Photo by Roel van Sabben on Unsplash

In mid-July of this year, my pastor sent me a screenshot of a Facebook post made by a mutual acquaintance. I’ve known Alan Bondar for about 20 years now, going back to when he was a youth minister. My pastor has known him for a bit more than half that time, initially through Alan’s ex-wife who served as our church’s administrative secretary.

I’ve already said enough to indicate that Alan has lived through some very difficult experiences in addition to making big changes to his worldview. I’ve known for some time now that he no longer believes in God. What I didn’t know—although I probably could have predicted it—was that he was working on a book about his new belief system.

That’s what Alan’s Facebook post was about. It read:

My pastor half-jokingly suggested that I take up Alan on his “How to Kill God the Easy Way Challenge” and after thinking about it for a few moments, I agreed.

It was quite an experience.

To obtain my PDF copy of the book I had to commit to completing a “Share My Results” web page by the end of August, which I did. That page provided a space to answer the question, “If still a Christian, what is the reason you believe God exists?” and another space to respond to the following invitation: “Share anything about the book that would explain your results. Please include supporting content from the book that you either agreed or disagreed with.” What I wrote in those spaces will now serve as the bulk of Part 1 and Part 2 of “‘Dear Alan…’ Letter to a Deconstructor.”

The next day, Alan posted again, announcing that the book would be published at the end of October. I commented, “Thanks, I shared my results on Saturday. I appreciate the opportunity.” Alan responded:

Yes, thank you so much for your feedback. It was SUPER helpful and insightful. I have a number of people to respond to. I have every intention of taking you up on your offer to talk with you about it. We’ll be in touch soon.

I don’t know if this means that Alan plans to modify the contents of his book based on the responses I (and perhaps others) submitted to him. He has nearly two months do that if he so chooses. In the meantime, please keep in mind that what I share here and in my next article pertains to the PDF draft How to Kill God the Easy Way that I received a copy of.

Dear Alan,

I am still a Christian and I still believe God exists, first of all, because He revealed Himself to me.

This is the basic reason I converted from my own stubborn agnosticism to belief in God in the fall of 1975. I had read hardly any of the Bible by that time, and what I had read I either didn’t understand or didn’t find compelling.

I called myself an agnostic up until near the end of my sophomore year in high school. I was actively suppressing any evidence that might indicate God was necessary to explain the universe. I have a very vivid memory of doing this one day in my biology class when I encountered information that I could not explain—and haven’t seen anyone explain since—apart from God’s design in nature.

But near the end of that academic year, my life suddenly changed. My dad died in February of 1975, and that caused me to start searching. I was now willing to give the Bible a chance as more than a great work of literature.

So, I obviously fell into that category of “trouble, tension, or transition” that, it seems to me, you refer to disparagingly in your book. And yet when my mom bought me a copy of the Living Bible, I tried to read it, but I soon put it aside. I thought I’d probably get back to it sometime, but that didn’t happen until after I became a Christian.

My mom was obviously concerned about me and my brothers, but aside from her no one was trying to directly reach me with any religious message. And she was way too involved in her own struggle with shattering grief to do much more.

In my personal search for answers, I was the one trying to reach out to others, but I couldn’t explain what I was looking for because I myself didn’t know. I wasn’t really searching for God in the most fundamental sense; I was searching for anything that might explain me and my world. I bought various self-help books, seeking answers wherever I could find them. None of them helped.

Throughout that summer, I never encountered an evangelical Christian who pressed an evangelistic tract or Bible into my hands or gave me a Gospel presentation—at least, not until sometime that fall when I myself went deliberately looking for someone like that, though I had no idea what these people might be called or what kind of churches they attended.

Why did I suddenly begin this new search? Because something happened to me as I sat in my high school library reading the words of Jesus in a Bible verse in the fall of 1975 that destroyed my agnosticism, and from that point on I sought an explanation for it.

I read that verse in a little booklet that was not a Gospel tract. It was a sort of self-help booklet that used Bible verses. I didn’t find any explanation of the way of salvation in it. But after reading this one verse, I decided to try to try to somehow believe it.

