By India McCarty
Wikipedia co-founder Dr. Larry Sanger said reading the Bible in 2020 “transformed [his] life” and brought him to Jesus.
“In 2020 I read the Bible through for the first time, all the way through for good understanding, which I’d never done before,” Sanger said during an appearance on Lecrae’s “Deep End” podcast. “And to get ahead of ourselves a little bit, it transformed my life. And that was five years ago, but I put off actually making an announcement about it, telling the story, because I wanted to be ready to contend for the kingdom, forcefully.”
Sanger explained that, despite being raised in the Lutheran Church, he began to question his faith and asked his pastor questions about the nature of good and evil.
“A lot of pastors are not able to handle questions like that because they don’t have a lot of philosophical training,” he said, adding that his pastor wasn’t able to answer his questions in a way that satisfied Sanger.
Instead, he decided that “there are no answers” to those questions, reasoning, “If there are any good answers to questions like this, then a pastor is surely going to have an answer…That’s what really sealed me in my unbelief.”
However, Sanger eventually began to question his own skepticism. He decided to read the Bible and carefully consider religion. Instead of reinforcing his previous beliefs, Sanger found himself drawn to the Word of God.
“There are certain things that people can do if they’re, like, open to the experience, but then that’s God drawing them to those experiences,” Sanger explained. “For me, I had a number of different ‘coincidences’ that led me to read the Bible, right? And that is the Word of God, I think now. But I think I was drawn.”
Earlier this year, Sanger shared a lengthy essay detailing his faith journey.
Related: How Wikipedia Co-Founder Found Faith After ’35 Years as a Nonbeliever’
“When I really sought to understand it, I found the Bible far more interesting and — to my shock and consternation — coherent than I was expecting,” he wrote. “I looked up answers to all my critical questions, thinking that perhaps others had not thought of issues I saw. I was wrong. Not only had they thought of all the issues, and more that I had not thought of, they had well-worked-out positions about them.”
Sanger’s essay continued, “It slowly dawned on me that I was acquainting myself with the two-thousand-year-old tradition of theology. I found myself positively ashamed to realize that, despite having a Ph.D. in philosophy, I had never really understood what theology even is. Theology is, I found, an attempt to systematize, harmonize, explicate, and to a certain extent justify the many, many ideas contained in the Bible. It is what rational people do when they try to come to grips with the Bible in all its richness. The notion that the Bible might actually be able to interestingly and plausibly sustain such treatment is a proposition that had never entered my head.”
In an interview with Sean McDowell in February, Sanger shared, “My understanding of the evidence and how compelling it was changed…the reasons that I had for disbelief had fallen away. That sort of left me free to consider the proposition neutrally, on its own merits…the preponderance of the evidence seemed to be in favor of the existence of God.”
“I thank God for what share of insight his Word and his faithful servants have given me, as I have studied them; I thank him for the gift of faith that, for most of my life, I never imagined I would have,” Sanger concluded.
Sanger’s newfound faith is an inspiring reminder that God’s hand is always at work in our lives.
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