Abstract
This is the third incarnation of a stellar collection of first-hand accounts of Christian conversions throughout history. The late Hugh T. Kerr, longtime professor of theology and editor of Theology Today, edited the first version. John Mulder joined him for the second, and Mulder is now the prime shaper of this text.
John Mulder taught at Princeton before a stint as president of Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary; he also brings extensive historical knowledge to Finding God. His Introduction to the volume provides a helpful overview of how Christianity has understood conversion from the biblical period to today. His introductions to each of the 60 first-person accounts reflect the editor’s breadth of historical insight.
Alas, the project draws too little from Christianity’s first 1400 years; accounts from Paul, Constantine, and Augustine are the only selections. The absence of St Patrick’s Confession is one obvious omission. I also looked in vain for sources from the traditions of Eastern Christianity. The collection essentially begins with entries from the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries. Luther, Ignatius of Loyola, Calvin, Teresa of Avila, Pascal, Edwards, and Wesley are featured, along with others.
The nineteenth-century collection ranges wider. Finney, Sojourner Truth, Livingstone, Tolstoy, Booth, and Francis Thompson’s powerful poem are among its notable entries.
Some twentieth-century accounts are substantial—such as those from Albert Schweitzer, E. Stanley Jones, Samuel Shoemaker, C.S. Lewis, Malcolm Muggeridge, and Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. Other accounts will appeal to popular Christianity, but the accounts from Billy Sunday, Oral Roberts, and several others may or may not loom significantly a century from now. Several entries, such as those from Bono and Bill Wilson (a founder of Alcoholics Anonymous) are notable for as far as we can imagine.
Muller’s Finding God will be helpful to a whole generation of Christian leaders. It is positioned between books that focus, on the one hand, on a much wider range of religious and worldview conversions and, on the other, more narrowly focused collections such as Rebecca Vitz Cherico’s Atheist to Catholic: 11 Stories of Conversion (Servant Books, 2011).
One could wish, of course, that other Christian leaders had left us their stories, but Finding God is a better collection than we could have reasonably hoped for. Oh, if you read it, do NOT neglect to read Muller’s own story, shared as an “Afterword.”