A Path to Heaven: My Journey from Atheism to Hope

A Path to Heaven

My Journey from Atheism to Hope

K. R. Queen

A Path to Heaven

My Journey from Atheism to Hope

Copyright © 2023 K. R. Queen. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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Scriptures taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

Table of Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Part I: Outside the Kingdom

Chapter 1: Existence, the Universe, and God

Chapter 2: Investigating Jesus

Chapter 3: Christianity on Trial

Chapter 4: The Personal God

Part II: Inside the Kingdom

Chapter 5: Faith, Works, and Salvation

Chapter 6: The Daily Cross and the Easy Yoke

Chapter 7: The Christian Revolution

Chapter 8: Knowing the Enemy

Chapter 9: Spiritual Disciplines for Spiritual Soldiers

Chapter 10: The Army of Christ

Chapter 11: Your Role in the Army

Chapter 12: From Suffering to Hope

Bibliography

Dedicated to Grandpa Phil—

You made the journey from atheism to hope long before I did.

Thank you for showing me the way.

Introduction

I have this vivid memory of sitting in my college dorm room with a dumb grin on my face after finishing C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. I closed the book and sat in stunned silence as a simple idea permeated my mind: Christianity might actually make sense. It had been a few years since I’d thought so. My grandfather, a dear mentor of mine, died during my senior year of high school, after which I posed a series of urgent questions to the Christians around me. Unfortunately, those Christians were members of the immensely legalistic sect I grew up in, and their answers were sheer simplistic nonsense. By the end of that inquisitive stage, gone were any inklings of faith I might have had. Out went the baby with the bathwater.

Four years later, enter C. S. Lewis, this Oxford University professor whose writing crashed through my mind like a bolt of lightning and ignited my intellect and imagination. Never before had I seen a writer so effectively convey the logic of an argument; and if a first-rate academic like Lewis could convey Christianity with such brilliance, I decided I had better not dismiss it outright simply because a handful of legalists got it wrong.

Reading Lewis’s work was a big step in the right direction, but it’s a long way from Christianity might make sense to actually being a Christian. It was nice knowing Christianity wasn’t for only the weak-minded, but as I ventured beyond that, most of the academic work I sampled spent far too much time in the weeds. I wasn’t trying to become a philosopher or theologian; I just needed the answers to two questions: (i) Is Christianity true, and (ii) if so, what do I do about it?

Those two questions are the subject of this book. Section I chronicles the steps I took from atheism to believing the Christian claims. Section II chronicles the steps I took from basic belief to living the Christian lifestyle. In both sections, I address the challenges I faced along the way and identify the books and ideas that helped me move forward. Section I is a philosophical inquiry, Section II a practical one. Or, put differently, Section I asks what I should think, Section II what I should do.

Those who read earlier drafts of this book came back to me with two main categories of criticism. First, some told me that Section I ended with a controversial or out there chapter, which is Chapter 4 concerning some of my firsthand experiences with God. I suppose I should warn you that you may feel the same, but I can’t, in good conscience, change the chapter since the controversial bits really are firsthand experiences. I can hardly justify concealing my experience on the basis that it causes discomfort to people steeped in Western Post-Enlightenment culture. If you don’t think I’m being genuine in that chapter, you are free to disregard it and move on; those experiences, though genuine, are not central to the argument and can be ignored without doing any violence to the rest of the book.

Second, some told me I was too heavy-handed at times, especially in Section II. On revisions, I did my best to soften the impact where I felt it possible without sacrificing the truth, but I must admit some bias here: I have a special place in my heart for those who’ve dared to gut-punch me for my own good, and I’ve found that the mild and harmless version of Jesus so popular nowadays is a fiction found nowhere in the Bible. Jesus and his followers routinely made daring, provocative statements that got them in hot water with all sorts of people. Most of the early Christians, not to mention Christ himself, were tortured and killed by people they had deeply offended. Their goal was truth, not controversy; but they could not convey the one without causing the other. I hope this book is not unduly brash in conveying the truth of Christianity; if it is, I can only assure you that my goal was never to offend and sincerely ask for your forgiveness.

Finally, I feel I should address a serious criticism—namely, the one that had me often resisting the call to write this book: Who do you think you are, writing on this topic? What credibility do you have? I pursued an M.A. in Systematic Theology for two years while living on campus at the University of Tennessee as a campus minister, after which I dropped out of seminary to attend law school. I doubt those are the theology or philosophy credentials many would like to see in a person writing a book like this.

So, let me be clear on what I can offer. For one, I can offer a view of Christianity from multiple angles. I know what it is to grow up in a conservative Christian sect, I know what it is to reject Christianity altogether, and I know what it is to discover a far better Christianity than I began with. Many grow up Christian and never reject it. Many others grow up Christian, then reject it never to return. I have the unique perspective of rejecting Christianity only to discover that I had rejected a version of Christianity hardly worth comparing to the real thing. In my conversations with seekers and skeptics, I’ve found this perspective can be a helpful one.

