A generation ago, scholars of comparative religion thrived on notions of congruency and conformity. Religion in all its variety possessed a universal experiential core, a primordium, that, once identified, made homo religiosis more intelligible. Today, scholars of the history of religions are animated by the power of plurality. Many of them reject the notion that religions are grounded in a common essence, nor do they find it very interesting or illuminating to generalize across religious boundaries. When similarities are observed, they are relatively isolated in nature. Perhaps some component—a particular belief or practice—may have analogies elsewhere, but it can only be properly understood in terms of the intrinsic pattern of interrelatedness from which it derives.

This radically pluralist view—increasingly prominent in the academy, though hardly evident in popular discourse—acknowledges the jarring reality of religious differences across the globe and underscores a scholarly preference for description over explanation. A hodgepodge of essays gathered under the title Religious Conversion: Contemporary Practices and Controversies, edited by Christopher Lamb and M. Darrol Bryant, serves as a revealing case in point. Contributors to the volume treat the subject of conversion rather delicately, aware that it is not only a complex concept—certainly impossible to define in any universal sense—but also a particularly "troubling issue" for champions of religious pluralism. While a vast smorgasbord of spiritualities in the West encourages individualized seeking, blending, and movement from one flavor to another, boundary-conscious religious groups, especially in less mobile societies, view conversion with a great deal more anxiety, often with an eye to wider ethnic, economic, or political implications. Conversion may signal a change of religious identity, but it will manifest itself in strikingly different ways depending on the boundaries that are crossed. That is why conversion must first be examined from within its own religious context. An indigenous understanding of conversion, based largely on what participating groups or persons say it is, will shed a great deal more light on the sort of tensions that arise between religious traditions. This is particularly evident when religion provides an anchor or, borrowing from William James, a "personal center of habitual energy" that nurtures and sustains life.

Buddhism, for example, begins with its own conversion story and, through the Awakening of Siddhartha Gautama Sakya, perceives the world according to the principles of karma, an incipient form of the Four Noble Truths, and, ultimately, nirvana. The history of Buddhism is punctuated by the conversions of emperors, entire nations, and recurring debates between "gradualists" and "suddenists." In India today, Dalits (members of the caste formerly known as Untouchables) sometimes convert en masse to Buddhism, though adherents to the new faith view their liberation or moksa primarily in social and political rather than spiritual terms. Meanwhile, converts at Dharma centers in the West resonate with the pratyekabuddha or "solitary realizer" who becomes gradually enlightened in isolation from others. Some Mahayan Buddhists assume that a conscious conversion is not even necessary, since everyone already possesses the Buddha-nature.

A number of religions, including Judaism, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, and many forms of Hinduism, have generally avoided proselytizing because they view conversion to their respective faiths as exceedingly difficult, if not impossible. Zoroastrians, or Parsis, in India, for example, may reject "horizontal" conversions—from another faith into their own—based on ethnic exclusivity. On broader cultural and political grounds, Mahatma Gandhi represented the views of many fellow Hindus in his criticism of the missionary enterprise, calling instead for a kind of "vertical" conversion to the higher truths or universal values contained in the religion of one's birth.

Muslims, by contrast, are more akin to Christians in their converting zeal, though, oddly enough, no exact equivalent for the English word "conversion" exists in Arabic. Most Muslims do not believe that formal declaration of the shahada ("there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is His Messenger") is in itself a sufficient mark of authentic submission; one must also live according to the dictates of Allah and His Messenger in everyday terms, that is, according to the Prophet's sunna (normative practices), including the famous Five Pillars of Islam. Revitalized commitment to Islam among young Muslims in Great Britain, however, is not as likely to feature such a well defined path of conversion. Rather, as nominal belief gives way to a deliberate quest for "Truth," a variety of personal transformations take place as devotees immerse themselves in religious communities of support and friendship—enclaves not unlike the transplanted biraderi (kinship networks) of more senior first-generation immigrants. In a world of contradiction, multiplicity, and innovation, new identities are formed according to a complex interplay of social and religious forces and, only gradually, does an all-encompassing, clearly marked way of life emerge.

