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PASTORAL PSYCHOLOGY
at the bedside of the ill and dying, our message would be
incomplete, inadequate. John Wesley used to say: ‘If you believe
that it happens through faith, it can happen now.’ The work of
Grace is a gift of God. It makes no demands on human ability.
The Bible gives no time schedules for the progressive stages in
the order of Grace or the process of salvation.
To demand a conscious instantaneous conversion is to evade
both the Word of God and religious experience. It is to
confuse a spiritual process with a temporal event. Many different
kinds of conversion are described in the Bible. Paul and Lydia
both had experience of Christ, but the outer contours of the
transaction were as different as they could well be.
A spiritual counsellor meets many people, living a Christian
life, who cannot point to any definite time of crisis or decision.
The knowledge that they have begun to live religiously
awakens gradually. The decisive moment can be compared to a
step over a threshold. Some are aware of taking it, others are not;
but the life bears witness to itself, and from the point of view of
religious discourse we must maintain that it bears witness that
God is dealing with this human being in ways that cannot be
subjectively explained.
From the standpoint of conversion psychology it is
unquestionably right to judge a mental crisis by its fruits, not by
its form. William James writes: ‘If a state of conversion bears
good fruit for life, we ought to idealise and honour it, even if it
is a part of the natural psychology. If it should not bear such
fruit, we should at once dismiss it. It is not necessary to enquire
whether it has a supernatural origin.’ James is very critical about
the ‘fruits’ of many Christians. He says that as a class converted
people are usually indistinguishable from others, and writes:
“True testimony about the new birth is to be found only in the
character of a true child of God: the continually tolerant heart,
the uprooted love of self. And this, it must be acknowledged, is
also met in people who have not gone through any crisis, and
can even be found entirely outside Christianity.” What James
means here is that a psychological reorientation can have a
lifelong result, while a reputedly supernatural conversion may
not bear close inspection.
The religious attitude to conversion should be no less critical,
and in fact where the teaching of the order of Grace is held in
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