Spiritual Epiphanies

From an everyday engineer, a journalist, and an anthropolgist

Everyone who has become a child of God has had at least one. Growing Christians have had some form of them regularly. And if we are fortunate, God leads us to have major ones from time to time. I am talking of spiritual epiphanies.

An epiphany implies an appearance of a revelation such as “a sudden intuitive leap of understanding, especially through an ordinary but striking occurrence.” [1] When one first grasps a concept from science or history in a rapid way it might be called an epiphany – a turning point in a pursuit where a previously unknown piece of the puzzle is revealed. A spiritual epiphany might happen when one is contemplating some mystery about God and an explanation comes to him or her. The implications of the new idea may even cause a rush of emotions.

The book of Acts records a story where an official from Africa was once struggling to understand a passage in the book of Isaiah. He was returning home to Candace after visiting Jerusalem where Christians and Jews likely debated the meaning of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 52:13-53:13. He met someone named Philip who jumped onto the chariot and explained the passage to him while they continued to journey. Then after conversing and thinking through things the Scriptures, Philip's explanation, and the sojourner's personal life resonated. 

As they traveled along the road, they came to some water and the eunuch said, ‘Look, here is water. Why shouldn't I be baptized?” And he gave orders to stop the chariot. Then both Philip and the eunuch went down into the water and Philip baptized him.

Most epiphanies involved internal conclusions after a search just as it was for this first century sojourner. These discoveries should be delineated from a theophany such as the unprompted and supernatural “self-disclosure of God”, such as experienced by the prophets. When someone is deluded in modern times to say that God told them that they are “special” or an “exception” or that they have privileged revelation, they are mistakenly saying that they have had a theophany. My understanding of Hebrews 1:1-3 and 2:1-4 is that God was finishing this means of communication, at least in the normative sense.

A spiritual epiphany includes such moments when a lost person comes to understand his condition and its remedy in Jesus Christ. People who met Jesus frequently encountered overwhelming evidence of his divinity that it could be said that the Gospels are full of epiphanies. Our first time comprehension of some aspect of God's character, a doctrine, or prophecy may produce an epiphany where our live or understanding is forever changed. I will produce three examples of spiritual epiphanies: a personal story, a journalist, and an anthropologist.

Personal Example: Christ, As Lord

In the summer of '81 I landed a great engineering job that would enable me to stay near Northern Illinois University where I would pursue graduate work. Things were going well for me but I had quite a bit of guilt and so little power over the sin in my life. For whatever reason, I had not gone to the Bible so my first spiritual epiphany came while studying the Bible that summer.

Over the years I had variously prayed Jesus into my heart learning of ‘Christ as Savior' and got as close as I could to the ministers and rituals of my faith. It merely made me a more religious person, serving in mixed roles – but with still very little evidence of spiritual strength. I was asked to give the concluding homily of my senior year, a task only offered up by the priests one weekend a year – the week of the commencement for seniors. The process of putting together my lesson I realized how empty my canister of faith really was. As I stepped back from my religion, and began to question things, I was soon challenged in my beliefs by members of a door-knocking sect. Another church invited me to exciting Bible study groups (coinciding with my favorite television show ‘Mork and Mindy'. Oh' the sacrifices one has to make). This event produced in me a desire to go to the source of all Christian belief – the Bible.

I unknowingly entered a gauntlet when studying with the Jehovah's Witnesses, afterwards going to the priests or the Bible with my questions and I also studied with a local Church of Christ campus minister. I was pursuer of the studies every bit as much as I was being pursued, yet much of my Bible study was when I was alone. The combination of personal inquiry and the contest over my beliefs was a perfect arrangement from God. It was turning out to be a challenge between the doctrinaire angles of the JWs, the traditionalism of my family religion and a simple gospel presentation from the Church of Christ minister. It was the latter experience which discovered me, showing me for what I was as I saw myself in the crowd who crucified Jesus. Of the three groups who should have my best interests in mind, it was the man who patiently tutored me with God's Word who also was the most Christ-like, living out and modeling what I was reading. He gave me no debates over who was right but a simple light shed on my life – and that light was Christ.

