My journey to faith did not begin in grand cathedrals or abstract philosophical treatises. It began in Oakland, Mississippi—a small town of fifteen hundred souls, though the town limit sign back then pointedly counted only the five hundred white residents. It was a world divided by race, but bound tightly by rural tradition.
The center of my early world was a two-story brick building that housed the segregated public school for grades one through twelve. I spent my first, fourth, part of my seventh, and my ninth and tenth grades in those classrooms before my father returned from a year in Korea, retired from military service, and took a civilian post at the Pentagon, moving our family to Arlington, Virginia.
That move to an urbane and cosmopolitan culture was a shift in the tectonic plates of my religious and educational upbringing. In Oakland, the limited academic curriculum available to me was mirrored in the simple, hominess of my church going. Across town from the school, on the other side of the railroad tracks and the one paved street, stood the Church of Christ—a small, modest clapboard building with just enough wooden pews to seat about a hundred people. On any given Sunday, our congregation of fifty or so filled only half of them, led in worship by Brother George Langston, a local farmer, who also led Tuesday night bible study. During summer revival week, most of the other pews would be filled by the less faithful, most drawn to the entertaining scolds of fiery circuit preachers.
Our family’s roots in that small church ran deep. My great-grandfather, Lee Jackson, Sr., was a Church of Christ minister who had once led that very congregation. One of my favorite photographs captures him in a local pond baptizing a small group of rather grim-faced converts. For many years, it was quietly assumed that I would follow in his footsteps to pastor that church. I was only faintly aware of this calling when, on Sunday, the Fourth of July, 1954, at the age of fifteen, I was myself immersed in the waters of baptism.
I did not possess a complex systematic theology then. I knew little of the long historical debates on sin and grace. What I had was a simple, pure acceptance of Christ as my Savior, a genuine repentance, and a commitment to live a Christian life.
II: Catholicism–A Treacherous Harbor
That steady, sure belief continued to anchor my faith as I grew into adulthood. Then, two decades later, and seven years after marrying Dorene, whose family’s Catholic roots went back many generations, I converted to her religion (no small journey from the Church of Christ I might add). I completed the mandatory course of instruction in Catholicism before our wedding could take place, and after our children were born, I honored my oath that they be raised in the Catholic faith. For decades, we attended family Mass without fail and I gradually mastered the Latin liturgy. My faith was once more firmly anchored—not necessarily because I was a dogmatist of Catholic canonical law, but because the structure served the personal goal of firmly grounding my family in religious harmony.
Then came revelations that shattered that sturdy architecture.The exposure of widespread child abuse by Catholic priests was devastating enough. The fatal blow to my trust was the subsequent discovery that the Church hierarchy—from bishops to the ultimate levels of moral authority—had systematically covered up these atrocities to protect the institution. When the shepherds betrayed me and my flock to save their own skins, not only was their legitimacy lost but in my anger, I hoped as well their very souls.
II: Long Years of Doubt and Despair
In the aftermath, my faith became wrenchingly unmoored from its safe harbor of belief and in concert, my trust in a benevolent God. For the next fifteen years, I was left to drag an unseated anchor through deep waters of doubt and despair. I did not abandon my intellect; rather, I threw myself into secular autonomy and alternative frameworks. Eastern religions were too much removed from my Judeo-Christian upbringing, but at one point, I seriously considered converting to Judaism, drawn to its rigor and discipline—specifically the construct that living according to The Law and Teachings in this life makes our existence meaningful and, equally important, that of others as well.
I also plunged into psychological and evolutionary models, studying thinkers like Jordan Peterson who examine religious structures from the ground up. Peterson’s work in particular offered me a compelling intellectual explanation: that human beings evolved sacred narratives, moral frameworks, and institutions to maintain "Order" and shield us from the terrifying "Chaos" of the unknown. Through this lens, I could see that religious stories were not merely naive superstitions, but deeply encoded maps for human survival and social order.
Yet, while this explained the utility of religion, it left a profound void. Pragmatic psychology could explain why human beings needed to construct a God, but it could not answer whether there was a God. A functional story is useful, but it is not a center of gravity. You cannot pray to a psychological archetype when life falls apart, as mine had.
III. The Theological Reality of Transcendence
After Dorene passed away, my life underwent another seismic shift. I elected to move from California with Brett and Patti to Kentucky in territory familiar to Patti, near Versailles where she grew up and still had close family and friends. We now have the joy of visiting with her father, and Brett's two children and their spouses at least weekly during family dinners.
