We hear a lot these days about professing Christian young people deconstructing their faith. The experiences of Adoniram Judson in turning away from, then coming to the Christian faith speak with relevance to those who are questioning their faith today.
Judson eventually became America’s first foreign missionary, serving for nearly forty years in Burma (modern Myanmar). However, as a young college student he rejected Christianity for a time. Here’s the dramatic true story of how God graciously led him through his unbelief to genuine faith in Christ.
Adoniram’s father was a conservative Christian minister who served a series of three Congregational churches in Massachusetts. Adoniram was an extremely intelligent boy who by age ten gained proficiency in both Greek and Latin. Barely one week after his sixteenth birthday in August 1804, Adoniram entered Rhode Island College in Providence (soon thereafter renamed Brown University).
Adoniram’s scholarship and outward conduct were highly commendable. But he had not yet been spiritually regenerated (born again) and manifested little interest in spiritual matters. In addition, he soon fell under the influence of one Jacob Eames of Belfast, Maine, an upper classman at Brown.
Eames was intelligent, talented, witty, and amiable, but a confirmed Deist. Deism was a popular, rationalistic belief system in that era. It taught that a Supreme Being had originally created the universe, but after that was totally uninvolved with the universe or humankind. Owing to similar tastes and sympathies, Adoniram and Jacob quickly became fast friends, and before long Judson joined Eames in his disbelief of Christianity.
After graduating from Brown, Adoniram taught school for eleven months in Plymouth, where his family was then living. But he wanted to see more of the world and to make much more of his life. He also felt shackled and like a hypocrite living in his parents’ home and attending their church, never having revealed to them the change of religious beliefs he had come to have while in college.
Consequently, on his twentieth birthday, he abruptly left his teaching position and announced his intention to travel for a time. When his father pressed him for an explanation of that sudden change of course, Adoniram was forced to divulge his newly held beliefs.
His father responded with accusations of irresponsibility and ingratitude as well as warnings against rushing to his own destruction. His mother responded with tears and pleading. After enduring a week of domestic anguish, Adoniram mounted a horse and rode westward out of town.
Making his way to New York City, he joined a small traveling theatrical troupe. “We lived a reckless, vagabond life,” Adoniram later confessed, “finding lodgings where we could, and bilking the landlord where we found opportunity – running up a score, and then decamping without paying the reckoning.” He soon grew tired and disillusioned with such a lifestyle and left it without notice one night.
Continuing his journey on horseback, he stopped at a country inn where the proprietor, while showing him to his room, stated apologetically: “I have been obliged to place you next door to a young man who is exceedingly ill, probably in a dying state. I hope that will occasion you no uneasiness.”
Adoniram assured him it would not, but it proved to be a very restless night. What really disturbed him was the landlord’s statement that the young stranger was in a dying state. “Is he prepared?” Adoniram kept wondering. “Is he a strong Christian, calmly anticipating glorious immortality, or an unbeliever shuddering on the brink of a dark, unknown eternity?” Entirely against his will, Adoniram could not help but imagine himself on that deathbed facing eternity.
He felt himself blush with shame, for these questions exposed the shallowness of the beliefs he had come to profess in recent years. He further wondered what the clear-thinking, intellectual Jacob Eames would say about his immature perspectives.
When at last morning came and sunlight flooded his room, dispelling all his “superstitious illusions,” he felt much better. As soon as he was dressed, he sought out the innkeeper and asked about his fellow lodger. “He is dead,” came the sober reply.
“Dead!” Adoniram exclaimed.
“Yes, he is gone, poor fellow. The doctor said he would probably not survive the night.”
“Do you know who he was?” Adoniram asked further.
“O yes. It was a young man from Providence College, a very fine fellow. His name was Eames, Jacob Eames.”
Adoniram was so thoroughly stunned, several hours passed before he attempted to resume his journey. As he set out again, one thought filled his dazed mind: “Dead! Lost! Lost!” He knew if Jacob was mistaken about his beliefs, then those words applied irrevocably to him.
