by Zack Hunt
Unprepared
How wrong I was.
And not just because college turned out to be nothing like Sunday school. Taking Biblical Exegesis as my first class in college was a mistake. I was woefully unprepared for the rigors of college life. Hell-bent on signing up for religion classes as soon as possible, I had taken as many AP exams and CLEP tests as I could during high school so that I could skip most or even all of my general education classes. My plan succeeded. I entered college academically as a sophomore, which meant I could immediately start taking religion classes normally reserved for real sophomores after they got their feet wet doing real college work. I didn’t care about any of that, but I should have. Jumping that quickly into the deep end of the pool meant I never got to wade through the shallow end of Gen Ed classes. I never got to learn how to learn in college, how to write in college, or how to accept the fact that college isn’t like high school.
So when I crossed the linoleum threshold that first morning of college and sat down for my first Biblical Exegesis class, my expectations of religion classes were shattered. Instead of getting candy for answering questions about the Bible, we were handed a three-hundred-page book and told to write a ten-page paper about it by the following Monday. I was crestfallen. When class was over, I went into a tailspin about whether this ministry thing was something I actually wanted to do. Not because the professor did anything wrong. Far from it. In fact, by the time I graduated, he ended up becoming one of my favorite professors in college. I simply wasn’t expecting my religion classes to be that hard, that rigorous, and to be honest, that boring.
What you’ve got to understand is that, as ridiculous as it sounds, I really had been looking forward to this class and New Testament Theology and Introduction to New Testament Greek and all the other religion classes. In my mind, I really did think they were going to be like Sunday school, except more fun, because we would be getting into all the deep theological stuff we usually skipped over in Sunday school because there wasn’t enough time or interest from my classmates in discussing the minute details of penal substitution atonement. But most importantly, I thought religion classes were finally going to give me all the academic ammunition I needed to figure out the end times and shoot down anyone who disagreed with me. But my religion classes weren’t anything like that. There was redaction criticism to learn about, and Greek verbs to conjugate, and educational theories to learn, and I hated it.
All of it.
That first semester was a war of attrition, and I was very quickly becoming the vanquished foe. But there was hope in the form of a meeting I had with the New Testament professor, who also happened to be my advisor. We had to meet to arrange my schedule for the spring semester. For most normal students, this would have been a boring meeting just as soon to be avoided. For me, it was the opportunity of a lifetime. It was my chance to have all my ideas about the end times confirmed, all my questions about the rapture answered—by a real bona fide expert.
A map that doesn’t exist
As I sat outside my advisor’s office that afternoon, my heart was racing in anticipation as if I were a kid on my way to Disney World for the first time. In my mind I was. In my mind, religion professors had the greatest job imaginable. They got paid to sit around and talk about theology all day! How could life get any better than that? Their offices had to be the happiest places on earth.
But that wasn’t the only reason I was excited to be there that day. I couldn’t wait to show off my theological brilliance, impress my professor, and win his undying admiration for how astutely I understood the mysteries of the end times. I don’t think I had even sat down on the old cloth-covered chair in his office before I began assailing him with my dispensational theories and questions. I didn’t take another breath for at least twenty minutes. Every theory I had I shared. Every suspect for the Antichrist I named. Every Israel-related news event I dissected. When I was finally done, I looked at my advisor and said, “So what do you think?” He cracked a sly grin, as if this wasn’t the first time he had heard this sort of thing and I hadn’t just blown his mind with my incredible insights into the end times.
And then he spoke.
I was expecting affirmation of my expertise, maybe a little bit of clarity on my prophetic timetables, or at least a phone call to the department chair letting him know my advisor was so impressed by my genius that I would be joining the faculty. What I got instead was something else entirely. In a calm, patient voice he said, “You know, Jack Van Impe seems like a smart guy to me. But the problem I have with him, and folks like him, is they’re trying to pinpoint places on a map that simply doesn’t exist. They’re right: we are living in the end times. But we have been ever since Jesus walked out of the tomb.” I’d never been so stunned into silence. I felt like the emperor with no clothes, dragged out before the masses. My apocalyptic delusions had been laid bare. Sensing my embarrassment, my advisor quietly signed my class schedule and gently sent me on my way.
What happened next was a whirlwind of shock, confusion, and anger. I locked myself in my dorm room until I could find the courage to show my face in public again. I immediately went into denial mode. My professor may have had my undying respect as an authority on all things biblical before that meeting, but I had barely made it out of his office before deciding he was a fool. He had to be. The end times were so clear! The fulfillment of prophecies in the news was so obvious. Maybe if I could just get him to watch one episode of Jack Van Impe Presents he would understand. Maybe he’d get it and come over to my side, to the side of truth, the side of Jesus.
The denial lasted for days, weeks, months even. When I finally began to make space in my head for the possibility that maybe, just maybe, a guy with a PhD in New Testament knew what he was talking about, the denial slowly began to fade. It was replaced by anger. I was mad. Really, really mad. At first, my anger was directed squarely at my professor. Why couldn’t he have just gone along with what I said? Why couldn’t he have just politely smiled, nodded, and sent me on my way? My ignorance had been bliss. Who did he think he was, anyway? Oh right, an expert in the New Testament.
