History: Your and My Journey to Faith ...

Saturday, Oct 30, 2019. When I was in school, history seemed very boring to me. I had no interest in some wars in the past. Why should it be exciting to learn about some emperors who lived 800 years ago? I did not have any access to these things. No, history was not my concern.

What is your access to history? And what is your opinion about the Christian faith? Do you have access to faith? Or perhaps you do not really know it? Some people are very much opposed to faith.

Personally, I was unclear about Christian faith in my teen years. I had learned about it in school and in a Lutheran church. But it was not clear to me. I have not been against faith. But from the age of 14 I considered it to be quite unclear what to believe. Who was God? Was God love? What was the meaning of that sentence? So my personal history can be characterized by many questions which the church as I knew it could not answer.

Path to Faith …

I looked deeper into faith during the last three years of German high-school education, even did my final exams in theology. I could repeat the theories of modern theological schools. But I did not understand who God should be. I could not grasp the truth or whatever these theories could mean.

Looking back, of course I have been in contact with Christianity. And some people had their personal faith. But still, I did not really understand the biblical books. They seemed to be gray to me, inaccessible, somehow enciphered. The theology of Barth or Bultman or others did not really help me. It more seemed to pull me away from reality. Their goal was to bring the old Christian message into a new critical time. But what they actually did is to convince me that somehow one should look more closely and find out, what the real truth was behind all of this. Their particular construction did not convince me, that was clear.

At that time I even attended big youth church events. I listened to the mainly political messages. When I started to study at university, I attended some evenings organized by the Lutheran student church. But these events were as critical as the theory I knew from school. Again, the concept did not convince me.

What did convince me? …

At some point I started to pray. Looking back, I do not know how I got to the idea that I should ask God to show me who he was. But I got to the idea and I prayed to the God of this Universe, that if he exists, I want to get to know him.

I know that in the weeks after this prayer, I suddenly got to know various Christian house groups. Before that, I had never attended Christian bible study groups - after confirmation at the age of about 14 years. But now, I realized that there are various student groups studying the bible. So I attended some of them, started to read the New Testament (and also the Old Testament) and study the biblical books and stories.

Christian faith is more than just being conv

(Roland Potthast)

This is part of the trilogy project “Faith of a Scientist”.