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

by Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

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.

Christians always seemed like bad readers to me, too. They appeared to use the Bible in a way that Marxists would call “vulgar”—that is, common, or, in order to bring the Bible into a conversation to stop the conversation, not deepen it.

Here is one of the deepest ways Christians scared me:

Acceptance is so essential for us as humans.

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

Christians still scare me when they reduce Christianity to a lifestyle and claim that God is on the side of those who attend to the rules of the lifestyle they have invented or claim to find in the Bible.

It seemed to me then and it seems to me now that Christians truly become ugly when we become jealous of the successful persuasive rhetoric of others.

too many Christians thought that they could rest in Christian tradition, not Christian relevance.

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.

A core belief i hold as an evangelist.

but his entrance into history violated a core value of my research: no one, according to the tenets of historical materialism, enters history; rather, we all emerge from it.

One thing that made Ken safe as well as dangerous was a point of commonality between us. We both are good teachers. 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.

I share this detail with you not to be lurid but merely to make the point that you never know the terrain someone else has walked to come worship the Lord.

How do you repent for a sin that doesn’t feel like a sin?

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

When Christ gave me the strength to follow him, I didn’t stop feeling like a lesbian.

Wanting to understand is a theoretical statement; willing to do his will takes action.

I learned that we must obey in faith before we feel better or different. At this time, though, obeying in faith, to me, felt like throwing myself off a cliff. Faith that endures is heroic, not sentimental.

One doesn’t repent for a sin of identity in one session. Sins of identity have multiple dimensions, and throughout this journey, I have come to my pastor and his wife, friends in the Lord, and always to the Lord himself with different facets of my sin.

I believe that the Lord is more grieved by the sins of my current life than by my past life as a lesbian. How did the Lord heal me? The way that he always heals: the word of God got to be bigger inside me than I.

Christian reader, is this what people say about you when they hear you talk and pray? Do your prayers rise no higher than your prejudice?

Or do we use the word of God as a cue card to commandeer only our external behavior?

Great quote!

The world’s eyes register what a life in Christ takes away, but how do I communicate all that it gives?

I sometimes wonder, when I hear other Christians pray for the salvation of the “lost,” if they realize that this comprehensive chaos is the desired end of such prayers.

Why pride? Pride is the root of all sin. Pride puffs one up with a false sense of independence.

In God’s economy, what we love we will discipline. God did not create us so that we would, as the title of an early book on postmodernism declares, “amuse ourselves to death.” Undisciplined taste will always lead to egregious sin—slowly and almost imperceptibly.

Wow well said

That is because we have too narrow a focus about sexuality’s purview. Sexuality isn’t about what we do in bed. Sexuality encompasses a whole range of needs, demands, and desires. Sexuality is more a symptom of our life’s condition than a cause, more a consequence than an origin.

While sin is not contained by logical categories of progression, nonetheless, sin is progressive.

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.

The truth is, outside of Christ, I am a manipulator, liar, power-monger, and controller.

My heterosexual past was no more sanctified than my homosexual present.

In understanding myself as a sexual being, responding to Jesus (i.e., “committing my life to Christ”) meant not going backwards to my heterosexual past but going forward to something entirely new.

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

Making a life commitment to Christ was not merely a philosophical shift. It was not a one-step process. It did not involve rearranging the surface prejudices and fickle loyalties of my life. Conversion didn’t “fit” my life. Conversion overhauled my soul and personality. It was arduous and intense.

When you die to yourself, you have nothing from your past to use as clay out of which to shape your future.

That is great point.

There is a pit of false hope in placing our faith in our words rather than in God’s compassion to receive sinners to himself.

How do I judge my own sincerity? The saving grace of salvation is located in a holy and electing God, and a sacrificing, suffering, and obedient Savior. Stakes this high can never rest on my sincerity.

Amen!

These misrepresentations of the gospel are dangerous and misleading. Sin is not a mistake. A mistake is taking the wrong exit on the highway. A sin is treason against a Holy God. A mistake is a logical misstep. Sin lurks in our heart and grabs us by the throat to do its bidding.

This is very good to remember i am often guilty of calling commiting sins making mistakes.

We do not control God by saying magic words or attending church. Conversion is a heart-affair. Before we can come to Christ, we must empty ourselves of the false pride, blame-shifting, excuse-making, and self-deception that preoccupies our days and our relationships.

Sanctification—growing in Christ—is always both personal and communal.

Each Lord’s Supper made me experience my traitorship to my gay friends and to the person that I once was.

Knowledge depends on the renewal of our minds. If you fear such renewal and its consequences, then you don’t belong in graduate school.

Instead, the classroom is a place of joy fueled by the quest for excellence and the productive fear generated by the awesomeness of our ignorance and our inability to transform human reason into wisdom on its own terms, when it is unhinged from a living God.

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This experience taught me a powerful lesson about evangelism: the integrity of our relationships matters more than the boldness of our words.

Then he said, “Rosaria, I’m a gay man because the GLBT (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered) community is the only safe home I have, a home made safe by you.

Whatever was God’s providence for me, it was his to lay out and mine to obey. No longer did I have to invent myself.

Although this pattern was unhealthy, sick patterns bind people together as firmly as healthy ones do. Before long, we confused fusion by sick patterns with love.

I think about this in the context of church work—about how easy it is for the church to unintentionally manipulate people.

The super-ego is our receptor site for people-pleasing. Even as a believer, it is easy to become people-pleasing instead of God-pleasing.

The support we received seemed so extreme and so over-thetop.