Throughout this vast survey of religions, it is the personal experience of the convert that preoccupies the contributors to Lamb and Bryant's volume. The editors promise to venture beyond William James' classic psychological description of conversion into the wider social and cultural arenas—contextualization, or "thick description," is a recurring theme—but the phenomenology of conversion provides the most vivid and, at times, baffling comparisons. Here scholars find themselves confronted with the irreducible nature of religious experience—irreducible despite the mediation of that experience by formative communities.

In the second half of the book, a number of biographical and autobiographical accounts of conversion, ranging from a charismatic Christian's take on Augustine's Confessions to the more open-ended quest of contemporary "Paganism" (or nature religion), are examined, each disclosing what Lewis R. Rambo calls a "deep-level learning" with its own rituals, language of transformation, and system of interpretation. The editors leave it up to the reader to make sense of all this, providing little integration with the theoretical essays located at the beginning of the volume. Rambo's seven-stage model of religious change, for example, is applied only haphazardly by authors who are busy privileging the voices of religious actors in a dizzying array of case-studies. The collection of essays, as a whole, is fragmented and uneven in quality—akin, say, to a session at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion—yet it satisfies the editors' desire to portray conversion as a widely varying phenomenon that is becoming more problematic in the context of emergent global pluralism.

To get a handle on just how complex the experience of conversion can be—and in a tradition where it is supposed to be definitive—Richard V. Peace's Conversion in the New Testament: Paul and the Twelve, Scot McKnight's Turning to Jesus: The Sociology of Conversion in the Gospels, and Gordon T. Smith's Beginning Well: Christian Conversion and Authentic Transformation provide especially satisfying reads. All of the authors are steeped in the subculture of North American evangelicalism, profess an evangelical faith, but are dissatisfied with evangelical definitions and practices of conversion. Peace thinks the church is muddled in its theology of conversion and, consequently, handicapped in its ability to make genuine disciples. As both a career evangelist and a professor of evangelism at Fuller Theological Seminary he is uniquely positioned to weigh experience against theory. McKnight, a New Testament scholar at North Park University in Chicago, objects to the way church-reared adolescents, including many of his students, are pressured to undergo a crisis conversion, ignoring prior faith and personality development. Smith, president of Overseas Council Canada, theologian, and part-time academic, expresses a similar concern in his theological critique of the Wesleyan-Holiness and Pentecostal paradigms and their excessively formal distinctions between conversion, sanctification, and the gift of the Spirit.

Conversion for these authors is a complicated process because humans are complicated creatures. According to McKnight, there are "vast implications for the entire process of conversion" if born and raised born-again evangelicals, in particular, ignore the developmental aspects of human nature. He joins fellow participant-observers like Peace and Smith in considering these implications at length using a complementary and, at times, dazzling array of multidisciplinary perspectives.

Peace typifies the renewed evangelical interest in conversion by re-reading the New Testament for signs of process over event. He argues that Mark's gospel stands out as a book principally about conversion. While the apostle Paul's dramatic experience on the road to Damascus gives us a normative theological pattern—insight/turning/transformation—it is the varied experiences of the twelve disciples that show us how complex and drawn-out the pattern can be. Peace highlights the difference between conversion as a singular episode for Paul versus conversion as an elaborate pilgrimage for the Twelve—a journey of discovery situated in thick relational contexts.

Bucking a long-cherished revival tradition, Peace also qualifies the normative status of Paul's experience, which happened in a flash, whereas the disciples' took place in "fits and starts." The evangelical church may try to replicate Paul's experience, but for most individuals a genuine turning to the person of Jesus is a complicated and often protracted affair. Accordingly, Peace reads Mark's gospel as a step-by-step account of how the Twelve gradually came to know the real Jesus. Paul's experience does not exactly fade into the background, however; it continues to play a definitive role in structuring the conversion process. This is where McKnight and Smith part company with Peace. Both move more exclusively toward the gospel accounts of the Twelve, with Peter often grabbing center stage.

McKnight combines social-scientific approaches with the latest in New Testament scholarship, arguing that conversion takes place in dimensions while faith occurs in stages. By this he means that conceptual frameworks (most especially Rambo's) that consider parameters such as context, crisis, quest, encounter, interaction, commitment, and consequences are actually windows to a process that unfolds with considerable variation over the life span of individuals. At any particular stage of life, one or more dimensions of conversion may express itself more explicitly or palpably than at another. Those Christian traditions which emphasize personal-decision and crisis conversion tend to overlook this developmental approach to faith. McKnight's case-studies—a collection of autobiographical conversion narratives written by his students at North Park—provide vivid accounts of the dimensions and stages of religious transformation and, like the Lamb and Bryant volume, underscore the tremendous diversity of social, psychological, and physical conditions which factor into the conversion process.

