My Train Wreck Conversion - a must read!

Testimony

My Train Wreck Conversion

As a leftist lesbian professor, I despised Christians. Then I somehow became one.

Rosaria Champagne Butterfield / posted February 7, 2013

 

Image: Photo by Jimmy Williams

 

My Train Wreck Conversion

 

The word Jesus stuck in my throat like an elephant tusk; no matter how hard I choked, I couldn't hack it out. Those who professed the name commanded my pity and wrath. As a university professor, I tired of students who seemed to believe that "knowing Jesus" meant knowing little else. Christians in particular were bad readers, always seizing opportunities to insert a Bible verse into a conversation with the same point as a punctuation mark: to end it rather than deepen it.

Stupid. Pointless. Menacing. That's what I thought of Christians and their god Jesus, who in paintings looked as powerful as a Breck Shampoo commercial model.

As a professor of English and women's studies, on the track to becoming a tenured radical, I cared about morality, justice, and compassion. Fervent for the worldviews of Freud, Hegel, Marx, and Darwin, I strove to stand with the disempowered. I valued morality. And I probably could have stomached Jesus and his band of warriors if it weren't for how other cultural forces buttressed the Christian Right. Pat Robertson's quip from the 1992 Republican National Convention pushed me over the edge: "Feminism," he sneered, "encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians." Indeed. The surround sound of Christian dogma comingling with Republican politics demanded my attention.

After my tenure book was published, I used my post to advance the understandable allegiances of a leftist lesbian professor. My life was happy, meaningful, and full. My partner and I shared many vital interests: aids activism, children's health and literacy, Golden Retriever rescue, our Unitarian Universalist church, to name a few. Even if you believed the ghost stories promulgated by Robertson and his ilk, it was hard to argue that my partner and I were anything but good citizens and caregivers. The GLBT community values hospitality and applies it with skill, sacrifice, and integrity.

I began researching the Religious Right and their politics of hatred against queers like me. To do this, I would need to read the one book that had, in my estimation, gotten so many people off track: the Bible. While on the lookout for some Bible scholar to aid me in my research, I launched my first attack on the unholy trinity of Jesus, Republican politics, and patriarchy, in the form of an article in the local newspaper about Promise Keepers. It was 1997.

I was a broken mess. I did not want to lose everything that I loved. But the voice of God sang a sanguine love song in the rubble of my world.

 

The article generated many rejoinders, so many that I kept a Xerox box on each side of my desk: one for hate mail, one for fan mail. But one letter I received defied my filing system. It was from the pastor of the Syracuse Reformed Presbyterian Church. It was a kind and inquiring letter. Ken Smith encouraged me to explore the kind of questions I admire: How did you arrive at your interpretations? How do you know you are right? Do you believe in God? Ken didn't argue with my article; rather, he asked me to defend the presuppositions that undergirded it. I didn't know how to respond to it, so I threw it away.

Later that night, I fished it out of the recycling bin and put it back on my desk, where it stared at me for a week, confronting me with the worldview divide that demanded a response. As a postmodern intellectual, I operated from a historical materialist worldview, but Christianity is a supernatural worldview. Ken's letter punctured the integrity of my research project without him knowing it.

Friends with the Enemy

With the letter, Ken initiated two years of bringing the church to me, a heathen. Oh, I had seen my share of Bible verses on placards at Gay Pride marches. That Christians who mocked me on Gay Pride Day were happy that I and everyone I loved were going to hell was clear as blue sky. That is not what Ken did. He did not mock. He engaged. So when his letter invited me to get together for dinner, I accepted. My motives at the time were straightforward: Surely this will be good for my research.

Something else happened. Ken and his wife, Floy, and I became friends. They entered my world. They met my friends. We did book exchanges. We talked openly about sexuality and politics. They did not act as if such conversations were polluting them. They did not treat me like a blank slate. When we ate together, Ken prayed in a way I had never heard before. His prayers were intimate. Vulnerable. He repented of his sin in front of me. He thanked God for all things. Ken's God was holy and firm, yet full of mercy. And because Ken and Floy did not invite me to church, I knew it was safe to be friends.

