When I first ‘became a Christian’ it was a dramatic conversion. It happened one summer in Pennsylvania when I was 20, and I came home to Dublin wearing a big red and yellow badge proclaiming ‘Jesus Saves’! I had found a small but lively and loving community of believers who put the Bible at the heart of their faith and daily routine.

I knew I had been given something very precious, which had come to me as a package. Lose any of it and it might all fall apart. So, I constantly ‘defended’ my faith, including its view of the Bible as ‘inerrant’. Though if I was honest, I sometimes couldn’t quite square that with what I read. I was often, as I still am, deeply moved by how the Bible speaks to me, but for years I was not willing to let down the barriers and think through my predetermined (i.e. pre-judged and hence prejudiced) attitude to the Bible.

As a young Christian I was asked if I would second a motion in a debate at Dublin University Theological Society. The topic was: “This house maintains that there is only one story of Creation in the Bible”. I’m not sure why I agreed to speak, except that I thought it was my Christian duty to uphold the truth of the Bible. I thought this must be that there could only be one story. I did minimal research and I have no idea what I said, perhaps because I’ve expunged the painful memory! I have no doubt that it was earnest, but uninformed guff.

I think it was the ecumenical movement that began a more open spiritual journey for me. In Trinity College Dublin (Dublin University) I met people from other denominations who believed differently. A Roman Catholic girl, Louise, with whom I had many helpful discussions, gave me a copy of Edward Schillebeeckx’s scholarly book Jesus. I dipped into it, but it was a bit heavy for me at the time. I remember a guy (why do I always remember the girl’s name but not the guy’s?) who was a Quaker and being impressed by the Quaker view that the whole of life is a sacrament.

The Dublin Interdenominational Charismatic Committee introduced me to many Roman Catholics who were beacons of faith and keen students of the Bible. They organised the wonderful David Watson (of St Michael-le-Belfrey, York) to come and speak in a Catholic church in Sallynoggin and I had the privilege of meeting him in a friend’s house after the event.

I had come back to Ireland a few years previously with a lot of baggage as well as a lot of love from the small Bible Church in Pennsylvania. They were happy to be called fundamentalists because of their belief in the Bible. They rejected any traditional denomination as far as I could tell (and presumably still do). For them either the Roman Catholic Church or the Pope was the Antichrist, I can’t remember which! It was relatively easy to maintain that prejudice in Pennsylvania, I think, but not in Dublin where I met so many faithful practising Roman Catholics.

Through meeting people of different Churches and denominations it was clear to me that one could be faithfully Christian with some quite different understanding of the Bible’s teaching for us today. This was not to say the differences didn’t matter, but we could embrace each other as brothers and sisters in Christ.

When talking to Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons or other deeply committed sects, I always sense the same insecurity that I felt in early years. They have found something very precious, very different to what ‘the world’ offers, and they fear that the whole house of cards will come tumbling down if they question it. But genuine listening goes out the window, and conversations about faith are about defending a view, not about discovering new insight. I guess there are times when I’m still that way myself!

I love a description I heard of the great Christian writer and missionary to Muslims, Kenneth Cragg, of whom it was said that he would listen so deeply to Muslim scholars that he was ‘almost ready to be converted’. It’s that kind of courageous listening we need. Not lobbing arguments or scriptures from behind the walls of our impenetrable theology to prove we are right. Many years ago, as a keen young Christian (I’m a keen old Christian now!), I went to a debate in Dublin about the place of women in leadership in the Church. I was horrified to hear a clergyman say: “I don’t think St Paul would have written that today”! It seemed to me to demean Scripture which I viewed as timeless. But I’m sure I was wrong about that and many other things (as I doubtless still am). That narrow view of the Bible has taken a lot of unravelling over the years, as I’ve begun to allow it to speak for itself and I’ve learned to accept the complexity of truth and the reality of how little we know. And the overwhelming priority of our relationship with God, of ‘knowing’ him. The Bible still comes alive to me, as much as ever, as I read and study it but I live much more easily with mystery