I graduated Magna Cum Laude as the Outstanding Graduate in Biblical Studies recipient from a small, but highly touted Southern Baptist liberal arts college in Texas. My time there was immeasurably beneficial in helping me become a man. I had a lot of growing up to do when I moved across the country to pursue the first steps in what I thought would be a “life in the ministry” in the Southern Baptist Convention. This school and its faculty helped me mature and grow. For that I will be eternally grateful.

Beyond personal growth, I also learned to take the Bible much more seriously. I finally learned how to move beyond my hyper-conservative, fundamentalist evangelical, John MacArthur-wanna-be version of biblical interpretation. This launched me into a world of biblical scholarship that had me frothing at the mouth.

It was two years into my degree when I fell into the classic trap of being a dumb Biblical Studies major who becomes exposed to new things and did what Wisdom of Sirach 5:9 (a book I had never even heard of until long after graduating) says not to d0: “...do not follow every road.” I followed every one of them I encountered. Here are some highlights of the many dogmatic positions I have entertained over the years, though in no particular order:

• I started to learn about Liberation Theology and Catholicism and became a social justice warrior.

• I read about Augustine and about Vatican I and Vatican II and became even more staunchly opposed to the empire and the ever-present patriarchy.

• I became a devotee of Stanley Hauerwas.

• I became “Barthian.”

• I had a brief period where I think I was a universalist.

• I was a staunch, 7-point-John Piper Calvinist at one time.

• Later I became a perennialist, though I didn’t know what to call it at the time.

• For a good while I thought women should probably have a turn at being pastors, since, of course, the patriarchy had ruined mostly everything else (at least that’s what the super-smart academic theologians at Yale Divinity and Union Theological Seminary say).

• I was a pacifist for a while.

• I took the eucharist in an Episcopal church for a while.

• I wanted to be Anglican.

• I went to a new age evangelical church in the punk side of Dallas.

Eventually I found myself not going anywhere, still doing the social justice, down-with-the-patriarchal empire nonsense, but completely disenchanted with Church. I inevitably became the 25 year old critic of all theological dogma, all ecclesiastical structure, and the revolting history of the “Church.”

Two years went by, and I only went into a church twice. I went from a young preacher-boy in a small rural community, sent off with the good-will and support of my local baptist church, who achieved outstanding academic success at a school that would almost guarantee a pastorate upon graduation, to a confused and dissatisfied perennialist looking for meaning, and holding onto Jesus by a thread. When I was asked by friends who wondered if I were still a Christian, all I could say was that I was committed to following Jesus.

I kept reading the bible, and I kept reading theology. Eventually, I discovered something in a lecture that I had only heard of once before. It was back when I heard through the hallowed halls of Criswell College that a fellow classmate was leaving the baptist church where he was the youth pastor for something called “Eastern Orthodoxy.”