Ordway's Not God's Type is a work in Christian apologetics, that is a book designed to make a compelling argument for the Christian faith to those who are not Christians. Her audience is doubting or unbelieving academics and others who reject the Christian faith on intellectual grounds. Her argument is that Christian faith is based on sound reason and that careful, logical, and critical analysis can lead one to faith. Not God's Type is an autobiographical sketch of Ordway's own journey from what she sees as an almost unthinking, knee-jerk atheism to a saving faith in Christ that encompasses her reason, her passions, and ultimately the whole of her life. Ordway is currently an Assistant Professor of Letters at MiraCosta College in Oceanside, California, who began her academic career as an atheist. By her own telling, life was not good, and she lived in a world of self-delusion. She was focused on herself and much more broken as a person than she realized. She describes the emptiness, despair, and loneliness of her atheism and writes, "My atheism was eating into my heart like acid." (p. 27) Her journey away from atheism and into faith started with her fencing coach, Josh, who is a deeply convicted Christian and a wise soul, at least where Ordway was concerned. Josh never tried to witness to her or argue her into anything, but over a course of weeks Ordway was led (by the Holy Spirit, she believes) into a dialogue with Josh about religion. Having become intrigued with the possibility that religion may not be entirely unwarranted superstitions, she set out on a self-conscious quest to discern the truth about God.
Ordway considers herself to be a tough minded rationalist, and she thus intended to follow the logic of her search wherever it might take her. For nearly all of the book, she traces the steps of her conversion. Josh convinced her that there are reasons to take faith seriously. Soon his arguments for the existence of God made sense to her. She began to realize that her atheism was based on false assumptions and that it had not been nearly as intellectually rigorous as she had thought. It was based largely on untested, superficial assumptions. Ordway began to see that God is personal and that Christ is more than a mere human. Step by step she was led to a consideration of Christ's resurrection, and after a period of intense study she accepted that the resurrection was an objective historical event, one that changed everything for her personally. Having accepted the resurrection, she had to accept the Christian faith.
With Josh's guidance, Ordway's conversion led her to St. Michael's-by-the Sea, an "orthodox" Episcopal Church committed to an "Anglo-Catholic" worship tradition. She was baptized and became a member of the church. At the end of her recounting of her conversion, she expresses a deep sense of how rewarding for her it has been to give herself up to Christ. She has gained far more than she ever guessed she would.
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| Dr. Holly Ordway |
Ordway's apologetics presupposes an orthodox faith. She does not self-describe herself as an evangelical or even, actually, name her brand of faith. Yet it is clear in ways large and small that her conversion was to a conservative, orthodox faith. She was attracted to St. Michael's Church because of its orthodox theology as well as its high church liturgical style. Toward the end of Not God's Type, she writes,
"St. Michael's was a place where I was challenged. The Bible, it turns out, contains some really hard things. The preaching and teaching at St. Michael's made me realize that much of what I had held dear as a politically liberal feminist was rooted in false premises and had to be rethought. That was difficult for me, especially since I liked the image of being a rebel and dissident. Obedience did not come easily. But I had accepted Christ as my Lord, my King. As I had recognized His death and resurrection as real, historical events, so too I now reconized the Holy Scripture as authoritative: God's Word, not man's." (p. 148)That is to say, her conversion was not only away from atheism to Christian faith but also away from unbelieving liberalism to believing orthodoxy.
There are points at which her conversion process seems to have been just a little too pat and one feels that she "protests too much" about her rational hard nosed conversion. For example, when challenged to think about how the universe came to exist, she claims that as an atheist she simply wrote off the question as being something we can't know. Maybe, she thought, causality regresses eternally. Josh then challenged her thinking with the Kalam cosmological argument, a philosophical argument against a universe that has no beginning. This was a key moment in her journey because it meant that she had to take the possibility of a First Cause, a God, seriously; and by her own telling, Ordway accepted the argument right away without much if any critical push back (see p. 66). The Kalam argument is hardly airtight, but she heard it and pretty much immediately "caved in" to it. Much later in the process, she wrestled with the meaning of the resurrection and asked Josh for some "scholarly" works on the subject. He gave her two books, one by a leading evangelical scholar, Gary Habermas and the other by the "open evangelical" British scholar N. T. Wright. These two scholarly works convinced her that the resurrection was a real, objective historical event, and once she accepted the historicity of the resurrection everything "fell into place" for her (pp. 114-119). Had Ordway sampled the works of other scholars she would have found very different interpretations of the resurrection. As much as she makes of her hard-nosed, rational quest for truth, Ordway pursued it along a very narrow course and without the intellectual vigor she claims for herself.
All of this does not take away from the importance of the Christian faith for Ordway. She is clearly a better, happier person for her spiritual journey. And if the path she has taken represents but one set of faith choices among many, her experience shows that faith remains a valid, important option for people today. Kathleen Norris' Dakota: A Spiritual Geography represents another option, more progressive, and very different from Ordway's but nonetheless meaningful and faithful for the difference.
In conclusion, it should also be said that Not God's Type is a relatively easy, quick read. Ordway's writing style is simple and direct. It is largely an honest book although, as suggested above, she seems to overstate her former misery somewhat in pursuit of her apologetical agenda. One suspects, however, that relatively few "hard-nosed" non-believer academic types will find this book particularly persuasive. Many will find in her conversion to a conservative orthodoxy only confirmation that the choice they face is between unfaith and narrow faith. Fortunately, there are more choices than that.
Links for Holly Ordway
Ordway's website, Hieropraxis.
Ordway's blog, Now What?
An interview about her life and experience.
A media packet for Dr. Holly Ordway.