Just accepting that simple fact took far longer than it should have. After all, the very reason I was so excited to share my end-times ideas with him was my respect for his biblical expertise. But acknowledging that he knew more than I did wasn’t just about my arrogance, though that certainly played a role. Acknowledging he knew more than I did meant admitting he was right and I was wrong—not just about some random topic, but about a core tenet of my faith, a defining part of my identity.
If I had been so wrong about the mysteries of the end times, then maybe I wasn’t quite as smart as I thought I was. Simply accepting that possibility—that I could be wrong about something I was so sure I was right about—took countless weeks and months of self-reflection. Forcing myself to confront the reality that maybe I didn’t have everything figured out was hard. I was still angry with my advisor, but I still trusted my other religion professors, so I turned to them for leads on books I could read and biblical experts I could consult to prove how wrong my advisor had been. They obliged, but I didn’t find the proof I wanted to shove in his face. Worse still, those biblical experts all agreed with him.
When I finally came around to accepting the fact that I was wrong, the anger didn’t subside. It simply began to be directed elsewhere: toward Jack and Rexella, toward Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye, toward anyone and everyone who had ever suckered me into believing in end-times prophecy and the rapture. How could they have tricked me into something like that and made me look like a complete fool in front of my professor?
Eventually my anger turned inward. After all, if anyone was to blame for all of this, it was me. I was the sucker. How could I have been so naïve? So gullible? So dumb? My whole life I had prided myself on having all the Sunday school answers, being the top Bible quizzer at church, and knowing everything there was to know about the Christian faith. At that moment, I couldn’t have
felt any dumber, and it was that embarrassment that turned to rage.
But being the nerdy church kid I was, that rage didn’t turn into anything scandalous. It turned into petty, childish protests only recognizable to me. Why? Because while I may have begun to have my doubts about the rapture, I was still terrified of hell, and I didn’t want to do anything that would have completely jeopardized my soul.
My rebellion was cliché. Super, incredibly, ridiculously cliché. I stopped doing my homework. (Like I said, super, incredibly, ridiculously cliché.) I got a D in my second semester of New Testament Greek after turning in all of one assignment that semester, so I felt like a rebel. I had stuck it to the Man! For a while, at least. But then I lost my academic scholarships and found myself torn between the love of feeling like a rebel and the terror of massive student loans.
The next step in my grand plan of rebellion was to stop going to chapel. Again, super cliché, but it felt hardcore to a kid who never missed church. Ever. Chapel was held three times a week. I started going zero times a week—or if I did go, I sat in the back and took a nap. Such a rebel. Unfortunately for me, the school’s threat of penalties for missing too many chapel services wasn’t a bluff. I racked up several hundred dollars in fines, and had it not been for the grace of the assistant dean—who, after I groveled in his office on bended knee, reduced my penalty to a more manageable dollar figure—I would have had to take out another student loan to pay for them.
But there was still church to skip.
To be fair, lots of churchgoing kids skip church when they go off to college, if for no other reason than that Mom and Dad aren’t around to make them go. But I relished it, staying as far away from church and anything resembling church as I could.
Then I changed my major.
I held on to the religion part, because I still liked studying religion. But I wanted nothing to do with the practical, ministry-oriented classes. Because I had started college academically as a sophomore, I had time to burn. (At least I thought I did; I failed to realize that graduating in three years instead of four would have saved me a huge chunk of money.) So I took on a double major: history and political science. My thought was twofold: this double major was the closest thing our school had to a prelaw program, and being a lawyer seemed like the furthest thing from being a pastor. Plus, I had seen A Few Good Men a whole bunch of times and figured it would be a cakewalk.
I know this will come as a shock, but it wasn’t.
So I tried getting a tattoo—a religious one, of course. I chose the symbol known as the Chi-Rho, formed from the first two letters, X and P, for “Christ” in Greek. I made sure to get it tattooed on the hardest of hardcore places: my ankle, because “how beautiful upon the mountains are the feet” and all that (Isaiah 52:7). Then I got a few piercings. When that didn’t solve my spiritual crisis either, I took a trip across the country to Yellowstone to find myself. All I found there were sore feet and exhaustion from a hiking excursion for which I was woefully unprepared.
By the time all was said and done, I was still as bitter and angry as ever. If anything, my newfound doubt about the rapture was just the first loose thread to be pulled. The rest of my faith began to unravel as well. After all, if I had been wrong about the rapture, what else had I been wrong about? A lot, it turned out. It would take me several years to find out just how much I was wrong about and how many people I had unfairly passed judgment on.
I might have seen it all coming had I paid just a bit more attention in my advisor’s Introduction to Biblical Faith class. On one of the very first days of class, he gave us a warning about where our religious studies would lead. Had I paid attention, I might have been able to see my crisis of faith coming over the horizon. I heard the words he said—that’s why I can tell you about it now—but back then I was too arrogant to think it ever could or would apply to me.
