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The Flight of Peter Fromm
The Flight of Peter Fromm is a novel of ideas disguised as the biography of a young man from a Pentecostal fundamentalist background in Oklahoma, who loses his faith while a student at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His spiritual odyssey is narrated by his mentor, a professor at the divinity school - who is actually a humanist who believes neither in God nor in an afterlife. Although Peter never abandons his theism or his admiration for Jesus, he reaches a point where he feels it would be hypocritical to remain within the church and to become the evangelist he had hoped to be.The counterpoint between Peter and the narrator reflects the eternal conflict between theism and atheism. In following the changes of Peter's beliefs, almost every aspect of Protestant theology and ethics is explored. The evolution of Peter's faith parallels the evolution of Christian theology, from the day of Pentecost to contemporary liberal theology.
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1973
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197 people want to read
About the author
Martin Gardner
489 books504 followersMartin Gardner was an American mathematics and science writer specializing in recreational mathematics, but with interests encompassing micromagic, stage magic, literature (especially the writings of Lewis Carroll), philosophy, scientific skepticism, and religion. He wrote the Mathematical Games column in Scientific American from 1956 to 1981, and published over 70 books.
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June 14, 2020
The Origins of Deplorability
Martin Gardner was a mathematician and writer about mathematics who wrote only one novel*, this one; and an exceptionally good novel it is. It is the hidden mathematical connection that makes it good - as both a novel and a moral tale for our time.
The narrative line of The Flight of Peter Fromm is that of the evolution of American fundamentalist belief and its adaptation to the world beyond the tribal society in which it has been formed. Why should a well-known mathematician engage himself in such a project?
The answer, I am convinced, is: because American religious fundamentalism emerged in a period, around the turn of the 20th century, when a parallel debate about the fundamentals of mathematics was also taking place. While Christian religious belief had been under intense fire by historical criticism and biblical exegesis during the latter half of the 19th century, mathematics was simultaneously being challenged to demonstrate its own rationality.
From the 1870’s onwards, biblical scholars and historians like Julius Wellhausen and Albert Schweitzer had succeeded in revealing some very uncomfortable facts that undermined much of conventional scriptural interpretation. Issues of authorship, chronology and intentions in the Old and New Testaments rolled out like ingots from (mostly German) academic word-mills. Many Christian theologians put up a fierce but ultimately futile battle against both the scientific rigor as well as the sheer common sense of these new ‘revelations.’
This powerful criticism brought into question not just particular doctrines but the entire Protestant Reformation with its dictum of ‘Everyman his own interpreter of Scripture’. In America, this threat was arguably more acute than elsewhere since the social cohesion of the Westward expanding country had been provided not so much by civil government as by Methodist peripatetic preachers and the self-forming Baptist congregations that moved forward with the frontier. If biblical truth was not self-evident, what chance the derivative truths of American democracy?
The situation provoked a response among American Christians that became known as Fundamentalism, that is, the adherence to a specific and fixed set of doctrinal ‘fundamentals’ regardless of scientific, historical internal biblical evidence which might seem to contradict them. This movement grew in membership and political power throughout the 20th century and remains the voice of today’s evangelical Christians, particularly among so-called Red State Republicans. Gardner’s fiction is a description of the state of that movement and its development from WWII to the early 1970’s.
In remarkably close parallel with the emergence of biblical criticism, mathematics underwent similar developments. 19th century mathematical researchers like Georg Cantor and Richard Dedekind (more Germans!), started working on problems in set theory and infinity. One of these problems, the so-called Continuum Hypothesis** was particularly thorny since it seemed to undermine confidence in the reliability of even basic arithmetic.
The initial response of the mathematical community was not unlike that of the American Protestants. Bertrand Russell with his colleague Alfred North Whitehead threw themselves into providing the axiomatic fundamentals needed to formally demonstrate the integrity of the system of numbers. The result was the Principia Mathematica, originally published in 1910, precisely the same year as American Baptists and Presbyterians published their first version of The Fundamentals (The Catholic version, the papal bull Pascendi, appeared in 1907; popes can act more quickly than councils).
Russell’s Principia had a run of growing popularity for about 20 years until a mathematical smart aleck named Kurt Godel demonstrated not only that Russell and Whitehead were wrong, but that the very objective of their project, the establishment of the inherent rationality of numbers, was futile. Godel showed that no axiomatic system could ever account for its own rationality. No arithmetic rationality equals no secure foundation for the so-called science of mathematics. Godel‘ s Incompleteness Theorem has caused about as much consternation in mathematics ever since as The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle has done in physics.