Something else I can offer is the perspective of a theological and philosophical layperson. This may seem like a weakness, and in some sense it may be; but professionals in those fields often spend so much time talking to fellow professionals that they forget how to talk to ordinary people. They are trained in a specialized form of thinking but not always in how to effectively communicate those thoughts. The problem is, Christianity is meant for everyone. That’s not to say the truth of it should be watered down for the masses and thus emptied of all its power; this is the approach of many modern Christian speakers and writers, and I’m convinced they’re doing more harm than good. No, Christianity—the real thing—should be conveyed in all its heat and power, just in a way that laypeople can understand. As a lawyer, I see a similar pattern in my cases. At trial, lawyers often fail to translate their knowledge of a case into non-legalese for the jury, and the jury sits there bewildered as they try to cut through the very legal- and impressive-sounding but incomprehensible thicket of words they’ve just been handed. The jury is convinced of nothing except perhaps that it really is a lawyer standing before them. On the other side of the spectrum are lawyers who merely try to inflame the jury with emotional appeals and manage only to come off as slimy and dishonest. Great lawyers, like great Christian communicators, can take up difficult concepts and convey them convincingly to laypeople. This leads to my final credibility point.

I am a lawyer, and during law school, I distinguished myself as a debater by winning a fairly prestigious debate competition. As a trained debater, I therefore have an advantage when evaluating the debates surrounding Christianity. And as a lawyer, I am trained in condensing complex cases to juries comprised of laypeople. In any given trial, I must organize the testimonies of eyewitnesses, engineers, medical doctors, economists, and others, then translate all of it to the jury. I must convey the heart of an expert’s argument without being confusing or misleading, then help the jury understand how the argument weaves into the overall tapestry of the case. Juries are eager to go wandering off the tracks, and my job is to shepherd them on the path to truth and therefore justice. It takes practice to do that well, and this practice has proven useful as I set out to explain Christianity convincingly while remaining approachable.

So much for my credibility. My sincere aim for this book is to turn people to Jesus. I also aim to prevent years of frustration and confusion for readers comparable to my high school, college, and graduate school self—people who want Christianity explained without all the sweet-sounding nonsense, theological nitpicking, and just have faith equivocation that Christians frequently offer when pressed.

This is not a philosophy, theology, or self-help book, though I do at times engage with philosophy and theology and know no better help than Christianity for the human condition. Still, those three terms don’t get to the overarching function of this book, which is to describe a path to Heaven. It’s not the only path, as I would never try and wrench the keys to Heaven from Jesus’ hands so I could guard the gate myself. That said, what this book presents is a very real path, for it has been my path. I have prayed many times and will continue praying that you find what you need within these pages as you walk alongside me.

K. R. Queen

December 13, 2022

Seattle, Washington

Part I

Outside the Kingdom

Chapter 1

Existence, the Universe, and God

There comes a time when a person begins wondering what the world is really like. When that first happened to me, it was like waking up from a long slumber. During childhood, existence was comprised of playing and exploring and begging for ice cream and whatnot, but at some point there came this awareness that there was, for better or worse, more to existence than those childish things. Many around me seemed to reach that ominous awareness only to try and pull the covers over their heads and go back to sleep. As for me, I gradually came awake and found myself in a fog, unable to see the safe path ahead. The more I came awake, the more I knew I could no longer sit carelessly in the fog—trifling with school, work, dating, or whatever else they call practical—while questions of eternal significance remained unanswered. To remain fixated on such minutia would have looked about as rational to me as strolling through a minefield concerned only about keeping my shoes clean.

Questions I had never thought to ask were now all I could think about. Where, I wondered, have I come from? Am I the byproduct of accidental physical processes, or did some intelligent being have a hand in my creation? Then there was the even heavier question that followed: where am I headed? Will I die and be greeted by eternal darkness, or is there something in me that goes on living after my body perishes?

There I stood, face-to-face with my bare existence, and I could not answer the most basic question about it: Why? The uncertainty tormented me, and I needed answers.

The problem was, opinions on these questions are as diverse as humanity itself. Christians, Muslims, atheists, Buddhists, yoga enthusiasts—they all answer these questions very differently from each other, and that’s before even accounting for the beliefs once common among ancient civilizations. Perhaps Zeus had something to tell me.

One option was to accept without question what I was raised to believe, but then why not simply blindfold myself, throw a dart at a map, and embrace the most common worldview wherever the dart pierced? On the other hand, surely whatever answers I reached by investigation were equally unlikely to be true. There were far too many options, and wouldn’t it be arrogant of me to ever think I found the one correct option?

Was I doomed to live in this fog? Perhaps, I thought, but I would not easily accept it. First, I would wrestle with these questions. What else was there to do? It seemed to me that humanity was set apart from the other animals by its ability to contemplate and understand things. If I could do nothing else, I would at least take the time to be human and think.

At the broadest level, I found the question to be a simple either-or. Either the physical world around me stumbled into existence out of mindless processes, or something like a mind first existed and created the rest. Call this theoretical mind what you will; I will call it God.

Thus, the question I began with was simply this. Is there a God or not? Exploring this question, among the first things I discovered was that some of the greatest minds in the history of the world have believed in God—Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, John Locke, Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Albert Einstein, Sir Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Max Planck, Francis Collins, and on and on. Given the harsh rhetoric I had often heard from atheists about the idiocy of belief in God, this list alone was enough to surprise me. Certainly, some of history’s famous thinkers were atheists too—Sigmund Freud, Stephen Hawking, Bertrand Russell, David Hume, Alan Turing, Ayn Rand, etc.—but then it wasn’t the theists I was typically hearing say I would have to be an idiot not to take their side. To me, it seemed the theists were actually the more impressive intellectual bunch, and I discovered a comical irony when I experienced firsthand how few of the aggressive atheists had done any real thinking on the matter before confidently asserting their beliefs. It turns out