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Conversions: The Christian Experience

Edited by Hugh T. Kerr and John M. Mulder

Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1983. 265 Pp. $12.95.

This book is remarkable in at least three ways, each important. To begin, and by contrast with the bulk of the literature in its field, it concentrates on primary sources (fifty different accounts of conversions, each in its best English dress), leaving the job of generalizing largely to the reader. Thus, it can be sampled, or, better yet, soaked up, and still be rewarding in either case. For, secondly, its range (within the Christian tradition)-is wonder-fully varied more representative than any such collection that I know (from every epoch and every "type"-save only for that vast multitude in every age who left no written accounts). And, finally, the editorial introductions are lively and instructive and almost always carefully understated.

Quibblers will note a few typos and a few will have some queries: did Constantine really establish Christianity as "the official religion of the [Roman] empire" (p.4)? Have there not been more Calvinists who have "indulged in subjective religious introspection"-and to good effect!- than one would gather here (p. 24)? Was the entire "European continent" ..."engulfed" in the Thirty Years War (horrendous as it was, p. 48)? Was John Wesley's "Aldersgate experience" actually "the beginning of Methodism" (p. 59)? And yet even quibblers will find themselves admiring the quiet mastery here of much learning and, above all, the breadth of the editors' selections, and the aptness of their introductions.

The old familiar faces are here, of course, as one might expect. But the majority of the "reporters" in Conversions will be "new" to many readers. How many current readers know of John Calvin's account of his conversion, or Sojourner Truth's, Sergei Bulgakov's, or Lin Yutang's, or Ethel Waters'? And who would have realized how many self-reported conversions were available from the twentieth century? Item #5 in the Table of Contents brings us to St. Teresa of Ávila; #10 is John Woolman and #29 is Henrietta Gant. Twenty-one out of the fifty items in the roster (that is, from Billy Sunday, #30, to "Chuck" Colson, #50) range from 1916 to 1976. Nor do they represent any single ideological bent. There is Dorothy Day from "the left"-with Simon Weil and Eldridge Cleaver. Sunday and Colson are from "the right"-with Claire Boothe Luce, Malcolm Muggeridge, and Charles Spurgeon.

The majority, from ancient to modern times tilt toward the "vital center." There is John Henry Newman's "apologia" for his move from Canterbury to Rome-along with Evelyn Waugh's less charitable account of his similar journey. The match to this (though not in literary quality) is John Cogley's story of his countermove, from Rome to

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Canterbury. The point is that the variety here is abundant, and there is not a single dull chapter in the book. And it does tend to offer a truly alternative perspective to our prevailing views of "born-again" Christianity.

By way of generalization, three struck me most forcibly. The first is a strange note of happenstance and intervention in each conversion. None was pre-scripted; and their spontaneity is genuine and "natural." Ethel Waters tells of her futile strivings: "And then it happened!" This is typical of them all.

Secondly (and this comes clearer as one discovers more and more of the life-long career of each convert), conversions are climactic "moments" of radical re-orientation rather than "complete changes from one life-style to another" (the editors' definition, p. ix). In each case, there is "a new creation"; but also in each case, there is a manifest continuity from "before" to "after." This has some comfort for those who rightly fear the loss of self-identity; it should, however, forewarn those who count on "conversion" as a solution to all problems, beside the crucial problem of God's reconciliation with us in Christ.

This leads to a third inference from these data, namely conversions are more rightly understood as beginnings in a process rather than its single reference point, an unfolding of insight, growth, and self-oblation. The real imperative of the "born again Christian" is to grow up into Christ who because he came among us not to be ministered unto but to minister and to give his life, calls us to an equivalent ministry, so defined.

There was only one of these pieces that I had never seen before (Henrietta Gant); some I had studied with some care. But I had never read an ensemble like this together and as a whole, hearing the same story in so many different versions-the high drama of sensitive people being turned from a centeredness in self to a centeredness in God, and always as a work of grace. It was a deeply moving experience, which I covet for a multitude of others.

ALBERT C. OUTLER

Perkins School of Theology
Southern Methodist University

Dallas, Texas