William Lobdell was a newspaper reporter who had recently given his life to Christ. With a fresh outlook shaped by his newfound beliefs, he started noticing a lack of serious stories on faith in his paper. He lobbied his editors at the L.A. Times to let him cover religion in Southern California.
When he got the job, he thought God had answered his prayers. But he wasn’t prepared for the way exposure to Christianity in all its excesses and shortfallings would affect his faith. Following interviews with corrupt bishops and investigations of greedy televangelists, he began to question his beliefs:
I read accounts of St. John of the Cross and his “dark night of the soul,” a time he believed God was testing him by seemingly withdrawing from his life. Maybe this was my test.
I met with my former Presbyterian pastor, John Huffman, and told him what I was feeling. I asked him if I could e-mail him some tough questions about Christianity and faith and get his answers. He agreed without hesitation.
The questions that I thought I had come to peace with started to bubble up again. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why does God get credit for answered prayers but no blame for unanswered ones? Why do we believe in the miraculous healing power of God when he’s never been able to regenerate a limb or heal a severed spinal chord?
In one e-mail, I asked John, who had lost a daughter to cancer, why an atheist businessman prospers and the child of devout Christian parents dies. Why would a loving God make this impossible for us to understand?
He sent back a long reply that concluded:
“My ultimate affirmation is let God be God and acknowledge that He is in charge. He knows what I don’t know. And frankly, if I’m totally honest with you, a life of gratitude is one that bows before the Sovereign God arguing with Him on those things that trouble me, lamenting the losses of life, but ultimately saying, ‘You, God, are infinite; I’m human and finite.’ ”
John is an excellent pastor, but he couldn’t reach me. For some time, I had tried to push away doubts and reconcile an all-powerful and infinitely loving God with what I saw, but I was losing ground. I wondered if my born-again experience at the mountain retreat was more about fatigue, spiritual longing and emotional vulnerability than being touched by Jesus.
And I considered another possibility: Maybe God didn’t exist.
Or maybe William never really knew God as well as he thought.
His story is a good reminder of how much our beliefs are shaped by our experiences. Sometimes that works well, like when Abraham invented a new name for God (“Yahweh Yireh,” God the Provider) after God spared the life of his son Isaac in Genesis 22.
But in William’s case (as in the lives of all kinds of people), he allowed the defects of fallen people to obscure his view of a holy and perfect God.
It’s tragic and heartbreaking, but it should be no surprise that God’s family would be filled with (and sometimes even led by) a bunch of sleazeballs. Jesus himself warned in Matthew 7, “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will recognize them by their fruits.”
Jesus assumes no responsibility for these fakes because they’re simply part of a fallen world. And that’s why we can’t paint a very accurate picture of God based on our experiences of the world around us. It’s not much more than a dim reflection of its creator.
Read William’s whole story and ask yourself, “How much of my theology has been formed solely by my experiences?”