In a state of despair Adoniram decided to abandon his travel plans. He needed to find resolution to these matters that had been brought so forcefully to his attention. He arrived back in Plymouth five and a half weeks after having left there.
A few days after his return, two notable clergymen visited the Judson home. Both had recently agreed to serve as professors at a new theological seminary being established in the small town of Andover, some twenty-five miles northwest of Boston. When they learned of Adoniram’s crisis of faith, they suggested he consider enrolling in the seminary as a sound setting in which to pursue further study and sort out his personal beliefs.
At first Adoniram declined that suggestion, opting instead to take a teaching position at a private academy in Boston. But he had no sooner started there, when a book came into his hands which again confronted him with issues of eternal import. Knowing he must settle those in his own mind and heart, he promptly resigned his new teaching position and entered the Theological Institution at Andover. Because he was not a ministerial candidate or even a professing Christian, he was admitted simply as a special student.
Adoniram’s professors at the seminary were used of the Lord to help guide him through his spiritual perplexities. His doubts concerning the Christian faith soon evaporated. By that November of 1808, he “began to entertain a hope of having received the regenerating influences of the Holy Spirit,” and the following month he “made a solemn dedication of himself to God.”
Francis Wayland, Adoniram’s official biographer after his death in 1850, testified of his Christian conversion: “He was prayerful, reflective, and studious of proofs. And gradually faith, trust in God, and finally a hope through the merits of Christ, took possession of his soul, he scarcely knew how. And from the moment that he fully believed, I think he never doubted.”
Please permit a few closing thoughts intended for anyone reading this blog who is thinking of turning from the Christian faith: First of all, people do well to beware of the Jacob Eameses of life who seem so persuasive in opposing Christianity and in promoting some other belief system (or complete unbelief!) in place of Christianity. As happened with Deism in the past, so a hundred years or less from now, many of the most popular belief systems of our day will have fallen out of favor and been rejected. Yet true biblical Christianity will still be alive and well, or perhaps will have already been proven indubitably true by Christ’s return and the establishment of His Kingdom!
Secondly, please don’t ignore the necessity of addressing eternal realities. Many belief systems seek to provide people with a coherent understanding of life in this world, also with guidance and support to get through this life. But most belief (or unbelief) systems have little to say about life in the hereafter following our brief life on Earth. What those non-Christian belief systems say about the hereafter tends to be rather vague and not at all assuring. True biblical Christianity provides the clearest understanding, the strongest support, and the greatest assurance to get through this life and to prepare for eternity. We put ourselves at peril in this temporal earthly life and in the eternal life to come if we ignore the Bible’s Christian truths.
Thirdly, I encourage you to give true biblical Christianity a fair hearing. Many, many individuals who encourage people to deconstruct their Christian faith engage in all types of inaccurate and unfair characterizations of biblical Christian teaching. Those critics sound compelling and convincing if you listen only to them. But if people will read for themselves, as objectively and unbiasedly as possible, what Christ and His Apostles actually taught in the New Testament Scriptures, many of their questions and objections will be readily answered.
For the stubborn, tough questions that remain, those too can be addressed satisfactorily with the help of committed Christians who have studied those issues carefully, and who address them thoughtfully in their speaking ministries and/or writings. When people genuinely seek God’s truth as it has been revealed in His Word, the Bible, He helps them to discover and understand it. Conversely, when individuals automatically criticize and reject His truth, He conceals it from them.
For a trustworthy, thorough treatment of the issue of people deconstructing their faith, I highly recommend Alisa Childers and Tim Barnett’s excellent book The Deconstruction of Christianity (Tyndale, 2023). My biography Adoniram Judson: Devoted for Life (Christian Focus, 2013) provides a full account of his inspiring life and ministry.
Copyright 2024 by Vance E. Christie
