The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor's Journey into Christian Faith

by Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

I believed then and I believe now that where everybody thinks the same nobody thinks very much.

Christians always seemed like bad thinkers to me. It seemed that they could maintain their worldview only because they were sheltered from the world’s real problems, like the material structures of poverty and violence and racism.

“Jesus is the answer” seemed to me then and now like a tree without a root. Answers come after questions, not before.

It seemed to me that the only people who could genuinely be satisfied with this level of reading and thinking were people who didn’t really read or think very much—about life or culture or anything.

the lesbian community was accepting and welcoming while the Christian community appeared (and too often is) exclusive, judgmental, scornful, and afraid of diversity.

“I would rather be wrong on an important point than right on a trivial one.” This quotation reminded me that when you make your mistakes in public you will learn that they are mistakes and in being corrected you will grow.

Winners have always seemed to me people who know how to fall on their face, pick themselves up, and recover well.

It seemed to me that if we fall, we need to fall forward and not backward, because at least then we are moving in the right direction.

Too often the church does not know how to interface with university culture because it comes to the table only ready to moralize and not dialogue.

There is a core difference between sharing the gospel with the lost and imposing a specific moral standard on the unconverted.

not at the expense of compromising my moral standards.

I came to my culture and its values through life experience but also through much research and deep thinking.

Ken and Floy invited the stranger in—not to scapegoat me, but to listen and to learn and to dialogue.

Good teachers make it possible for people to change their positions without shame.

Ken stressed that he accepted me as a lesbian but that he didn’t approve of me as a lesbian. He held that line firmly and I appreciated that.

there are no such marks of postmodern “both/and” in the Bible.

I learned the first rule of repentance: that repentance requires greater intimacy with God than with our sin.

I’ve discovered that the Lord doesn’t change my feelings until I obey him.

The Bible doesn’t just say do his will, but “will to do his will.” Wanting to understand is a theoretical statement; willing to do his will takes action.

I’m grateful that when I heard the Lord’s call on my life, and I wanted to hedge my bets, keep my girlfriend, and add a little God to my life, I had a pastor and friends in the Lord who asked nothing less of me than that I die to myself.

Do your prayers rise no higher than your prejudice?

If my life was the only evidence that Christ was alive, would anyone be convinced?

Conversion put me in a complicated and comprehensive chaos.

Sometimes in crisis, we don’t really learn lessons. Sometimes the result is simpler and more profound: sometimes our character is simply transformed.

Importantly, God does not say that this sin of Sodom is the worst of all sins.

Pride is the root of all sin. Pride puffs one up with a false sense of independence. Proud people always feel that they can live independently from God and from other people. Proud people feel entitled to do what they want when they want to.

Second, we find wealth (“fullness of food”) and an entertainment-driven worldview (“abundance of idleness”). Living according to God’s standards is an acquired taste.

We develop a taste for God’s standards only by disciplining our minds, hands, money, and time.

Third, we find lack of mercy (“neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy”).

Our hearts will become hard to the whispers of God if we turn our backs on those who have less than we do.

Fourth, we find lack of discretion and modesty (“they were haughty and committed abomination before Me”).

Sexuality is more a symptom of our life’s condition than a cause, more a consequence than an origin.

There is a fairness and capaciousness to Jesus’ words that simply is not reflected in modern evangelical culture.

These passages also convicted me that homosexuality—like all sin—is symptomatic and not causal—that is, it tells us where our heart has been, not who we inherently are or what we are destined to become.*

but to reveal that my sexuality was sinful not because it was lesbian per se but because it wasn’t Christ-controlled.

I learned that sin roots not in outward behaviors, but in patterns of thinking.

picked out the three women whose godliness, sense of self, personal strength, and integrity really stood out to me. I picked women who were different from me, but people who would answer me honestly.

We do not control God by saying magic words or attending church. Conversion is a heart-affair.

The Apostle Paul explains it this way, “I do not count myself to have apprehended, but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead”

Surviving means sacrificing something of you.

Text, History, and Mercy. These categories raise my life’s Big Questions.

Knowledge depends on the renewal of our minds.

risking immediate comfort and facing instead the Big Questions is a skill that must begin early if it is to begin at all.

Don’t fret because your path to those Big Questions doesn’t look like somebody else’s journey. Don’t fret when the path is lonely or treacherous. Look up.

Once he lost his anchor, he lost his wisdom, and it all came tumbling down. The biblical story does not stop here, because the nature of a Holy God is redemptive, not abandoning,

we all need to be anchored in something bigger than we are, something bigger than the ideas currently generated within disciplines, and certainly something bigger than the politics of our fields of study.

The integrity of our relationships matters more than the boldness of our words.

In recent years, I have contemplated this statement, thinking about the difference between the call of God on the one hand (as revealed through the Holy Spirit’s work in our conscience) and the call or influence of other people whom we deem powerful or important on the other hand (what Sigmund Freud would call the power of the super-ego). I think about this in the context of church work—about how easy it is for the church to unintentionally manipulate people.

Even as a believer, it is easy to become people-pleasing instead of God-pleasing.

I’ve come to note that normally moderate non-pretentious Christians tend towards extreme emotional excess in the areas of weddings and baby showers.