And something happened.

By the time I got up from my chair, I was saying to myself, for the first time ever, “Jesus is real!” It was totally unexpected. Those words that I spoke to myself were and remain the only way I can make sense of what happened. I had an experience. I didn’t mention it to anyone until some months later.

I still did not know the Gospel, but I had an experience. And I still didn’t know any evangelical Christians, or at least wasn’t aware of knowing any, because I didn’t even know what an evangelical Christian was. All I knew was that I wanted to know more about Jesus.

After a series of events that were part of that pursuit and would take too long to recount here, I found myself in the foyer of an evangelical church in December of 1975 where I finally received the information that I was looking for. It explained everything, including what happened to me, and that explanation happened to be the Gospel message.

I suppose someone might ask how I can really know that my experience was any different from the Mormon’s “burning in the bosom” many say they feel after being exhorted to pray for it as confirmation of the Book of Mormon’s truth. That’s a valid question.

My response would be that there are key differences. For one thing, nobody exhorted me to pray for any specific experience. No evangelist or missionary came to me and said, “Read this Scripture, pray this prayer, and if what you read is true, you’ll have this experience,” as commonly happens in Mormonism.

Nor did I read any text indicating such a thing or setting any kind of expectation for it. I had nothing to cognitively or emotionally bias me toward such an experience, to set me up for some kind of experiential placebo effect, nor did any relevant cultural conditioning precede it. And although I’d been searching for answers for about eight or nine months since my father’s death, I wasn’t experiencing any particular stress or anxiety for which my experience could serve as some kind of relief valve.

It just happened.

Another key difference is that this experience did not lead me to the contents of a book that has virtually no historical or archaeological evidence to back up any of its contents. Unlike even the most basic outline points for the Book of Mormon, we can demonstrate that there actually was a collection of documents, written in Hebrew and Greek, which came to form the Bible, that there really were a people called Israelites, later known as the Jews, and so on. Of course, I believe that all the historical details of Scripture are true, which I know you don’t concede, but I think my point is clear: I have a much firmer basis for believing the Bible than a Latter-day Saint has for his Book of Mormon.

A further difference is that, with one possible though not quite as vivid exception early in my Christian life, that experience has not been repeated. I’ve sometimes wanted and prayed for it to be repeated, but it hasn’t. I understand that many Mormons claim to repeatedly experience their “burning in the bosom.” This hasn’t been true for me. It eventually became obvious to me that God didn’t want my faith in Him to be based on a unique personal experience that most people don’t have, but on His word.

God’s absolute, bedrock revelation is in that same Jesus who revealed Himself to me in my high school library in 1975, and His authoritative and inerrant revelation of Jesus is in Scripture. My experience was merely a means to the end of taking my stand with Christ on His word.

Perhaps God gave me that experience precisely because I couldn’t explain it, and being an agnostic who was deeply into rationalism, empiricism, and scientific explanations, those things were really what I was hoping to find in my search for answers instead of some experience. In any case, what I discovered was that, just as the only explanation that made any sense of the experience was my private, solitary, under-my-breath exclamation, “Jesus is real!” so also the only thing that makes sense of my life and my world is what I find in Scripture. My former answers do not, neither do alternatives I’ve encountered since then. For me, my experience was a counter-intuitive doorway into what I was really looking for but didn’t know it. The God-shaped gap in my mind was actually a God-shaped void in my soul that could only be filled by Christ.

I’ve tried looking at my life and world from other angles. I’ve reconsidered and reexamined my faith, and wondered, “What if I’m wrong and God really doesn’t exist?” But I’ve never been able to see how such a worldview can explain existence, history, and my own biography in an intellectually satisfying way.

So yes, I still believe. Thank you for providing me with the opportunity to explain why.

In my next article, “‘Dear Alan…’ Letter to a Deconstructor (Part 2),” I will provide my response to, “Share anything about the book that would explain your results. Please include supporting content from the book that you either agreed or disagreed with.”Ω

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