“Evangelical friends of mine are always trying to trim the corners and smooth the rough edges of what they call My Witness in order to shove it into a tidy, born-again conversion narrative. They want an exact date, even an hour, and I never know what to tell them. The dateable conversion story has a venerable history. Paul, the most famous Jew to embrace Jesus, established the prototype of the dramatic, datable rebirth. He was walking on the road to Damascus, Luke tells us, off to persecute the zealous disciples of the newly dead carpenter when Jesus appeared to him, and Paul became his follower instead of his foe. Centuries later, John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, was attending a meeting in Aldersgate Street; listening to Luther’s Prefeace to the Epistle to the Romans, his heart was ‘strangely warmed.’ At that instant, Wesley later wrote in his journal, he felt that he ‘did trust in Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.’….My story doesn’t fit very well with this conversion archetype. A literature scholar would say there are too many ‘ruptures’ in the ‘narrative.’ But she might also say that ruptures are the most interesting part of any text, that in the ruptures we learn something new.”
~from Girl Meets God by Lauren F. Winner pp 7-8
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