Why did I take so long to become a Christian? What was the intellectual block?

I did not become a Christian until my 49th year - yet I have been very interested in the possibility for at least 25 years - when I was reading a fair bit of Christian theology. It a sense I wanted to become a Christian. It is interesting to understand why it took me such a long time; what blocked me - and how I overcame that block.

The answer is that there was more than one thing that needed to happen - but one intellectual block, was that I felt compelled to take-on a package of beliefs; a package that had been predefined by a church - whichever church of which I would then become a member and obedient adherent.

That was certainly what I got from reading about Christianity and conversion - for example in GK Chesterton, who always presented Catholicism as a coherent and complete body of mandatory beliefs and practices. To become a Christin would, therefore, be to take on some such complete package as - in effect - all and equally true.


That presented a problem for me. I was being asked to accept all or nothing, the whole package or none of it; and, in converting, solemnly swear to my acceptance). Yet I could not accept all of any church I knew about. - as a lifelong scientist that would have been impossible, it would have been starkly dishonest.

I had never subordinated by truth-judgement to any other person or a group on a permanent basis, and I knew in my heart that for me to do so would be wrong - for me, truth, personally established, was a bottom line. 

I needed to find a way-out from this impasse; and it came in my drawing a comparison between science and Christianity - or more exactly between science and the actuality of any-particular-Christian-church.


I realised that for me to believe the truth of a scientific theory, I was not required to believe the theory in every particular - indeed, to be an active and practising scientist entailed believing in the error and incompleteness of an already-existing scientific theory (or in an error in the evidence and its interpretation).

After all that is what scientists do; they work on the errors within a system that they regard as overall-true.

I realised that I could become a Christian on the same basis - that in fact I believed it was overall true, but not true in all details; exactly like I believed for science. I could be as confident of the overall truth of Christianity as I was in any overall truth of science.


That was what unblocked Christianity for me; and so I became a Christian 'in my head', privately; but felt that I could not announce the fact until I had decided which church I would join; since I (then, not now) felt that Christianity could only exist within a church - a valid church (of which there seemed to be several, although I didn't know much about their current situation).

In practice, the only church I could join, or re-join, was the Church of England into-which I was baptised as an infant - because converting to any other church would mean swearing to the truth of many specifics that I did not believe were true (all churches require far more affirmation and promising from adult converts than of infants and children; far more of new converts than of already members).

So I 'reactivated' my Church of England membership, and announced that I was A Christian.

This was only the beginning, and indeed the phase lasted only a few months. But it was how I overcame the intellectual block.