One of the more startling features of McKnight's analysis is his application of this developmental approach to Scripture. The gospels, in particular, are notoriously sketchy in their depictions of the conversion process; no complete narratives are available and considerable differences of opinion exist concerning what is a truly normative pattern. But when careful attention is given to the Jewish and, especially, Galilean socioreligious background of Jesus' ministry, his central teaching concerning the kingdom of God begins to yield a model of conversion that is strikingly resonant with a process-oriented view.

According to a modified version of Rambo's multi-stage model, McKnight unpacks key ingredients of Jesus' understanding of the master-disciple relationship: how it is initiated in a rich symbolic universe of kingdom principles, organized around a variety of personal crises and quests, grounded in an encounter with a supreme advocate, and sealed through a broad range of commitments and life-saving consequences. Each dimension varies in content, intensity, and duration according to the personality of the individual. Indeed, there are many of the kind of "fits and starts" observed by Peace here, perhaps even more so. Still, general contours of the complex journey emerge, suggesting, for example, that Peter's conversion is close to the normative pattern set forth by Jesus. McKnight argues that the biblical evidence suggests that Peter, not Paul, is the "prototypical convert to Jesus." Why? Because Peter did what most Christians have done ever since: he "weighed his options, deliberated, discussed, debated, oscillated, and scrutinized, but in each phase he gave a new nod of the soul to Jesus' mission."

That phrase, "nod of the soul," is a favorite expression for McKnight. It suggests that the new possibilities opened up by the kingdom of God become evident to us through a very personal series of "gentle" awakenings. Apparently, Jesus prefers to work this way, often despite the tyrannies that surround us, evangelical or otherwise. Little wonder that only the person who has actually experienced conversion can properly interpret it—or so says Gordon T. Smith's favorite phenomenologist, Louis Dupré. Indeed, religious experience always "defines its own meaning."

This unapologetic appeal to the subjective aspect of conversion reveals a striking compatibility between Smith's project and that of the contributors to the Lamb and Bryant volume. Like McKnight, Smith appreciates the socially constructed nature of religious life and freely acknowledges, in true Wittgensteinian fashion, the varied ways a shared language conceptualizes and structures experience. Where Smith departs most candidly from the descriptive paradigm of his scholarly peers, including McKnight, is his desire to help fellow evangelicals develop a capacity to interpret and, in some instances, redefine their conversions on theological grounds. In effect, Smith asks evangelicals to simultaneously trust and critically evaluate their experiences, paying closer attention to the dynamic interplay between objective matters of faith and the more subjective act of finding personal meaning in those disclosures.

While conversant with sociologists, Smith is not content with case-studies and thick descriptions. He works on a somewhat larger biblical canvas than McKnight, and looks more closely at the context of Paul's Damascus Road experience than Peace. Smith hopes to locate and "organize" the experience of conversion in a comprehensive theological framework—all this for the sake of addressing a "dilemma" in contemporary evangelicalism.

Smith thinks evangelicals are profoundly ambiguous about the experience of conversion. "Many are confident they are Christian believers," he observes, "but because the evangelical tradition does not have a thorough and consistent theology and language of conversion incorporating second-generation Christians, they often feel that their experience of conversion is incidental—not a significant source of meaning and strength for their Christian lives." At times, Smith writes autobiographically of his own struggles with the classic "soul-winning" strategies of revivalism, especially its misplaced emphasis on the suddenness of conversion, or the artificially differentiated two-step model of sanctification in the holiness tradition. After tracing the historical highs and lows of conversion and examining the spiritual biographies and autobiographies of individuals as varied as Augustine and Dorothy Day, Smith reminds evangelicals in the 21st century that a "good" conversion is not so much the end as it is the beginning of the Christian life.

