Credo Ut Intelligam (Believe Me, I understand.)

About 900 years ago, St. Anselm of Canterbury wrote his Proslogion, with the famous (or infamous) ontological argument for the existence of God. Whatever its merits or demerits, and however often updated, refined, and reimaged, the idea of "a being than which none greater can be conceived” probably hasn’t led to many “born again” experiences, to be sure. 

In the Proslogion, however, Anslem also fleshed out an notion expressed as credo ut intelligam, “I believe in order that I many understand.” Or, as Augustine had expressed it 600 years earlier: Noli quaerere intellegere ut credas, sed crede ut intelligas, i.e., "Do not seek to understand so that you may believe, but believe so that you may understand.” However Latinized, the notion’s simple enough. 

Jump ahead those 900 years from Anselm, to me in my office in Silver Spring, Maryland, where—coming across for the first time the words credo ut intelligam—I was stunned. How could this man, St. Anselm, a Roman Catholic theologian in medieval England about a millennium earlier—how could he have so accurately, and precisely, captured the essence of how I, a Jew from Miami Beach, came to faith in Jesus? Until I read the phrase, I had never thought about it that way (didn’t know much Latin, either). But, yes, I first believed, and only then, and only on the foundation of that belief, did I come to understand, an understanding that has been growing, logically and rationally, for 46 years now.

However personal, subjective and unbelievable (my wife-to-be, the first time she heard it, thought, This guy can’t be for real)—my spiritual journey testifies to how logic, reason, and experience, can together create a living faith.

The Pizza Parlor Epiphany

         I grew up in an über-secular Jewish home. The way that my extended family kept the holidays could have been expressed like this: They tried to kill us, they failed—let’s eat! My immediate family was worse: though raised religious, as one of the early G.I.s to liberate Dachau, my father at 19 years old lost his faith; my mother never believed to begin with (though later in life she became what I called “a backslidden Unitarian.”) We rarely talked religion at home; if we did, it would usually center on God, His non-existence being the Goldstein family usual theological denouement. 

With that background, and a public school education to boot, by the time of my late teenage years, I was a jihadist secularist postmodern materialist (or whatever you want to call it). Truth was personal, subjective, cultural, as mutable as mood, as contingent as wind. Sally had her truth, and that was her truth; Joey has his truth, and that was his truth. And so on and so forth. There was no God’s-eye view of reality because there was no God.

Then, in a pizza parlor in Gainesville, Florida, in 1976, that world-view shattered, clattering into a thousand pieces at my feet. It was my own personal Copernican revolution, of sorts. These lines, on the first page of Stuart Hampshire’s Spinoza, did it. “He conceived it to be the function of the philosopher to render the universe as a whole intelligible, and to explain man’s place within the universe . . . .”

Though hardly bunker-busting or Weltanschauung-shattering (especially to me now), those words were for some reason like a pre-frontal lobe lobotomy that severed every relativist neuron in me, draining all the juice from my Pomo mojo. 

As I have explained for decades now—here was the pizza on the table in front of me. Ten thousand different people could have 10,000 different beliefs about where the pizza came from, how it got here, and why. Maybe the Canaanite god Baal created it; maybe zombies from the Orion flew in and baked it; maybe, along with everything else, it is part of the Matrix? None of that mattered. What mattered only was that out there, somewhere, there was an explanation for the pizza, and that explanation had to exist, and that explanation, whatever it was—that was the Truth about the pizza. 

So, I just extended that logic outward: to the table  the pizza sat on (it had to have an explanation), to the ground holding the table up (it had to have an explanation), to the Milky Way (it had to have an explanation), and to all created reality, to all created existence (it had to have an explanation).  And that explanation, the explanation of all creation, whatever it was, that was the Truth.  In other words, contrary to all that this whopping 21-year had believed until that moment, Truth, as in a capital T, had to exist. Mickey Mouse might have been able to tell you that, yes. But, for me,  it was like Wow! Wow! Wow! Even if everything didn’t suddenly change for me, nothing could be the same.