I started reading the Bible. I read the way a glutton devours. I read it many times that first year in multiple translations. At a dinner gathering my partner and I were hosting, my transgendered friend J cornered me in the kitchen. She put her large hand over mine. "This Bible reading is changing you, Rosaria," she warned.

With tremors, I whispered, "J, what if it is true? What if Jesus is a real and risen Lord? What if we are all in trouble?"

J exhaled deeply. "Rosaria," she said, "I was a Presbyterian minister for 15 years. I prayed that God would heal me, but he didn't. If you want, I will pray for you."

I continued reading the Bible, all the while fighting the idea that it was inspired. But the Bible got to be bigger inside me than I. It overflowed into my world. I fought against it with all my might. Then, one Sunday morning, I rose from the bed of my lesbian lover, and an hour later sat in a pew at the Syracuse Reformed Presbyterian Church. Conspicuous with my butch haircut, I reminded myself that I came to meet God, not fit in. The image that came in like waves, of me and everyone I loved suffering in hell, vomited into my consciousness and gripped me in its teeth.

I fought with everything I had.

I did not want this.

I did not ask for this.

I counted the costs. And I did not like the math on the other side of the equal sign.

But God's promises rolled in like sets of waves into my world. One Lord's Day, Ken preached on John 7:17: "If anyone wills to do [God's] will, he shall know concerning the doctrine" (NKJV). This verse exposed the quicksand in which my feet were stuck. I was a thinker. I was paid to read books and write about them. I expected that in all areas of life, understanding came before obedience. And I wanted God to show me, on my terms, why homosexuality was a sin. I wanted to be the judge, not one being judged.

But the verse promised understanding after obedience. I wrestled with the question: Did I really want to understand homosexuality from God's point of view, or did I just want to argue with him? I prayed that night that God would give me the willingness to obey before I understood. I prayed long into the unfolding of day. When I looked in the mirror, I looked the same. But when I looked into my heart through the lens of the Bible, I wondered, Am I a lesbian, or has this all been a case of mistaken identity? If Jesus could split the world asunder, divide marrow from soul, could he make my true identity prevail? Who am I? Who will God have me to be?

Then, one ordinary day, I came to Jesus, openhanded and naked. In this war of worldviews, Ken was there. Floy was there. The church that had been praying for me for years was there. Jesus triumphed. And I was a broken mess. Conversion was a train wreck. I did not want to lose everything that I loved. But the voice of God sang a sanguine love song in the rubble of my world. I weakly believed that if Jesus could conquer death, he could make right my world. I drank, tentatively at first, then passionately, of the solace of the Holy Spirit. I rested in private peace, then community, and today in the shelter of a covenant family, where one calls me "wife" and many call me "mother."

I have not forgotten the blood Jesus surrendered for this life.

And my former life lurks in the edges of my heart, shiny and still like a knife.

Rosaria Champagne Butterfield is the author of The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert (Crown & Covenant). She lives with her family in Durham, North Carolina, where her husband pastors the First Reformed Presbyterian Church of Durham.

From Reformed Baptist Fellowship, visit them soon

The liberals were right on one point

  The liberals were right on one point. It is true that the world has undergone massive, breathtaking changes. But what they overlooked was the fact that in the midst of all of this change, some things have not changed at all. God in his character, counsels, and knowledge has not changed; the human being, though fallen, remains in the image of God; sin in its nature has not changed across the ages; the significance of God’s acts in history has not changed; the abiding truth of God’s word has not changed; the reality of the incarnation and the results of the cross have not changed, so neither has the gospel. It is the same gospel which is to be believed in all places and times, and among every tribe, ethnic group, culture, and generation. It is no different today for those in the Builder generation than for those who are Baby Boomers, or Gen Xers, or those in the Millennial generation, though you would never guess this from listening to the more adventurous, entrepreneurial evangelical leaders who are busy growing their own churches in selected generational niches.
The revelation God has given us in his Word is enduring in its relevance, in all places and times, precisely because it corresponds to what does not change. It is not simply a reflection of the changing culture of a world long since vanished, the cultural worlds in which it first arose. It is God’s truth for the church in all ages and all seasons.^[1]

– David F. Wells

Buy this book!

