From Secret Knowledge to Reading Scripture as a Story

space-time order. Significantly, the Bible school associated with this church gave no attention to integrating scriptural principles with this-worldly concerns such as economics, art, psychology, literature, anthropology, or philosophy.

In time, I came to understand that the extreme heavenlymindedness I encountered at the fundamentalist Bible school was simply the other side of the coin from what I had experienced a year before in California at the seeker-friendly church. Both extremes severed the connection between God and the material world through rendering the latter passive and spiritually neutral. Indeed, an uncritical appropriation of the world and its cultures, no less than an uncritical rejection of it, both hinged on a shrunken view of the gospel that could only relate itself extrinsically to the materials and institutions of this world.

In the early 2000s, I moved to the UK, got married, and began pursuing undergraduate studies. During that time, I got involved with a British group that had accumulated a series of secret revelations over the past fifty years. These secret texts, which the group showed only to a chosen few, purported to offer a hidden glimpse into the world of angels, archangels, and fallen angels, as well as a range of paranormal phenomena.

The group (which we avoided referring to as a “church”) gradually initiated me into their secret mysteries. They gave me access to a filing cabinet where our leader (whom we assiduously avoided referring to as a “pastor”) kept his prophecies, which I read alongside the Bible for my morning devotions. I began to have prophecies of my own, helping to advance a corpus of extra-biblical revelations that swelled to nearly the size of the New Testament itself. We often stayed up until 2 or 3 am poring over prophecies, texts from the ancient world,

and a range of esoterica as we attempted to systematize, make contact with, and ultimately control the spiritual entities that pull the strings for earthly events.

Our leader initiated only eight of us into the full secrets, leading to an elitism that fed the worst human passions. Through personal revelation in the form of dreams, visions, and prophecies, we imagined we had attained the true secret meaning of numerous scripture passages. In our hubris, we believed we had all been archangels in a previous life, sent to earth to perform various missions. We even believed we discovered references to ourselves in the Book of Revelation. With our more exalted type of Christianity, we felt justified setting aside clear biblical injunctions and using dreams and visions to rationalize our sinful passions. This resulted in a strange amalgam of legalistic moralism and antinomian licentiousness.

We associated the rest of world Christianity (especially institutional religion) with Babylon, the beast system we were working to destroy. Our destructive mission focused close to home: one of the church members had dreams and visions which seemed to indicate that our leader had actually been my father in a previous life and that my biological father was associated with the Antichrist. I responded to this by writing a letter to my dad cursing him and formally renouncing his fatherhood.

But even when I had most deeply immersed myself in these deceptions, God was at work in my life through the works of Francis and Edith Schaeffer and through various members of the UK homeschooling community who befriended my family and recommended books to us. Recorded lectures from the Schaeffers first led me to understand the biblical doctrine of physical resurrection. The Schaeffers articulated the historic understanding that the separation of body and spirit that occurs at death is an aberration from the proper order of things, and that even the saints in heaven anticipate the final resurrection when God will renew all things.

The Schaeffers’ discussion of what it means to have a Christian worldview also intrigued me. Christianity is not just true in a religious sense, they taught; rather, when we say that Christianity is true, we mean it is the correct understanding for all reality. This comprehensive understanding of worldview forced me to start reflecting on how the Christian Faith might apply more fully to my experience living in the material universe. I was particularly interested in how to reconcile my love of the arts with my Christian faith.

Despite my newfound interest in thinking Christianly about all of life, I could only practice this on one cylinder, so to speak. Not reading Scripture in light of God’s overarching purpose for the earth held me back. Moreover, I still thought that dreams, visions, and prophecies led to true understanding of Scripture.

Things began changing for me in the summer of 2001 when Francis Schaeffer’s son-in-law, Ranald Macaulay, organized an intensive theological study program at Cambridge for two weeks. When I heard about the program, I jumped on a train from Lincolnshire and headed south toward Cambridge University. Macaulay invited Dr. Richard Pratt from Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida, to help us understand the Old Testament. Dr. Pratt, one of the world’s leading Old Testament scholars, walked us through the Creation account in Genesis as its original audience would have understood it. He showed that by taking the scriptural texts in the context of their original ancient Near Eastern meaning, we can approach a clearer understanding of God’s overarching purposes for the earth itself and the role that we play in that ongoing story. He walked us through the history of the Old Testament, particularly the various covenants, showing how they all connected in a single narrative leading to Christ and, ultimately, the new heavens and the new earth.

Throughout the classes, Dr. Pratt kept showing that the cultural mandate of Genesis 1 applies to every area of human culture and that all human activity can grow out of our vocation as images of God.