Blog on the Lillypad
Monday, August 16, 2004
 | The Flight of Peter Fromm
Next in the series of novels about Fundamentalists and former Fundamentalists is THE FLIGHT OF PETER FROMM by Martin Gardner. Martin Gardner is better known as a skeptic and atheist who writes essays and analyses to debunk claims of the paranormal. His only novel, PETER FROMM is slightly autobiographical. It's far more a book of ideas rather than a novel. |
Peter, raised in a fundamentalist Holiness church in Oklahoma, comes to the University of Chicago in the mid-1930's to the School of Divinity. He strikes up a friendship with Homer Wilson, a Unitiarian minister (back in the days when Unitarians were still technically part of liberal Christianity) who is actually an atheist.
The story, an account of how Peter loses his faith, is narrated by Homer, a double-edged narrator after the order of CS Lewis's Uncle Screwtape. Debonair, diplomatic, and actually kind-hearted, Homer appears to be honest with the reader; he even thinks he is being honest. But the reader sees that Homer is self-deceived about the validity of the premises that he uses to debunk Christianity. In truth, Homer is a pompous and self-satisfied windbag, but he doesn't know it. Gardner's honesty about so much of atheism, when he is an atheist himself, is startling.
Within the story, Homer likens Peter's progress (or decline, actually) into liberal theology to a man walking from one blue-walled room to another, where each room has just a shade more green added to it than the previous. By the time the man has walked through all the rooms, he thinks he is still in a blue room, but actually he's in a room that's entirely green.
Even so, as Peter grapples with one liberal theologian after another, starting with the fairly conservative Chesterton and moving on through Tillich, Niebuhr, Barth and the like, Peter loses that which makes Christianity distinctively Christian. By the end, Peter no longer believes in the accounts of the miracles in Scripture; nor does he believe in the resurrection. He suffers a nervous breakdown while preaching his first sermon as a liberal, and then he finds himself free to live in a world that can only be described as "enlightened doubt", a sort of open-endedness that looks for faith but will never find it.
The book includes side glances at CS Lewis, J. Gresham Machen, and even Billy Graham. Its panoply of liberal theologians and their ideas is large, and there were names I did not even recognize. Though the story includes a loose narrative of Peter's forays into alcohol, women, and several years in the navy, it's much more a discussion than a story. As it describes Peter's journey, the reader sees also the journey of Christendom from its roots of direct experience of the miracles and the resurrection to its formal institutions, to its theological disputes, to liberalism, and then to atheism.
What's so surprising about the book is that Gardner himself is indicting liberals far more than Fundamentalists. He shows by the end of the book that liberals who deny the resurrection are preaching nonsense---mere double talk from men who earn their living by telling lies when they call themselves Christian or promote Christianity. The liberal clergy in the book flock after every new fad and idea (and new ideas abounded in the 1930's). Most of them, to one degree or another, embrace Communism and then slowly back off from it, some apologizing for their stupidity and others pretending that they operated from high motives that Communism had promised them.
But Gardner shows the neat way that liberalism dispenses with Christian morals and embraces situation ethics, and how the desertion of the commands of Christ leads liberal Christian leaders into foolishness, faddishness, and an ardent love for social prominence. By the end, the reader clearly sees that Christianity is either about the literal resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, His literal commands to love our neighbor, forgive our enemies and do good to the poor and forsaken, or it's not Christianity. Gardner has realized what the liberals deny: Christianity must be a belief in the literal teachings of the Bible or it is not Christianity at all.
I found the novel refreshing in that by slow degrees it makes the reader aware of the inherent double-talk and nonsense in claims that the resurrection of Jesus Christ was spiritual and not material. Gardner shows that liberal theologians are merely performers, skilled liars, in fact, who earn social status and wealth by pandering to their congregations rather than offering any kind of honesty to them. Yet Gardner is not a believer himself.
This book is not promoting literal belief in Christ so much as it is showing that those who do not possess such belief but call themselves Christians are deceiving others or at the very least are self deceived. But it never says this forthrightly. At the end of the book, Peter is content with his new open-ended "search", and Homer is content with his smug Unitarianism.
Readers not able to pick up the nuances of what is going on under the surface of the story may be a bit confused or dismayed. Some people might miss the point entirely, but it's there, a treasure of the ironic. Gardner, a highly perceptive atheist, has written a novel that clarifies what Christianity must be to be real Christianity. Its most significant drawback is that so much of Christendom in this country has already dispensed with the version of liberalism that was popular for five decades or more in the twentieth century. So much of what is clear priority in the assumptions of Homer and Peter has already been dropped, even from the canons of the liberals.