I'd like to 100 % recommend this book written by Feminist Lesbian University Prof. Rosaria Champagne Butterfield as well as her interview on last Sunday's White Horse Inn podcast available on iTunes.

from Amazon: "Rosaria, by the standards of many, was living a very good life. She had a tenured position at a large university in a field for which she cared deeply. She owned two homes with her partner, in which they provided hospitality to students and activists that were looking to make a difference in the world. There, her partner rehabilitated abandoned and abused dogs. In the community, Rosaria was involved in volunteer work. At the university, she was a respected advisor of students and her department's curriculum. And then, in her late 30s, Rosaria encountered something that turned her world upside down-the idea that Christianity, a religion that she had regarded as problematic and sometimes downright damaging, might be right about who God was, an idea that flew in the face of the people and causes that she most loved. What follows is a story of what she describes as a "train wreck" at the hand of the supernatural. These are her secret thoughts about those events, written as only a reflective English professor could. Conversion put me in a complicated and comprehensive chaos. 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. Often, people asked me to describe the "lessons" that I learned from this experience. I can't. It was too traumatic. Sometimes in crisis, we don't really learn lessons. Sometimes the result is simpler and more profound: sometimes our character is simply transformed. -Rosaria Butterfield"

How much different is Brian McLaren than the Nazi Walter Grundmann?

Did Hitler rewrite the Bible?

 

by Russell Grigg

Elimination of the Jews in Nazi Germany was not confined to the Holocaust. It also took the form of rewriting the New Testament to ‘dejudaize’ it, i.e. to remove references to Judaism and to recast Jesus as an Aryan, generating what has been called the ‘Nazi Bible’. This has been the subject of some sensational and substantially erroneous claims, including that the project was Hitler’s brainchild.
So what are the facts? This article is based on the book The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany by Susannah Heschel,¹ Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College.

Page numbers in brackets in this article refer to her book.

They wanted a faith without anything Jewish in the Bible, and without converted Jews in the church.

The German Church in the 1930s

In 1930s’ Germany, the ‘German Christians’ (Deutsche Christen) movement arose. These were theologically liberal Protestant churches and theologians who were enthusiastically pro-Nazi, calling Hitler the ‘Führer Jesus’ and ‘God’s agent in our day’ (p. 67). Politically ambitious and anti-Semitic, they wanted a faith without anything Jewish in the Bible, and without converted Jews in the Church. Their ultimate membership of 600,000 constituted about 30 percent of German Protestants (p. 3).
In opposition to this, the so-called ‘Confessing Church’ (Bekennende Kirche) movement arose, ultimately attracting some 20 percent of Protestant pastors. It included notable opponents of Hitler such as Karl Barth, Martin Niemöller, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. However, some of its members were inclined to take other liberties with the plain meaning of the biblical text, and some were even ideologically anti-Semitic, despite wanting to retain Christian Jews in the church.

The Institute

The Deutsche Christen flag

The research arm and propaganda organ of the ‘German Christians’ movement was its Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life (Institut zur Erforschung und Beseitigung des jüdischen Einflusses auf das deutsche kirchliche Leben).² This served Nazi anti-Semitism by a program of dejudaizing the Bible, and giving anti-Semitic theological training to clergy and laity via lectures, seminars, scholarly books, and popular pamphlets.
Its founding visionary and Academic Director was Walter Grundmann (1906–76), a member of the Nazi party from 1930. Though Hitler did personally sign the 1938 appointment of Grundmann to Jena University as Professor of New Testament, there is no evidence (despite some sensationalized claims to the contrary) that Hitler ordered the ‘Nazi Bible’ project.
Grundmann was clearly the main instigator of this and the Institute itself, which by 1942 had 180 members—mostly professors of theology, teachers, pastors, bishops, and church superintendents (p. 99). It was not financed by government but by donations from supporting churches, individual church leaders, and sale of its publications (p. 96).
Its goal was to redefine Christianity as a Germanic religion, whose founder, Jesus, was not just a non-Jew, but was an anti-Jew, (a proto-Nazi (p. 71)), who had fought to destroy Judaism, dying as a victim in that struggle. According to Grundmann, the Bible needed to be restored to its pristine condition—purged of its Jewishness which was due to the distortions of history. Protestants had to overcome Judaism, he declared, just as Luther had overcome Catholicism (p. 2) in the Reformation.
Churchgoers were reassured that the Institute was promoting a return to the anti-Jewish Christianity practised in the days of Jesus (p. 116). However, beyond this, the Institute provided a scholarly and religious mantle that gave Nazism religious and moral authority (p. 16). Describing Jesus’ goal as the eradication of Judaism “effectively reframed Nazism as the very fulfillment of Christianity” (p. 17).