Before we dived into actually studying the Bible or the nuts and bolts of the Christian faith, our professor warned us that what we would be studying would likely challenge some of the things we thought we knew about the Bible and Christianity. We might be uncomfortable with, or even mad at, some of the things suggested in class or claimed by the authors we would read. We would encounter ideas that ran counter to what we always thought we knew to be true.
But that was okay, he said. Even though what we were learning would probably be painful, it was all a normal part of the learning process. This learning process, according to French philosopher Paul Ricœur, can be best understood in three stages.1
First naiveté
The first stage of the process is called the first naiveté. This is the precritical stage of our understanding or knowledge of the world, in which we accept what we are taught without giving it much critical thought or attention. For me, that would have been the Sunday school period of my life—or really all my time growing up and learning something in church. I implicitly trusted the people charged with teaching me the faith. Not that I shouldn’t have; none of them had any nefarious intent to mislead me. But I trusted my Sunday school teachers and the adults in my life without question. Whenever they told me something about the Bible or Jesus or God, I believed that whatever they said was true.
Most of us do the same when we’re young. And more of us than we care to admit stay in this stage long after we grow up. A not-insignificant number of us never really grow out of it. Need proof? Just take a look at your social media feed and see how many people regularly share information that is clearly incorrect but that they take to be the gospel truth because the source seems authoritative. Some of that is the result of confirmation bias—something even the most educated and wise can fall victim to. But when we accept the word of an authority figure simply because of their perceived authority and without question or reflection, we’re likely still living in the first naiveté.
Critical reflection
One of the core purposes of higher education is to move students out of the first naiveté and into the next stage of learning and understanding: critical reflection. You might also call it the humbling stage. That is just me talking, not Ricœur. But for me, the biggest lesson from the critical reflection stage isn’t the knowledge you gain—though that is certainly important. It’s the humility that comes as your eyes are opened up to how much you don’t know and how arrogant you were in your naiveté.
Now to be clear, this usually isn’t an overnight realization. When you first get to the critical reflection stage, it’s rough and embarrassing. My rapture-shattering conversation with my advisor was my baptism by fire into critical reflection. I didn’t leave his office joyful over my newfound enlightenment; I left angry and embarrassed. And I stayed that way for a long, long time.
Had I paid attention that first day in Introduction to Biblical Faith, perhaps this stage wouldn’t have lasted quite so long. After all, my professor had tried to warn me. He had tried to prepare me for the inevitable moment when I would come face-to-face with indisputable proof that a belief that I was once so sure was right was actually wrong. When that time came, I wouldn’t be able to do the mental gymnastics necessary to wiggle out of it. When that time came, he warned, I had a choice to make. I could bury my head in the sand, refuse to believe it, and live the rest of my life in willfully ignorant denial (kind of like if Neo had chosen to take the blue pill and plug back into the Matrix). Or I could continue down the road of discovery and learning, no matter how hard or scary or painful it might be.
The path of willful ignorance is easy, comfortable, and known. It’s filled with plenty of fellow travelers, because many take it. But more than a few choose the more difficult path—or, like me, many find themselves forced onto it, because intellectual integrity eventually leaves them with no other choice.
I say eventually, because when the door to critical reflection was first opened, I didn’t run through. I slammed it shut and ran as hard as I could the other way. I tried going back to living in the first naiveté—tried as hard as I could to ignore the bad t
heology and contradictions of dispensationalism whenever they reared their ugly head. I tried to take the blue pill, but it was too late. It took many bitter months—years, actually—to accept the truth when I saw it and to forgive both those who taught me the wrong things and myself for believing them. Again, those folks had not intentionally led me astray, so they didn’t need my forgiveness for that. I needed to forgive them in the sense of letting go of the idea that they had tried to trick me, in the sense of letting go of the belief that there was some secret cabal that had colluded to embarrass me in college. Even though I knew, intellectually, that they were good, well-meaning people who were simply trying to teach me what they believed to be true, accepting that simple truth in my soul took a long time.
It took even longer for me to forgive myself. I’d always prided myself on being the smartest guy in the room. I still do—even though I’m now keenly aware of how rarely, if ever, that is true. But pride is a difficult thing to overcome. They say pride cometh before the fall, and it did. But it also came along with me for the ride. Even as the pieces of my faith eventually began to be put back together, the pain and embarrassment of realizing just how arrogant I had been in my youth lingered. It still does. It was years before I could even talk about my previous devotion to the end times without embarrassment-induced rage building up inside me.
Second naiveté
Thankfully, the anger eventually subsided. It has to if you’re going to move on to the third and final stage of understanding. You need a healthy dose of humility to move on to what Ricœur calls the second naiveté. You need it because the second naiveté requires you to accept what you don’t know along with the mysteries you can’t figure out. It’s not a return to willful ignorance but rather an embrace of the fact that you don’t have everything figured out and that’s okay. That doesn’t mean you stop trying to pursue knowledge and understanding. Rather, you learn to drop the need to know everything, to learn every fact and decipher every mystery.
