We’ve written about Christianity breaking out in the tech world. One of the new converts is Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia (which he now criticizes). It turns out, like Apple founder Steve Jobs, he grew up in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod.
He tells his story of “why I was not a Christian and why I am one now” in a post at his website entitled How a Skeptical Philosopher Becomes a Christian. Every pastor, especially every Lutheran pastor, should read it. (Towards that end, I am taking down the paywall and making this a free post.)
Sanger had an impeccable LCMS background:
My parents met and married in the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, the more conservative of the two largest Lutheran denominations in the United States. One of my great-grandparents was a professor of musicology and church organist; we still have his books. My father was an elder in our church when I was a small child. I remember a few Bible commentaries on the bookshelves, which I found forbiddingly difficult. . . .I was confirmed at age 12 in the Lutheran Church, but soon after, my family stopped going to church.
His family seems to have gone through its own period of falling away but later returning to faith. As for young Larry, he said that he had always been a kid who asked “too many questions.” After a high school philosophy class and his own musings, he felt his faith “slipping away.” So he went for a talk with his pastor:
At some point in my late teens, I remember calling up a pastor—I forget which—to ask skeptical questions. It felt bold for a teenager to do, but I was not merely being rebellious. I really needed help thinking these things through. But the pastor had no clear or strong answers. He seemed to be brushing me off and even to treat me with contempt. It seemed to me he did not care, and if anything, I had the impression that he felt threatened by me. This was a surprise. The damage was quickly done: being met with hostile unconcern by a person I expected to be, well, pastoral confirmed me in my disbelief.
This is similar to what happened with Steve Jobs! As a teenager, full of questions about the problem of evil, he went to his pastor, who blew him off with condescension and a refusal to take his questions seriously. The same thing happened with a friend of mine, a precocious teenager going to her pastor with questions, only to get belittled.
They all three left their Lutheran church and their faith. Jobs went on to become a Buddhist. My friend is not a tech titan, but she is a precious soul, whom God brought back to Himself, as he did Sanger. (More on how pastors should approach teenagers with questions on Thursday.)
Sanger tells about how, in search of answers, he turned to philosophy, to the point of earning a Ph.D. in the subject. He became what he calls a “methodological skeptic,” resolving not to believe anything unless he could be certain about it on rationalistic grounds.
He didn’t oppose religion as such. He saw its benefits. Some of his favorite people were Christians. He found the New Atheists to be obnoxious, refusing to take religion seriously, which he was willing to do. He was a nonbeliever, but he considered himself an agnostic, thinking that it was impossible to know with certainty whether God exists or not.
He found the arguments of Intelligent Design strangely plausible, particularly the notion of the fine tuning of the universe. He had always found the classic proofs of the existence of God unpersuasive. If they proved there had to be a “necessary being,” or a designer, or a first cause, or a source of morality, that does not necessarily prove there to be a God, much less the personal God of the Bible. But then Sanger realized that the individual proofs taken together suggest a multi-faceted God (necessary to existence, a creator, moral) that is, in fact, close to the Biblical God. (There is much more to his intellectual journey towards belief, including a fascinating and quite original thought experiment about Artificial Intelligence. Read his post for the whole story.)
Meanwhile, his life–specifically, his marriage and the birth of his children–made him recognize the reality of the moral order. He felt willing to sacrifice himself for his family, which made him reject the “virtue of selfishness” that he had picked up from Ayn Rand.
But what had the strongest impact was his reading of the Bible. He plunged into that project, with the help of annotations and commentaries:
When I really sought to understand it, I found the Bible far more interesting and—to my shock and consternation—coherent than I was expecting. I looked up answers to all my critical questions, thinking that perhaps others had not thought of issues I saw. I was wrong. Not only had they thought of all the issues, and more that I had not thought of, they had well-worked-out positions about them. I did not believe their answers, which sometimes struck me as contrived or unlikely. But often, they were shockingly plausible. The Bible could sustain interrogation; who knew? It slowly dawned on me that I was acquainting myself with the two-thousand-year-old tradition of theology. I found myself positively ashamed to realize that, despite having a Ph.D. in philosophy, I had never really understood what theology even is. Theology is, I found, an attempt to systematize, harmonize, explicate, and to a certain extent justify the many, many ideas contained in the Bible. It is what rational people do when they try to come to grips with the Bible in all its richness. The notion that the Bible might actually be able to interestingly and plausibly sustain such treatment is a proposition that had never entered my head.
Reading the Bible “obsessively,” Sanger began to understand the necessity of revelation and he began to recognize the overarching themes of the Bible: righteousness, sin, the fall, sacrifice, the promise of a savior, the Incarnation, Christ’s death and resurrection, salvation.
There was a moment, soon after I started reading the Gospels (toward the end of February, 2020), when I said I should admit to myself that I now believe in God, and pray to God properly. I did so, silently and eyes closed, lying in bed. I’m not saying this is what I should have done, but it is what I did. It was anti-climactic. I never had a mind-blowing conversion experience. I approached faith in God slowly and reluctantly—with great interest, yes, but filled with confusion and consternation.