The so-called Nazi (or Hitler’s) Bible

CMI’s good friend, information scientist Dr Werner Gitt, author of the new book Without Excuse, was able to obtain a copy of Die Botschaft Gottes via the Library of the Technical University of Braunschweig. 

The Institute’s most notorious publication was its dejudaized version of the New Testament (NT), titled Die Botschaft Gottes (The Message of God), and released in 1940. This was a book of some 304 pages, with about 60% fewer words than in the German Luther NT. The Foreword by Grundmann and others said it was a selection from the NT which had shed new light for them.³ It contained no OT books, and was never called a Bible, let alone Hitler’s Bible.⁴ The text was divided into four sections (p. 109 ff.):

1. Jesus the Saviour—a life of Jesus based on excerpts from the synoptic Gospels, expunged of OT prophecy fulfillment, and reorganized to present Jesus as a warrior, not a servant or meek or the Lamb of God.
2. Jesus the Son of God—a condensed version of the Gospel of John to show the theological significance of Jesus’ actions.
3. Jesus the Lord—brief excerpts from various Epistles concerning hope, comfort, community of God, etc.
4. The Emergence of the Christian Community—based on Acts, Paul’s Epistles (without his Jewish biography), his mission to the Gentiles, and his break with the Judaizers of Palestine.

Part of John 4 from Die Botschaft Gottes; v. 22 “salvation is from the Jews” was omitted. In v. 25 “Messiah (called Christ)” was changed to “Promised one”. Reference to Jesus being “a Jew” in v. 9 was changed to “who comes from Judea”. 

Jewish references were retained only where they were deemed negative to Judaism. Omitted were the genealogies of Jesus linking him to the OT patriarchs. The baby Jesus was brought to the temple to bring him to God, but was merely given a name, not circumcized. In the Sermon on the Mount, there was no blessing for the merciful. The Sabbath became ‘holiday’.
The text associated Jesus with Galilee. Liberal German theologians had taught since the early 1900s that Galilee was supposedly populated by racially Aryan Gentiles in the 8th century BC following the Assyrian conquest of Israel, thereby opposing Jesus’ identity as a Jew (p. 57).
In his own book, Jesus the Galilean, Grundmann advocated that Mary was not a Jew, and Jesus had an illegitimate father: a Roman soldier named Panther (or Panthera) (p. 155). Ironically, this is an ancient libel from Celsus and anti-Christian Jews attacking Jesus’ legitimacy (“ben Panthera/Pandera”). However, the Gospel was clearly presented in Jesus’ discussion with Nicodemus, especially in John 3:16.
By the end of 1941, 200,000 copies of Die Botschaft Gottes had been sold or distributed to members of the German Christians movement, including soldiers (p. 111). Some pastors and scholars in the Confessing Church wrote pamphlets or spoke against it. After the War, most copies were destroyed, with only two or three still known to exist.

A catechism for the times

In 1941, the Institute was involved in producing Germans with God: a German Catechism.⁵ “It omitted traditional doctrinal positions regarding miracles, virgin birth, incarnation, resurrection, and so forth, in favor of positioning Jesus as a human being who struggled on behalf of God and died not only as a martyr, but also a ‘victor’ on the cross, despite being a victim of the Jews” (pp. 126–27).
It (not the ‘Nazi Bible’, as has been reported) contained 12 revised Commandments in place of the OT ten:

1. Honor God and believe in him wholeheartedly.
2. Seek out the peace of God.
3. Avoid all hypocrisy.
4. Holy is your health and life.
5. Holy is your well-being and honor.
6. Holy is your truth and fidelity.
7. Honor your father and mother—your children are your aid and your example.
8. Keep the blood pure and the marriage holy.
9. Maintain and multiply the heritage of your forefathers.
10. Be ready to help and forgive.
11. Honor your Führer and master.
12. Joyously serve the people with work and sacrifice.