I began to notice with regularity that every encounter with Jesus in the Gospels had a modern parallel using only a little imagination. Every parable had contemporary application. The actions for and against Jesus were being lived out in modern times. The call to discipleship was as discernable to me as it was for Jews in Galilee. Each of my sins were sins committed by people in the Bible and the outcome of my current course in life was viewable, in light of Scripture. Jesus was so fascinating to me, but interestingly the JWs only tried to prove to me that he wasn't divine, not what he was. Significant transgressions that made me feel guilty were being excused by some of my clergy. Just believing was all that mattered – believing in the program of a latter day sect, believing in the church of my ancestors, or the Savior through the sinner's prayer.

I came to conclude that my previous ritualism had some value, such as walking the Stations of the Cross, for they imprinted on my heart the steps of Jesus. Yet those rituals and the evangelical counterparts, the so-called accepting Christ as Savior experiences, were signpost which God had used in some ways but had left me in need of Christ as Lord. The Church of Christ minister, Marty Fuqua, a friend to this day, respected those experiences.

I became serious about sin and felt prompted by God I threw out trash magazines and other relics of my lost state. My decision to be baptized on a warm Friday night in July of 1981 momentarily separated me from friends and family who did not understand … but I did, and that was all that mattered. Some years later I wrote. 

It was like going out into an ocean with a sack filled with all of the baggage of the past. Everything associated with my past was with me we rowed out into deep water thinking through the decision to leave my past behind. The evidence of my sinful life, the belongings of a dead person, would be cast into the ocean's depths forever. After articles were dropped overboard, I jumped in and watched them go out of sight. I climbed back in and came back to shore with nothing but it wasn't me who was rowing – it was the Son of God; and I did not know what lay ahead when I went back to shore. One thing I knew for sure. I had left past behind and my foolishness was erased. To go back and retrieve my previous life would have been meaningless. I will never forget when God the Spirit convicted me, God the Father enabled me to repent, and God the Son rescued me and gave me a new life, a vastly better life.

I've told large numbers of people since 1981, “Until a prospective learner comes to Christ as Lord, they'll never receive Christ as Savior”. Separating one from the other is the reverse of an epiphany. It is a step into the darkness.

G.K. Chesterton: Orthodoxy

It is my theory that epiphanies mostly come only to seekers. A journalist is a trained seeker and over one hundred years ago one of them, G.K. Chesterton, was changed by his discovery. In 1904 a three-hundred pound journalist expounded on his earlier epiphany in his seminal work Orthodoxy. He had set out to look for something novel in religion, perhaps to prove something and Chesterton used a parable to describe his breakthrough. It's “about an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island.”

There will probably be a general impression that the man who landed armed to the teeth and talking by signs) to plant the British flag on that barbaric temple which turned out to be a Pavilion at Brighton, felt rather a fool. I am not here concerned to deny that he looked a fool. But if you imagine that he felt a fool, or at any rate that the sense of folly was his sole or his dominant emotion, then you have not studied with sufficient delicacy the rich and romantic nature of the hero of this tale. His mistake was really a most enviable mistake; and he knew it, if he was the man I take him for. What could be more delightful than to have in the same few minutes all the fascinating terrors of going abroad combined with all the humane security of coming home again?

The great writer admitted that when he was younger he wanted to be ahead of his times by “some ten minutes in advance of the truth.” Instead, as Chesterton wrote, “I found that I was eighteen hundred years behind it.” He realized that he had become astonished with what so many had taken for granted – orthodoxy – the historical Christian truths emanating from the Apostles Creed. The term orthodox meant “established view” yet many have taken established truths for granted, the first step to doubting and eventually denying it.

While Chesterton set out was in pursuit of truth with all of his preconceived notions, he was surprised at where he landed – “Heaven forgive me that I did try to be original,” he wrote. Embarrassed like the yachtsman he wrote, “When I fancied that I stood alone I was really in the ridiculous position of being backed up by all Christendom.”  When we come to a place where we are awed by the already known truths of the ages, are we the fool that we look like? G.K. Chesterton became the most entertaining, effective and friendly intellectuals of the early twenty-first century. He maintained gracious relations with those he debated and was one of the positive rudders for western culture.

Chesterton reminds us that some of the greatest epiphanies have to do with discovering the riches and depths of what we already have. For those who look at Christ, Scripture or the views espoused in the early creeds as ‘no big deal' should do as Chesterton did – set out on the sea again. It could be said that he was the leading intellectual to influence J.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and Philip Yancey. It was the latter who admitted that Chesterton's language was difficult but worth the effort to read, “I would recommend drinking very strong coffee before reading Chesterton. He is not bedtime reading, at least for me.” He also followed “I would say Orthodoxy had as much influence on my spiritual direction as any single book.”