Similarly, religious fundamentalism in America seemed to have reached a peak of influence (right along with the Ku Klux Klan) by the beginning of WWII. Education was eroding the credibility of primitive religious beliefs generally; the expansion of the federal government was providing a cohesive American self-image which was independent of the local, historically religiously-based identity; scientific and philosophical research in language began to show the inherent conventionality of words and their problematic relation to things. So religious fundamentalism was feeling exactly the same pinch as its mathematical sibling: if even language was unreliable, what hope could doctrinal pronouncements, necessarily made in language, have for expressing the purported truth of religion.***
Gardner picks up his story at just about this historical point. His first person narrator is a Unitarian minister, Dr. Homer Wilson, who teaches at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. Wilson makes a number of jokes at his own expense, generally about the somewhat slim claim that Unitarians have to be Christians, or even theists for that matter. Unitarians, very much like mathematicians, are aware of the fundamental irrationality of their adherence to their calling. They nevertheless maintain a view that there may be something, call it divine, hiding behind the boundary of the irrational.
Peter Fromm, a hick from the Oklahoma Bible Belt, and offspring of true blue fundamentalist parents becomes Wilson’s student in Chicago. Peter is on a mission: to bring the notoriously humanist and liberal Chicago divinity faculty to its spiritual senses and back to the Ol’ Time Religion. He is energetic, passionate, and skilled (he had preached routinely as a teen-ager). But of course he fails; he fails not only in converting his colleagues but in maintaining his own evangelistic certainties.
It is this failure that is the real subject of Gardner’s novel, how it affects Peter but also Gardner’s prognosis about its impact further along in history. It is here that the book makes an important contrast between the religious and mathematical responses to failure. And it is here that one can see the reason for the persistence and sheer bloody-mindedness of American Fundamentalism. The issue he seems to be putting forth is: Can we make a rational response to a situation which is literally fundamentally irrational?
Mathematics is often put forth as the Queen of the Sciences, the ultimate carrier of truth. But it has also always carried a religious tinge from the days of the ancient Greeks (the Dionysus of Pythagoras) to the 21st century (the Supreme Fascist of Paul Erdos). Indeed numbers have been historically described as not just the words of God but the essence of the divine. It would seem that human consciousness, unable to entirely understand itself, is vulnerable to almost anything it can find to fill the chasm of irrationality that it perceives in itself. Some solutions are innocuous; others have horrendous consequences for one’s fellow humans as well as the rest of the planet. Gardner’s novel implicitly shows the alternatives and their consequences.
Not all mathematicians are acutely concerned with its irrational boundary or with lies ‘beyond’ it. Like Homer Wilson, they accept this fundamental uncertainty and get on, more or less pragmatically, with a life filled with numbers. Some, however, find this intellectual dead end troublesome and try to address it, even if only to move it only slightly into the beyond. Only rarely do they become obsessed with the beyond itself; and even more rarely do they make claims about the mathematical beyond that they then attempt to impose on other mathematicians as truth.
Similarly not all human beings, mathematicians or not, find the mysteries of human existence - ultimate causation, ultimate purpose, consciousness, free will, etc. - problematic. But some do and they often turn to religion or philosophy to provide some reasonable explanation for these apparently unreasonable questions. Having formulated some answers (or more likely heard some answers fifth-hand by someone who says ‘Trust me, I’ve seen the beyond), the Peter Fromm character in them either stops looking for other answers... or he goes mad. Actually even the first alternative is a kind of madness since it destroys communication with those who might share his concerns but insist on continuing their search.
In short, Fundamentalism, the establishment of fixed religious or philosophical doctrines, isn’t bad because it promotes wrong doctrines. Rather, it is disastrously destructive because it is an inhibition of the very human impulse to understand, a closure of the process of education, a betrayal of the capacity that human beings have to think and act together. It is wrong because it tries to stop not just thought but the society which makes thought possible. Mathematics is the hidden metaphor in Gardner’s novel for an alternative to fundamentalist tribalism, an alternative that expands the community of ‘believers’ indefinitely.
Forget the rash of recent books about the forgotten Americans who have found Trump. For those people Trump is quite literally an Incarnation of their Prosperity Gospel, the latest version of American fundamentalist psychosis. The Flight of Peter Fromm, although written almost an half century ago, is for my money a far better analysis of the existing cultural situation. Hillary Clinton’s electioneering remark about the Trump’s Deplorables is accurate but not accurately explained. I contend that they are largely the seekers who have stopped seeking, nihilists who move from absolute to absolute because they can’t tolerate the fundamental uncertainty of being human. They have demonstrated their fundamentalism with no regard for evidence, or logic, or their fellow human beings for the past year. It will be interesting to see where they alight next after their current fundamentals fail.
