A number of people lately have been intrigued to meet a French theologian, and have asked me to tell them the story of how I, a French atheist, became a Christian scholar. Even the theologians and apologists I met recently at the ETS Conference in Baltimore (where by God’s grace I was delivering my first scholarly paper) seemed to care (understandably) more about my conversion from atheism than my immediate theology paper! Therefore, it seemed fitting to type it up properly, to have a clean telling of that story of God breaking into my life, ready to be shared with people who ask. So here it is (and please let me know if you spot spelling mistakes or awkward sentences, I’m still French after all!)
FROM RELIGIOUS ATHEISM TO SECULAR ATHEISM
I grew up in a wonderfully loving family in France, near Paris. I was the second of 3 children. We were nominally Roman Catholic, and would regularly attend mass, but this religious expression seemed to be more out of tradition and maybe superstition than a true life conviction. I certainly didn’t believe any of this was true myself, nor did I sense that people around me took it all that seriously either, though it was an important part of their lives. As soon as I was old enough (13 or so) to tell my parents that I didn’t care for any of it, I stopped going to mass on Sundays, and my life as an atheist was hardly different.
My basically atheistic beliefs and values remained, and all that changed was that I was no longer required to fight boredom for an hour or so on Sunday morning while going through the motions of religious rituals and meaningless recitations. Meanwhile I grew up to be a pretty happy young adult. My dad was a mathematician and computer scientist, and my mom “religiously” devoted herself to the well-being and education of her children, from which I benefited greatly on all fronts. It allowed me to do very well at school, learn to play the piano, and get involved in all sorts of sports. I ended up studying math, physics and engineering in college, graduated from a rather respected private engineering school, which landed me a job as a computer scientist for a large investment bank.
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Poster Comment:
So I picked up a Bible to figure it out. And at the same time, since I’m a scientist, I figured there was at least one experiment that could be carried out to dis-confirm the belief that God exists: I thought “if any of this is true, then there is a God who exists right now and presumably cares greatly about this project of mine”, so I started to pray in the air as an atheist “If there is a God, then here I am, I’m looking into this, why don’t you go ahead and reveal yourself to me. I’m open.” Well, I wasn’t, really, but I figured that shouldn’t stop God if He existed. So I read in the gospels about this Jesus of Nazareth. And there, it didn’t exactly feel like what I expected. I was impressed by the authority of that man’s teaching. Sure enough, I didn’t have much room in my worldview for his talks of God and supernatural activity, but I was rather impressed by the way he maneuvered in conversation, and the wisdom of some of his retorts. I could say what I want, this man knew what he was doing, he spoke with authority, and it made me somewhat uncomfortable. Additionally, even as an atheist, I knew that the person of Jesus of Nazareth was not just a piece of mythology; it seemed clear he was at least a person of history who walked the roads of Palestine in the first century, and apparently his story was compelling enough that these ancient followers of his believed it and even suffered for preaching his death and resurrection. These considerations were making it harder to completely throw out the whole thing, and I knew that at some point I would need to give a coherent account of who I thought Jesus in fact was. But all of this was nowhere near changing my view or my life habits. I couldn’t even visit a church had I wanted to, since all my weekends were busy traveling the country to play volleyball...(Guillaume Bignon)
