The Gileadites took the fords of the Jordan toward Ephraim. When any of the fleeing Ephraimites said, “Let me pass,” the men of Gilead would say to him, “Are you an Ephraimite?” If he answered, “No!” they would ask him to say “Shibboleth.” If he said “Sibboleth,” not being able to give the proper pronunciation, they would seize him and kill him at the fords of the Jordan. Thus forty-two thousand Ephraimites fell at that time.

A shibboleth is a litmus test: it’s used to determine if truly part of a group they say they belong to. It’s a cool word, but to understand why I chose the name instead of any of the other cool Biblical words, I need to tell a little story:

In the Beginning…

I was born and raised Roman Catholic. My father was unobservant, citing his years in Catholic school as the main impetus. My mother, however, was particularly stubborn about making sure my brother and I went to Church as much as possible and that we attended CCD (a Roman Catholic form of religious education). She also wanted to make sure we went through each of the Holy Sacraments all Roman Catholics go through as children: Reconciliation, First Communion, and Confirmation.

For most of my childhood, I was unquestioning about this process: I believed in God, I was a Catholic, and going to Church and CCD were just part of being a kid. I didn’t understand my friends who didn’t have to go to CCD or worse yet, didn’t believe in God. However, as I got older and entered my teenage years, I started to grow more and more apathetic. By the time I was ready to go through Confirmation, I was having my doubts. My mother, who wanted only the best for me, said I could drop out of Catholicism only after I went through Confirmation. I begrudgingly complied, and left the faith shortly thereafter.

It wasn’t because of any one event: I was a teenager, I thought I knew better, and arguments for atheism were compelling. Looking back, despite years of CCD, I don’t think I ever understood what I was supposed to believing in. I knew all the stories of the Bible, but I didn’t know why I should care or what it meant to be a Christian. It just seemed like a waste of time, and I, as an arrogant teenager, was proud to be able to lord over my friends who still believed how much I knew better than them.

Bob and Nick

It wasn’t for another 5 years before I seriously considered my faith again. I was a Philosophy major, which is a small enough major that you wind up taking the same classes with a core set of people. Within that group, there were two interesting people: Bob and Nick. Both had sharp minds, could argue articulately and cogently, and both were in the hardest analytical classes the college offered. Both were also devoutly Christian. It was paradoxical to me: how could two incredibly smart and rational people be so mistaken about a major part of their life?

The First Shibboleth

Statue of Pier Gerlofs Donia, known for his legendary strength and size and the invention of a famous shibboleth (From Wikipedia)

As the more outgoing of the two, I set out to get to know Bob first. We would walk and talk after class, and even though he was 3 years my senior, he was incredibly receptive to my admittedly primitive arguments about whatever we were talking about in class that day. In one of these walk-and-talks, the topic of Jesus’s credentials came up, and  I made a boneheaded comment about how you didn’t need to believe in the Crucifixion to get Jesus’s message: that he was a perfectly interesting philosopher in his own right.

Bob interrupted me and provided me with my first shibboleth: he told me it is impossible to be a follower of Christ if you don’t believe in the Crucifixion and subsequent resurrection. It wasn’t up for debate, and referenced John 3:16.

At this point in my life, all I knew about John 3:16 was that it was on placards crazy people brought to baseball games. When I got back to my dorm, I looked it up. It read:

For God so loved the world that he gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.

Based on my background, I understood the premise of the contract God is providing, but I still didn’t understand the full implications of what it meant to truly believe in God just yet. However, for the first time in my life, someone made the distinction between Christians and non-Christians so painfully simple: if you believe God gave us Jesus as a sacrifice for our sins so that we could live forever, you were ostensibly Christian. Otherwise, you weren’t.

The Second Shibboleth

It took a full two more years before I got to know Nick. During that time, I had taken a few classes that analyzed the Bible, and they provided more clues as to what was really going on in it. I learned that Jesus wasn’t just some old version of Ghandi or a washed-out hippy: everything he did had an ulterior motive, and He was as sharp as a tack. I also started to understand how the Old Testament helped frame the New Testament: that you couldn’t just omit the Old Testament and still understand the works of Jesus.

In my junior year of college, I moved in with a few guys off campus. As luck would have it, one of those people was Nick. Nick was a man of many interests, and loved to talk about anything with anyone who’d listen. He was also acutely aware of his surpassing knowledge, and would regularly ask if  I knew what he was talking about. I suppose most would find that condescending: to me, I thought it was a great opportunity to get inside the mind of a true believer. He’d explain something, I’d interject, and he’d provide a cogent response to what I said. It was great.

It wasn’t until I met Nick that I knew someone who would explain, in painstaking detail, the theology and motivation behind being a Christian. In this, he provided the second shibboleth. It wasn’t enough to believe certain factoids about the life and times of Jesus: you needed to understand the whole picture; that there were subtleties to belief and faith that most people ignore or take for granted. To base one’s faith on a punch list of facts that you agree or disagree with was like reading the Cliff’s Notes version of the Bible: you get the gist, but you lose the meaning.

In order to help me understand the full meaning of what it was to be a Christian, Nick recommended I read two books by C.S. Lewis: The Four Loves and Mere Christianity. I didn’t think I was ready for a whole book advocating Christianity, so I opted to start with The Four Loves.

The book changed my life. It was as if C.S. Lewis wrote the book specifically for me. He got it: he understood the human condition, he understood what Friendship was, and he understood the problems associated with it. That’s not to say I liked it because I agreed with him: I liked it because he made sense. Throughout the book, he describes four different types of “loves”: affection, or need-based love, Friendship, Eros (romantic love), and divine love, or Charity. It is with the last section that I finally understood the full implications of John 3:16, the passage I looked up years before. It finally clicked.

A New Beginning

Nick eventually graduated, and I found myself in my last year of college feeling compelled to understand Christianity more, and what it meant to be a Christian: the shibboleths of faith. Everything I read and everyone I talked to about it added more and more weight to coming back to the faith. It no longer became a question of whether I’d believe, but how I’d come back. What were the terms? What parts of the faith were still inconsistent with what I believed?

I eventually did read Mere Christianity, where C.S. Lewis expanded on Nick’s teaching: Christianity isn’t something you can turn on and off at cocktail parties. Everything has to be framed within it. When I left college, I read the Bible, cover to cover. It provided the final background to understand the two shibboleths I’ve been given: who God is, where He is coming from, and what He expects of me. Since then, it’s been a slow process to rectify years of bad habits and faulty beliefs.

Afterword

I provide this lengthy exposition to help understand the Shibboleth’s meaning to me, and to provide the background for the motivation behind this blog. I hope to explore other tests of faith and what it really means to believe in God. Hopefully this blog can act as a point of inspiration for and discussion with others who have gone through or are going through a similar struggle of faith. There are no easy paths, and it’s always best to have a friend along the way.