Over the years, old high school friends, echoing rumors, would say, Hey, Cliff, I heard you found God in a pizza. Or, Hey, Cliff, I heard you had a vision of Jesus in a pizza parlor.  No. What happened in the pizza parlor was a moment of pure deductive reasoning: the universe, whatever it is, exists, and something had to explain that existence, and that explanation, whatever it was—that was The Truth. 

And I defy anyone to diss that logic.

My realization, however, that truth had to exist was radically different from whether anyone could ever know it. These were two completely separate metaphysics (ontology, epistemology). That truth had to exist did not mean that I, or anyone, could know what it was. I harbored, in fact, no illusions that I ever could, or would.

I left the pizza place and walked down the street. Within a minute, and at this spot (see photo)—still spinning from the realization that truth had to exist—I was overwhelmed by the desire to know it. I don’t why, or where the yearning came from (so strong that a pain jabbed me in my chest) other than the fact that, because the Truth had to exist, I felt some kind of  moral (Kantian, perhaps?) duty to find it, if possible. I remember thinking, If I could know the Truth, whatever it was, then I wanted to know it. No matter what it cost me, where it led me, or what I had to suffer—if I could know it, I wanted to know it, no matter what.  

  And, all I know is that, about three years later, I became a born again believer in Jesus.

Called by Name

The logic part of this story ends here, on this street. The personal, subjective and weird stuff, the stuff which gets me the incredulous looks—soon begins.

From childhood, I had wanted to be novelist, and, in my senior year at the University of Florida, in Gainesville, about 1977—I had started one. The novel consumed me, controlling my life more than I did the characters in it. Having begun it in Gainesville, I took it home, to Miami Beach, and wrote. It took it Europe, and wrote. I took it Israel, and wrote. I took it to Europe again, and wrote. And I took it back to the States, and wrote. All I did was write. Nothing else mattered to me, nothing.

Meanwhile some experiences had opened me up to the idea of God, but just the idea. Also, having met some Christians who got inside my head, the specter of Jesus lurked among my synaptic clefts, however negative a vibe just the name “Jesus Christ” was for me, a Jew who couldn’t forget the Jewish blood shed either directly, or indirectly, in his name.  At the same time, going through a rough patch, I was standing near the Eiffel Tower and—just as the thought to jump off entered my head—another thought came from behind and, Pop! pushed it out. That thought was, Hang, on, maybe this Jesus stuff is true.

I cursed myself. Your whole life you believed that religious people were weak people who, Boo Hoo, unable to handle the hard knocks of life, followed some made up god in order to feel better. Gag me! I had nothing but disdain for such a cheap crutch. Yet, now, for the first time in my miserable 23-years, feeling that I can’t handle it, I’m going to reach out to some deity in order to make myself feel better? No way! I would rather jump off the Eiffel Tower than live a lie, no matter how good the lie made me feel.

Then, whether or not I shook a fist up into the sky, I don’t remember, but I do remember this thought (prayer? plea?): God, if you are there, I need a sign. Otherwise I will never believe—never.  

About a month later, I met a young man, my age, named Clifford Goldstein. 

 He, too, had grown up in Miami Beach. (When I told my mother, she nodded, saying that we must have shared the same pediatrician because years earlier his bills would come to our house.)  

Clifford Goldstein was a volunteer on the same Kibbutz in Israel that I had volunteered on months before.

There were about twenty rooms on the Kibbutz for volunteers, and Clifford Goldstein lived in my old room.

Of the two beds, he slept in my old bed. 

As we sat talking, I looked at the bookshelf over the bed and saw many of my old books and, when I had asked Cliff if he liked my books, he said, “No, those are all my books.” Disbelieving him, I stood up, pulled books off the shelf and, though they were some of the same titles and editions that I had left there—they were his books, not mine. 

I asked Clifford Goldstein if he were a writer, and he answered, “I think I want to be a writer.” 