The Institute’s perverse attempt to marry Christianity to Nazism was not reciprocated by the Nazis.

Perhaps divine prohibitions of murder, theft, and covetousness were deemed inappropriate for a ‘survival-of-the-fittest’ ideology that was instrumental in the then ongoing pillage of Europe.

Relationship to the Nazis

The Institute’s perverse attempt to marry Christianity to Nazism was not reciprocated by the Nazis, who were deeply suspicious of all things Christian.⁶ They tolerated the Institute, but at times even mocked it (p. 148), and kept it under secret surveillance by the intelligence arm of the SS. (p. 149). In March 1943, they confirmed their lack of sympathy for Grundmann by drafting him into military service on the dreaded Eastern (Russian) Front (p. 161).
After the war, Grundmann claimed that he was “an objective scholar who had fallen victim to Nazi attacks as a result of his efforts on behalf of Christianity and his scholarship” (p. 253). In the 1950s, he was appointed rector of the Thuringian seminary in Eisenach, in East Germany. From 1956 he served the communists as a spy, supplying information about his opponents in the Confessing Church (p. 256 ff.). He went on to publish various commentaries on the Gospels, which attained significant popularity.

Relevance to us today

When what God has said in His inspired Word, the Bible, is disregarded by those who claim to be Christians, there is no logical limit to the errors or indeed the blasphemy to which this opens the door.
Today many pastors and theologians think they are doing the church a favour by substituting theistic evolution for recent Creation in Genesis, and by denying that the biblical accounts of the Flood and Babel are part of Earth’s true history. However, such persons have no authority to censor the Word of God in this way, any more than the liberal German Christians had to dejudaize it.
Without exception, all attempts to marry Christianity to the worldview of unbelievers contravenes biblical authority, and subverts the faith of Christians. At the same time, it cuts no ice with atheists and agnostics. Just as the Nazis whom Grundmann was trying to impress treated him with disdain, many anti-theists have nothing but contempt for Christians who do not believe their own Holy Book.⁷

 

Related Articles

• The Christian Nazi myth refuted
• Darwinism and the Nazi race Holocaust
• The Darwinian roots of the Nazi tree (Weikart review)
• Hitler’s ‘master race’ children haunted by their past

References and notes

1. Heschel, S., The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany, Princeton University press, USA, 2008—see also ref. 2. Return to text.
2. Heschel’s book is based on her research into previously untouched archives of the Institute, and interviews she conducted in the 1990s with surviving members (p. xi). Return to text.
3. Verses were itemized in the 20-page Index. Return to text.
4. Prof. Heschel presents no evidence that Hitler had anything to do with it. Return to text.
5. Deutsche mit Gott: Ein deutsches Glaubensbuch. Return to text.
6. See Sarfati, J., Nazis planned to exterminate Christianity, Creation 24(3):47, 2002; creation.com/naziex. Return to text.
7. For example, see Dawkins on compromising churchians, as well as Darwin’s Bulldog: Thomas Huxley, Creation 31(3):39–41, 2009; creation.com/huxley. Return to text.

20,000 pageviews!!!

Wow I can't believe its been so long (almost) 3 yrs!
April 2011 was my first blog post and since then its been viewed over 20,000 times
Thanks to everyone who's been apart and had a hand in this:
Reformed Baptist Fellowship
Monergism
The Gospel Crier
Calvary Baptist of Lenexa
Reformation 21
and many others.
I hope and pray that over the years you've read, studied or seen something that's taught you more about Christianity, the Bible, Reformation Protestantism or Church History.

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Hello

This is my first Blog!

Hope you all enjoy the rantings of a crazy person.
I know I do.
What you'll get to see here is ideas and photos of my life and family.
And short tidbits from Church History (photos-stories-bios-and brief articles)
Enjoy!