Mary Jo was a guest on Sean McDowell and Scott Rae’s podcast Think Biblically to discuss her book Why I Still Believe. Here’s a preview of the transcript:
Episode Transcript
Sean McDowell: Welcome to the podcast, Think Biblically, Conversations on Faith and Culture. I’m your host, Sean McDowell, professor of apologetics at Talbot School of Theology, Biola University.
Scott Rae: I’m your cohost, Scott Rae, Dean of Faculty and professor of Christian ethics, also at Talbot School of Theology, Biola University.
Sean McDowell: Today we’re here with a guest that I have been looking forward to having on for a long time. Number one, she’s a personal friend. Number two is a graduate of our Biola MA in Apologetics program. Mary Jo Sharp has written a new book that’s just wonderful. I want to commend to all our listeners, it’s called Why I Still Believe. She is a full-time professor at Houston Baptist University, writes and speaks, and has just made a wonderful contribution in the world of apologetics and beyond. Mary Jo, thanks for joining us.
Mary Jo Sharp: Hey guys, it’s so good to be on today.
Sean McDowell: In this book really is an apologetics book, but in another sense it’s your story, it’s your journey and you do apologetics, but just in a narrative fashion, which I love. Maybe let’s just start by you sharing your journey to faith, kind of from atheism to becoming a Christian.
Mary Jo Sharp: Yeah. Well, part of my journey is that I didn’t grow up Christian and I think sometimes people have trouble with understanding that on the onset because they hear my name’s Mary Jo and that I have this Southern Baptist background. They think I was born and raised in the church in the South and that’s not the case. I actually grew up… I did not grow up in church and I grew up in a somewhat post-Christian culture in Portland, Oregon. In fact, I recently found an article about Oregon that said Oregon had one of the lowest participations in religion in the country back in even the ’50s.
Scott Rae: Wow, that far back, huh?
Mary Jo Sharp: Yeah, I was pretty shocked when I found that. For me, Christianity wasn’t part of the culture I grew up in. It wasn’t a huge part. It was what it was, was what I saw on TV in the movies. It’s pretty shallow. But what I did experience growing up in that area was the great beauty of the Pacific Northwest. I saw the beauty and power of the ocean. We also had a rich cultural environment in that my parents love to take me to the symphony and to opera and anything that… Plays, anything they could get their hands on that way. I saw the beauty of what humans could do through the arts. Then my dad was just a huge nature and science buff. He really exposed me to Carl Sagan and what people could do through the sciences.
I think over the years these areas profoundly impacted me. They made me have awe and wonder at the goodness, truth, and beauty I found in the universe, so much so that I think it made me more receptive to discovering what was behind all of it. Well in high school, I had a high school band teacher and for those of you who don’t know, I actually went and got a degree in music education and taught band for a while. I really respected this guy and he was a Christian who hadn’t shared his faith with anyone before and he was burdened for me. My senior year of high school, he gave me a Bible and he said, “When you go off to college, you’re going to have hard questions, I hope you’ll turn to this.”
I actually started reading that Bible, came around to, yeah, I came around to thinking, “There’s probably a God. I should investigate this because it seems to be answering what is the source of all that beauty I found.” In college I went to church for the first time on my own and after looking around a little bit, I found a church that gave a clear presentation of the good news of the savior for mankind. It really brought everything together for me. I trusted in Jesus for my salvation.
Scott Rae: Wow. That’s so… Let me get this straight. Your high school music teacher gave you a Bible in an effort to do something that the culture might define as proselytizing and would probably be fired for today. Is that right?
Mary Jo Sharp: Yeah. He actually, when he tells the story, he says he felt like he was going to get fired.
Scott Rae: Oh, is that right? Wow.
Mary Jo Sharp: Because I didn’t respond apparently real well, so he thought I was going to turn him in.
Scott Rae: He thought you were going to rat him out.
Mary Jo Sharp: Yeah.
Scott Rae: Mary Jo, before you came to faith, you were a self-described atheist. What were your impressions of Christians and Christianity before you came to faith?
Mary Jo Sharp: Yeah, my impressions of Christianity, as I mentioned earlier, I had a pretty shallow view because I didn’t know much about Christianity and my culture wasn’t culturally Christian. I sort of thought Christians were weird. They were the fringe of society. They weren’t normal people. normal people didn’t believe in God or didn’t have a need for that. But then there were these people that went to church, so they were sort of on the fringe of society. That was my view of Christians.
Now I wouldn’t have said it that way because I was taught if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. I would never have said that to anybody. But that was, I didn’t know why they were Christians and then Christianity to me, I grew up in the 1980s and I saw the televangelists and some of the scandals that happened there. To me it looked like an institutional organization that just sort of asked for people’s money, but they weren’t to be trusted. I saw it as something that people kind of just did. They did it for whatever reason they needed that, but it wasn’t for the intelligent, compassionate human beings, but just for those people who needed something in their life that I didn’t need, and I’d probably would have seen it also as people who desired power and control. I would have that view of some of the pastors in Christianity.
Listen to the Podcast Interview and finish reading the transcript here