Rene Girard: “Divine Revelation”

The agnostic French researcher, Rene Girard, was on a quest to understand developments of violence in ancient communities. Having come to America in 1947 he was educated in the Midwest and later became an esteemed professor for Stanford University working in anthropology and literary criticism. Over three decades ago he developed a theory about dynamics within communities emphasizing the relation of mimetic desire, retributive violence and sacrifice.

Soon came 1972 Girard came La violence et le sacré later published as Violence and the Sacred. Using the stories of ancient civilization and mythology, Girard established that storytellers were unaware of man's unconscious desire to imitate models, which became rivals. He also discovered that when stories emerge of victims being cast out of communities over envy, fear and blame the storytellers provided a basis for religious sacrifice and the mythology of gods and demons. Many of the stories of myth had actual events and mindsets that were enlivened by the mythical stories. The story makers were taking the view of the crowd, which when stirred by a crisis always led to the wrong conclusion, though unknown at the time. Angry people side with the loudest voice which happens to be the confident scapegoating voices. The angry voice has succumbed to envy, the entire crowd is locked by mimesis and so the victim is never heard or their views are twisted. Sometimes even the victim himself believes that they have caused all the local problems causing unanimity which tends to be feverish. In various works Girard could point to the stories of Oediphus, Romulus and Remas, the massacres of Jews during the plagues during the dark ages for some of his case studies. He went so far as to establish that the great novelists such as Shakespeare and Dostoevsky revealed such plots in their works. Girard unlocked the delusion of the subconscious schemes of communities in crisis.

This epiphany has rocked the worlds of literary criticism, social studies, our understanding of history and even expertly rebuffed at least one of Freud's theories on desire. But his greatest epiphany was yet to come. For his work was incomplete because he had not adequately looked into the Judeo-Christian Scriptures, probably because of his prejudices as a disbeliever. When he went through the Scriptures he was in for a shock, probably one of the most epic shocks that any investigator of history could make in a millennium. His theories of mimesis, crowd violence and sacrifice were already championed by the Bible and no one as of yet had noticed. That's right, only the God of the Scriptures had rejected the view of the angry crowd, sided with the victim, identified and unmasked the mechanism which humans had manipulated since shortly after creation.

In his Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World published in 1978, Rene Girard used the stories of Cain and Abel, Joseph and his brothers, Aaron and Korah, Job and his friends, the writings of the Psalms, the other Old Testament literature to survey and expound his theories, now out in he open everywhere in Scripture. In the New Testament he saw John and Herodius, Stephen and his contemporaries but most notably of course was Jesus. In the Gospel story Jesus is seen as the first one to turn the first and greatest systemic evil known in this world, invented by Satan himself, on its head --- by scorning its lie while standing silent before his accusers. Time and the resurrection vindicated Jesus and the position of the mob for it has been shamed ever since. But Cain, Joseph's brothers, Korah's faction, Job's friends, Herod's guests and every other activators and antagonists have been wrong as well because, according to Girard, even imperfect or partially guilty people innocent under such mechanisms. God takes the side of the victim in every case of mob action in Scripture. Perhaps, God does this as Girard believes, because mob anger is Satan's instrument and is never authorized for use in pursuit of justice. Consider such strong biblical language for a Stanford Professor. 

“When this happens, the community actually believes the accusation it makes against the unfortunate person. One way to out this, in the language of the Bible, especially the Gospels, is that the entire process is the work of Satan. Indeed, it is Satan.” (Foreword, I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning)

Girard's discovery led to his conversion to faith in God, the Scriptures and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. His theories are now beginning to be used to help corporations and world leaders. Rene Girard's revelations have reinvigorated many souls looking to pursue peace where violence has been the only language.

Conclusion

An ordinary twenty-two year old graduate student looking for power over sin, a journalist in pursuit of new ideas about religion, and a scholar looking to understand mankind each ended their explorations surprised by what they found. Their conclusions were different but not contradictory perspectives about the person of Jesus Christ.

More spiritual epiphanies are there for the seekers but not for bottom feeders that wait around trying to be fed by popular hand-me-downs. Those who seek to know about God, even if their original motivations are less than ideal, may be surprised at what they discover.