To better understand what it means to begin well, Smith refers his readers to the metaphors and images of religious change found in Scripture and in the classic Puritan and Wesleyan patterns, criticizing, along the way, the varied legacies of 19th-century revivalism. A New Testament model of conversion containing seven elements—intellectual, penitential, affective, volitional, sacramental, charismatic, and communal—assures that the conversions of both first- and second-generation Christians will be complete and discernible. As with McKnight, careful exegesis of key biblical passages suggests to Smith that these elements are variable in sequence depending on the age and circumstances of the convert. All are essential, but each person—usually an adult—will experience them with varying degrees of intensity. The precise moment of justifying grace may occur at any time. There is, in fact, a great deal of mystery involved, because the process of conversion is a response to God's saving work in Christ—and only an initial response at that. Together, Smith's seven "elements," McKnight's six "dimensions," and Peace's three "stages" remind us that from a human perspective God is inclined to work rather slowly and incrementally in every aspect of the Christian life.

If you are beginning to worry that conversion might fall prey to flowcharts and regimented X-step programs, stay tuned. No matter how useful a schema may be in understanding the meaning, dynamics, or goals of conversion, the experience is still mediated, often in very perplexing ways, by a local faith community. It will signify the cultural-linguistic of that community with a degree of social determinism that Lamb, Bryant, et al. are only too happy to demonstrate in vivid detail. But there's more. Edmund Husserl and his successors in the field of phenomenology draw our attention to the "transcendental subjectivity" of religious experience. Interruptions are still possible—so-called "nonsemiotic" interruptions, no less—in which the signs and signifiers of organized religious life give way to the "jolts, bumps, fits, wallops, and starts" of radical turning to God (metanoia). Theologians like William H. Willimon prefer to speak in terms of the "God-initiated, human-responsive, discontinuous, surprising quality of new life." Through these encounters, conversional communities recover a degree of openness to divine grace.

Willimon's thoughts on the irreducibility of the conversion experience and, most especially, the in-breaking work of divine love (sanctification) are found in his concluding essay of a volume edited by Kenneth J. Collins and John H. Tyson, Conversion in the Wesleyan Tradition. Here and in Gray Temple's The Molten Soul readers will discover some of the most evocative reflections on religious conversion found anywhere in contemporary literature. The unrelieved tensions between religious conformity and experiential suppleness, between ordered human development and what Jonathan Edwards once called "the surprising work of God" preoccupy these authors.

One would expect that where genuine life-changing conversions occur there would be a "tensive" atmosphere as routinized faith is interrupted by awakenings, acts of radical obedience, or any number of other possible outcomes of metanoia. The Wesleyan contributors to the volume edited by Collins and Tyson speak primarily to an ecclesiastical tradition that historically has fluctuated, often exclusively, between conversionist and nurture models of salvation. Exegetical essays by Joel Green and Ben Witherington III suggest that the Paul-versus-Peter debate is an unnecessary one; both apostles demonstrate the profound changes individuals undergo in their spiritual rebirth. What is most striking about this pervasive New Testament theme, Witherington argues, is that the Greco-Roman world did not believe such changes could actually occur.

Unfortunately, Christians often express the same doubts. Healthy revitalizing tensions in the church are routinely jeopardized by narrowing conversion down to a decision or, in Willimon's words, an "insufferable, sentimental moralism" of niceness. In such instances, the experience is no longer "God's means of getting God's way," but merely a reasonably predictable rite of passage defined by therapeutic needs or communal norms. John Wesley addressed this problem during the English Revival by embodying conversion in communal practice—in activities that turned sinners into saints. William J. Abraham's essay refers to Wesley's concept of the small group as a "sensitive and carefully constructed spiritual machine for the production of conversion." Another contributor, Sondra Higgins Matthaei, traces the success of such Methodist innovations to an "ecology of faith formation" that connected conversion to nurture and held self-referential tendencies in check, both individually and corporately, through concern for "the other." While cheap grace is never in short supply, this collection of fine essays shows us how religious communities can rise above the mediocrity of nominal religion to the edgy task of producing "real Christians"—i.e., disciples.