When living on the Kibbutz, I had a blonde Danish girlfriend named Tine. As Clifford Goldstein and I were talking, this girl walked into the room. I never saw her before. It was his girlfriend. She was blonde. She was Danish. And, yes, her name was Tine.

“You were asking God for signs,” an astonished Christian uttered.  “What more do you want? Man—the Lord is calling you by name!”

Night of Fire

What more did I want? I didn’t know, but meeting Clifford Goldstein definitely got my attention. It had to be a “God thing”  (whatever that was?), and if nothing else it helped me realize that there was more after all to reality than what I had been taught in Miami Beach Senior High chemistry. 

But none of this mattered. Only my novel did.  Now back in Gainesville, I had so far put more than two and one half years into it, and would put another two, or more, if needed. Barely eking out an existence, I didn’t care.  Everything served one goal: writing the novel.

It was an evening, the fall of 1979, I was 23-years old, and had just walked back to my room. I sat down, put my fingers on the manual typewriter keys and, at that moment, as real as anything that I had ever experienced—the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ came in the room. I knew, instantly, who He was and I knew, instantly, what He wanted. His exact words to me were, Cliff, you have been playing with Me long enough. If you want me tonight, burn your novel.  

He showed me, instantly, that this novel was my god and that you shall have no other gods before Him.  It was this stark, clear-cut choice before me.  There was no audible voice; it was deeper, more real, and more present than mere sounds.  I never questioned who He was, or what He was asking. The novel had to go.

I fled the room and trekked, heavily, the same streets in Gainesville that I did after the pizza parlor incident, wanting to know the Truth no matter the cost. And, now, I faced the cost.  It was too much. After hours of divine-human wrestling, however, and knowing only that I had met God, and this is what I had to do, I walked back to my room, put the manuscript on a hot-plate, and—having no idea what was ahead—I burned the novel.

Credo ut Intelligam

I was now born again. A believer. But in what?  Standing amid the smoke in my room, if told I was a sinner, I would have had no idea what you were talking about. Words like atonement, justification,  sanctification, and redemption meant nothing to me. The only theology I knew were some Hal Lindsey prophecies, and they all failed, anyway. 

But here's where credo ut intelligam—"I believe in order that I may understand” —captured it all. Only through a supernatural personal experience (a poor man’s Damascus Road) did I come to believe. But, then, based on that foundation of belief, I have over the decades built a logical and rational faith. From the mere fact of creation itself; to the amazing revelation from the natural world of not only God’s existence but of His love; from fulfilled biblical prophecies; from the powerful evidence for Christ’s resurrection; and from decades of how God has worked in my life—I have solid reasons for faith, despite all that I don’t understand, which is probably more than I do.

When someone had once asked me, “Do you ever doubt?” I answered, “Not much anymore, but if I do, I dismiss it as irrational.”

“Irrational?” he responded.

“Yes,” I said, “because of the experiences that I have had, and the reasons why I believe what I believe, doubt is the most irrational thing that I can do.” 

Of course, let the one “who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall” (1 Corinthians 10:12). I don’t take my belief for granted, at all. But, between what happened in the pizza parlor, which was pure logic, and what happened in my room, which was pure experience, and the mixture of both logic and experience since then (which included, about a month after the book incineration, meeting Clifford Goldstein, again, but now on a street in Gainesville!)—I can say, by faith, that “I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that He is able to keep what I have committed to Him until that Day” (2 Timothy 1:12).

Image: Caravaggio. The Supper at Emmaus. 1600–1601. Oil on cypress wood. Odescalchi Balbi Collection, Rome.

Clifford Goldstein has been a writer/editor at the world headquarters of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church for 41 years, in Silver Spring, Maryland. He has written about 27 books on theology, philosophy, sacred history, and is especially interested in the question of faith and science. For seven years he had been editor of Liberty Magazine, which deals with church- state issues.   His work has been published in more than one hundred languages.