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CONVERSION AND GROWTH IN GRACE
describe a process that includes many different phenomena; and
this kind of generalisation is always dangerous. There is a
great difference, theologically, between renewal and rebirth;
between prevenient, justifying and perfecting Grace; and
Christian thinking loses much of its clarity if these distinctions
are slurred over. Again, a ‘revival’ of faith is very different
from a ‘rebirth’.
Religious conversion can be considered from a psychological
and a theological point of view. It cannot be judged by purely
psychological criteria, for as a lived experience it is a
phenomenon that cannot be comprehended by scientific categories of
explanation and valuation. Nevertheless its psychological
aspect is not unimportant. The essential thing is to distinguish
the one point of view from the other.
It is natural that psychologists should desire to understand
what happens in a conversion and that they should express
their findings in their own technical terms, describing it as a
form of psychological reorientation. The theologian may
accept this, as far as it goes, but he cannot leave the matter
there. From the standpoint of religious discourse conversion is
something more. The total experience includes a supernatural
factor: God. But it must be observed that it is the believer who
perceives this factor and is made aware of it by his own religious
experience. For faith, conversion is a work of God: an
expression of God’s self-disclosure to the individual.
An English psychologist, Sydney Dimond, has described in a
book the psychology of the Methodist revival. It includes a
chapter on the ‘religious sentiment’ of John Wesley. Dimond
says that Wesley’s conversion was the normal result of a process
of development through which a strong sentiment of
selfesteem is identified with an unselfish religious sentiment whose
object is God revealed in Christ. Dimond himself is well
informed about the discoveries and methods of modern psychol-
ogy; nevertheless he considers that the nature of the process by
which this identification occurs are too ‘high and mysterious’ to
be accessible for psychological analysis.
A sentiment is an organised system, a ‘constellation’ of
feelings and emotions, having as its nucleus or focus an object
or idea that always has power to evoke them together. A
1 The Psychology of the Methodist Revival, London, 1926.
201
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