We bought a beautiful farm-style home situated on seven bucolic acres and grew into an easy, loving relationship. I could now see firsthand the culmination of Brett's long journey into the ministry, accompanied at every step by Patti, and the deep pastoral bond they formed. It made a profound impression on me as we made a life together, and I could witness firsthand their deep, unshakeable belief. Equally important, living with them did not subject me to well meant sermons or gentle relentless urgings toward renewed faith. Instead, it provided a priceless opportunity to observe a rich, meaningful and purposeful faith at close range—no institutional politics, no grandstanding, and no hypocrisy, just the quiet, steady expression of faith lived through integrity, service, and genuine devotion.
That daily witness awakened a longing in my soul to re-examine my motives for abandoning my own once firmly anchored belief and yet again find safe harbor. I plucked from Brett's bookshelf Millard J. Erickson’s monumental, “Christian Theology.” Undertaking a study of this iconic text book would be no mean feat. It's 60 chapters and twelve hundred and fifty-three pages, covered the vast theological landscape essential to a Master's of Divinity degree. But, I had a more profound purpose: to dig down to the very foundations of Christian orthodoxy in search of the bedrock I so desperately needed as I passed my 85th birthday. Having spent a lifetime in academic and analytical environments—as an assistant professor at the Air Force Academy, earning a master's degree in a French university, and analyzing complex mechanical, scientific and bureaucratic constructs—I approached Erickson not as a passive seeker, but as a rigorous critic. Yet, what I had expected to criticize proved largely reaffirming and extraordinarily comforting. As I near completion of his masterful text, my studies have forced me through a wholesale intellectual reboot.
His systematic historical theology, rooted in Scripture, has provided for me the critical piece that evolutionary psychology could never supply: the clear distinction between human fallibility and divine revelation. Where Peterson, for example, looks at religion from the bottom up (how humans construct order out of chaos), Erickson approaches theology from the top down (how a transcendent God reveals objective truth to humanity). He makes it rigorously clear that God does not reveal Himself through flawless human organizations, but through creation, conscience, Scripture, and the historical person of Jesus Christ.
This distinction changed everything:
* The Problem of Human Sin:
Theology does not excuse the corruption of priests or the cover-ups of bishops; it predicts them. Sin is not just a social misstep; it is a pervasive moral failure that infects every human structure, including church hierarchies. Recognizing the reality of human depravity paradoxically freed me: it explained why church leaders fail without indicting the character of God.
* From Self-Reliance to Grace:
Psychological models demand that the individual carry their own cross to create order in their life. Theology agrees with the duty, but exposes our limitations: human intellect and self-discipline alone cannot bridge the moral gap between our fallen nature and a holy God. Redemption requires an objective act of divine grace (sola gratia).
IV. The Practical Crucible: Living Faith in Community
Abstract intellect and theoretical frameworks must eventually meet lived experience. Wrestling line by line with foundational texts transformed my faith from an inherited habit into an intellectually tested conviction. My faith is no longer a passive adoption of tradition, but a mature, rigorous engagement with ultimate questions, historical evidence, and doctrinal coherence.
When that intellectual work is paired with the daily witness of authentic Christian living, the noise of macro-institutional politics dropped away. What remains is the realization that true faith is maintained not in grand Vatican councils or corporate church headquarters, but in the quiet, daily commitment to live truthfully, serve others, and walk humbly before God.
V. Conclusion: A Newly Re-anchored Faith
In retrospect, I realized how easy it was to look at the flaws of human religion and conclude that the rational position is to discard the entire proposition. Arrogant certainty is a comfortable posture—whether it comes from a pulpit or an academic desk. But true intellectual rigor requires us to examine not just the corruptions of men, but the enduring truths that survive those corruptions.
My return to faith is not a regression to childhood naivety. It is not an uncritical surrender to dogma, nor is it a defense of broken human institutions. It is a synthesized, battle-tested conviction. It is the realization that while human hierarchies will inevitably fail us, the transcendent reality of God’s grace and moral order remains untouched by that failure.
If there is a bottom line to the understanding that emerged from a decade and a half of lost faith weighed down by an anchor of doubt, it is that secular autonomy, for all its intellectual polish, leaves a life without a finite horizon. Rejecting the failures of fallible men is only the beginning of wisdom—not its end. A true anchor is found where personal moral responsibility meets the enduring, transcendent truth of a living God.
