A Shattering Experience

Scottish theologian Thomas Torrance writes about the importance of teaching Christian doctrine to children: "One of the great tragedies of modern life is that the neglect of doctrinal teaching to children at an early age, has meant that their powers in other areas of intellectual life are often developed out of all proportion to their powers in Christian and spiritual understanding..." (School of Faith, 39)


In other words, Torrance sees a parallel process in learning a basic grammar of doctrine alongside our other early learning endeavors.


Lack of balance here causes problems later down the road in life.  What sort of problems might this cause?  Torrance writes: "Conversion in the psychological sense takes place when, as a result of such an unbalanced development and the radical dichotomy it involves, adaptation to the truth can only be a shattering experience.  But that need not happen if Christian instruction and learning have been properly fulfilled." (39)


Torrance's choice of metaphor is interesting here - "a shattering experience."  We understand what it means for a conversion to be painful or difficult.  Family and friends don't understand.  Jobs are relinquished.  But shattering?  What exactly shatters?


Presumably, a conversion shatters when reconciliation and growth in the life of faith come at a point when many other habits or traits of thought or life have become fully ingrained that then have to be given up or unlearned.  It is shattering psychologically.  It feels like we are in pieces.


'Shattering' conversions are certainly still conversions.  Indeed, even if we are not shattered by the experience, we feel some pressure of the significance of it, don't we?  Shouldn't we?  Yet, as Torrance says, the one who has had a shattering conversion may truly yearn for an alternate reality in which he or she had learned doctrine as a child as with other building blocks of life.