The subversiveness of conversion is also a central theme in Temple's The Molten Soul. Both the author and his book defy categories. Theologically, Temple is charismatic; ecclesiastically, he is Episcopalian. He describes himself as liberal on most things, though he clings to classical Pentecostal understandings of the infilling work of the Holy Spirit, which Temple prefers to call the "molten soul" experience. The book deconstructs traditional doctrines like the Incarnation and the atonement, but only to shed light on the "compelling inner evidence" they convey when relieved of their evasive conceptual baggage. Temple condemns the bondage and contrived sentiment of religiosity with the help of anthropologist Ernest Becker's theory of self-preservation.

In marked contrast to a human-crafted religion that bargains with God for an extended lifespan, Temple embraces the liberating notion of divine righteousness, which he describes as a relationship of mutual delight between God and humanity. This deeply transforming experience is what the Shorter Westminster Catechism had in mind when it asked, "What is the chief end of Man?" Ultimately, for Temple, this draws us to a mystical encounter with the radiant goodness of God—a goodness that beckons in the midst of an otherwise cluttered world of self-centered beliefs and practices. At this point, Temple's project falls most readily into the category of phenomenology, and it is here that he is most quotable: "The molten soul begins with bodily sensations, swiftly followed with the realization that we are not alone in the room. We feel awe, joy, embarrassment, relief, and exaltation in that Presence. It takes us out of the ordinary into some pretty strange company."

Temple's book is more typical in its appeal to developmental aspects of conversion, endorsing James Fowler's popular "six stages of faith," for example. Not surprisingly, Temple gravitates toward the more mature conjunctive faith that embraces tensions, exploration, paradox, and ambiguity. With Willimon, he celebrates the "tensional" implications of Spirit-wrought molten experience. But in marked contrast with the Wesleyans, Temple's focus is on individual experience, not the spiritual ecology of small groups.

The developmental models proposed by these authors are especially helpful in underscoring the complex ways God works through social and cultural contexts. Here we recall, once again, the emphasis on mediation and thick description found in Lamb and Bryant. The "total language" used to define conversion must be, as it was for the Puritans and early Wesleyans, a communal language and, as such, it must be articulated in every dimension of the church's inculturation of believers. The "internal" actions of belief, repentance, assurance, and devotion must also be expressed symbolically through the sacraments of baptism and communion, through the conscious reception of the gift of the Holy Spirit (which can take any number of forms, according to Smith), and incorporation into the Christian community. In each of these "external" actions, the church plays a critical role in mediating the conversion experience, teaching the language of faith and "the rhythms of grace" which give the transformation much of its shape and substance. All this proves especially critical given what Søren Kierkegaard called "the laborious pace of conversion." And, yet, there remains the experience itself—a divine encounter that transcends the enclosures of communal practice and the metaphors these contexts generate.

If, as Lamb and Bryant claim, most people undergo conversion in the religious tradition in which they are born, then the volumes by Peace, Smith, McKnight, Temple and the collection edited by Collins and Tyson seem especially appropriate and, perhaps, long overdue in the vast American subculture of evangelical Christianity. Moroever, a judicious application of sociology, anthropology, phenomenology, and literary theory brings their books into fruitful dialogue with the pluralist viewpoints of outside scholars. This multi-disciplinary, multi-perspectival approach may not seem to matter at first to insiders, but it adds fresh new insight and critical distance on a very old and misunderstood subject. It is as if we are suddenly able to look at what we normally look through. We find a deeper significance in an otherwise indescribable reality, appreciating a fullness and vitality that informs pastoral care as well as the responsiveness of entire faith communities to a world where differences matter.

Phil Harrold is associate professor of Church History at Winebrenner Theological Seminary, University of Findlay, in Findlay, Ohio.

Books discussed in this essay: Christopher Lamb and M. Darrol Bryant, eds., Religious Conversion: Contemporary Practices and Controversies (Cassell, 1999). Richard V. Peace, Conversion in the New Testament: Paul and the Twelve (Eerdmans, 1999). Scot McKnight, Turning to Jesus: The Sociology of Conversion in the Gospels (Westminster John Knox, 2002). Gordon T. Smith, Beginning Well: Christian Conversion and Authentic Transformation (InterVarsity, 2001). Kenneth J. Collins and John H. Tyson, eds., Conversion in the Wesleyan Tradition (Abingdon, 2001). Gray Temple, The Molten Soul: Dangers and Opportunities in Religious Conversion (Church Publishing, 2000).

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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