In his post, Sanger concludes with a statement of his faith, his own credo. He believes in the Trinity, the deity of Christ, His death for sinners, His resurrection, and pretty much every tenet of orthodox Protestantism. He even affirms the inerrancy of Scripture. (Again, read it yourself.)
Where is he now, in his newly-found Christian faith? He needs a church. He is part of a lively Bible study that fills part of his need for fellowship with other Christians, but he is aware that he should be going to an actual church.
He hesitates because he doesn’t want to join a congregation only to leave it if he arrives at some belief that goes against his church. He doesn’t want conflict with the pastor. He is studying all the different denominations, but his own convictions right now are in flux.
As for the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, that remains an option. He writes,
I might consider going back to my childhood church, the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, but I’m fairly sure I’d need to go on disagreeing with them about the meaning of the communion. That seems possible. (I doubt the meaning of the communion need keep me out of the LCMS.) But I wouldn’t want to start debating the pastor about that; I’d better make sure I’m on board.
Well, yes, rejecting the meaning of communion would keep you out of the LCMS. That Jesus gives us His body and blood in the Sacrament is the beating heart of Lutheran spirituality.
Sanger goes more into his difficulty with Lutheranism in a follow-up post to his long “testimony” entitled A Response to My New Brothers and Sisters. He describes what he likes about the various church traditions and what he has trouble with in each one.
He firmly rejects Roman Catholicism because they don’t accept “sola fide” and “sola scriptura.” He likes Orthodoxy more, but that would still violate his belief in the solas. (I wonder where he picked up the importance of those Latin phrases!)
Anglicanism, of the conservative ACNA variety, is a possibility, but he worries about Anglo-Catholicism. The Wesleyan tradition would give him doctrinal latitude, but he is leery about its tendency towards liberalism. Baptist? But he rejects dispensationalism. Pentecostalism? He is not an emotional kind of guy. It would seem like one of the many non-denominational churches would ideal for him, but he doesn’t care for contemporary worship music. He does like conservative Presbyterianism, except for the Calvinism. (I wonder where he picked up each and every one of these criticisms?)
Ditto, conservative Lutheranism: I like it quite a bit, except for the thing that is maybe the most distinctive thing about it among American Protestants, namely, sacramentalism. (This is the view that baptism and communion are “means of grace,” and required, for most believers, for salvation.) I would like to think that quibbles on this issue do not matter that much, as I said earlier; but I am apprised that Lutherans would disagree that they are quibbles. I know that they distinguish their view from Catholic sacramentalism, rejecting the idea of ex opere operato (grace imparted by the act alone). I do think the ordinances of baptism and communion can be nearly as strong as you like, even if I am breaking one of these, in that case, for now. But I am not convinced that they are required for salvation, according to Scripture. This is highly debatable; there are strong “proof texts” on both sides. (Have fun comparing John 3:5, Mark 16:16, and Acts 2:38 with Luke 23:43, Ephesians 2:8-9, and 1 Corinthians 1:17.) I’m also chary about the “real presence” of the body and blood of Christ in the Lord’s Supper; I am inclined to think of these as deeply important symbols we use to remember his sacrifice for us.
Well, I’d like to ask him, is the Bible necessary for salvation? The answer is surely no and yes. Strictly speaking, all that is necessary for salvation is faith in “Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2). The Word of God is what communicates this good news, this gospel, to us, and is the means by which the Holy Spirit kindles faith in our hearts. So, yes, the Word is necessary to convey this salvation. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper convey this same gospel. They do so only because the water and bread and wine are connected to the Word. (Dust off your catechism, Larry!) They are only necessary in the sense that we need them to build up our faith, just as we need to continually read and hear God’s Word (as you are commendably doing), for the same reason.
As for the Real Presence of Christ in the bread and wine, don’t let your rationalism keep you from mystery. We are tangible, embodied human beings–not just abstract intellects–so we should not be surprised that Christ comes to us in a tangible, embodied way. Why wouldn’t He?
You express some concern that you lack religious experience. And that you lack enough contrition for your sin. When you receive the Lord’s Supper, believing sheerly through faith alone rather than your intellectual understanding (sola fide), that Jesus Christ is actually there, giving His broken body “for you,” giving His atoning blood “for the remission of all your sins,” the experience is as real as eating and drinking.
My impulse is to recommend my book Spirituality of the Cross: The Way of the First Evangelicals for a sense of Lutheran Christianity as a whole. And, since you have been catechized and confirmed, my book Embracing Your Lutheran Identity. And for the Real Presence, Hermann Sasse’s This Is My Body.
But, as I’ve discovered in my own pilgrimage, books are not enough. What you really need to do is try, once again, to talk with a Lutheran pastor.
OK. . . About that. . . .
Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday, so I’ll be posting about Lent. On Thursday I want to have a heart-to-heart discussion with pastors based on the unfortunate experiences of Larry Sanger, Steve Jobs, and my friend.
Photo: Larry Sanger., CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
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