Postscript: it strikes me that the themes of Gardner are remarkably reinforced and demonstrated as significant in Pankaj Mishra’s recent The Age of Anger: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
* This is not strictly true if his 1998 book Visitors from Oz: The Wild Adventures of Dorothy, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Woodman is considered as a novel.
**The problem can be stated simply: Does the set of all sets contain itself? The answer seems to be both Yes and No which is the kind of self-contradiction that gives mathematicians dyspepsia and nightmares.
*** By the time of WWII, Reinhold Niebuhr, the premier American Protestant theologian, could write a 600 page book, Human Nature and Human Destiny, with not a single mention of the central Christian belief of the Resurrection.
Martin Gardner was a mathematician and writer about mathematics who wrote only one novel*, this one; and an exceptionally good novel it is. It is the hidden mathematical connection that makes it good - as both a novel and a moral tale for our time.
The narrative line of The Flight of Peter Fromm is that of the evolution of American fundamentalist belief and its adaptation to the world beyond the tribal society in which it has been formed. Why should a well-known mathematician engage himself in such a project?
The answer, I am convinced, is: because American religious fundamentalism emerged in a period, around the turn of the 20th century, when a parallel debate about the fundamentals of mathematics was also taking place. While Christian religious belief had been under intense fire by historical criticism and biblical exegesis during the latter half of the 19th century, mathematics was simultaneously being challenged to demonstrate its own rationality.
From the 1870’s onwards, biblical scholars and historians like Julius Wellhausen and Albert Schweitzer had succeeded in revealing some very uncomfortable facts that undermined much of conventional scriptural interpretation. Issues of authorship, chronology and intentions in the Old and New Testaments rolled out like ingots from (mostly German) academic word-mills. Many Christian theologians put up a fierce but ultimately futile battle against both the scientific rigor as well as the sheer common sense of these new ‘revelations.’
This powerful criticism brought into question not just particular doctrines but the entire Protestant Reformation with its dictum of ‘Everyman his own interpreter of Scripture’. In America, this threat was arguably more acute than elsewhere since the social cohesion of the Westward expanding country had been provided not so much by civil government as by Methodist peripatetic preachers and the self-forming Baptist congregations that moved forward with the frontier. If biblical truth was not self-evident, what chance the derivative truths of American democracy?
The situation provoked a response among American Christians that became known as Fundamentalism, that is, the adherence to a specific and fixed set of doctrinal ‘fundamentals’ regardless of scientific, historical internal biblical evidence which might seem to contradict them. This movement grew in membership and political power throughout the 20th century and remains the voice of today’s evangelical Christians, particularly among so-called Red State Republicans. Gardner’s fiction is a description of the state of that movement and its development from WWII to the early 1970’s.
In remarkably close parallel with the emergence of biblical criticism, mathematics underwent similar developments. 19th century mathematical researchers like Georg Cantor and Richard Dedekind (more Germans!), started working on problems in set theory and infinity. One of these problems, the so-called Continuum Hypothesis** was particularly thorny since it seemed to undermine confidence in the reliability of even basic arithmetic.
The initial response of the mathematical community was not unlike that of the American Protestants. Bertrand Russell with his colleague Alfred North Whitehead threw themselves into providing the axiomatic fundamentals needed to formally demonstrate the integrity of the system of numbers. The result was the Principia Mathematica, originally published in 1910, precisely the same year as American Baptists and Presbyterians published their first version of The Fundamentals (The Catholic version, the papal bull Pascendi, appeared in 1907; popes can act more quickly than councils).
Russell’s Principia had a run of growing popularity for about 20 years until a mathematical smart aleck named Kurt Godel demonstrated not only that Russell and Whitehead were wrong, but that the very objective of their project, the establishment of the inherent rationality of numbers, was futile. Godel showed that no axiomatic system could ever account for its own rationality. No arithmetic rationality equals no secure foundation for the so-called science of mathematics. Godel‘ s Incompleteness Theorem has caused about as much consternation in mathematics ever since as The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle has done in physics.
Similarly, religious fundamentalism in America seemed to have reached a peak of influence (right along with the Ku Klux Klan) by the beginning of WWII. Education was eroding the credibility of primitive religious beliefs generally; the expansion of the federal government was providing a cohesive American self-image which was independent of the local, historically religiously-based identity; scientific and philosophical research in language began to show the inherent conventionality of words and their problematic relation to things. So religious fundamentalism was feeling exactly the same pinch as its mathematical sibling: if even language was unreliable, what hope could doctrinal pronouncements, necessarily made in language, have for expressing the purported truth of religion.***
Gardner picks up his story at just about this historical point. His first person narrator is a Unitarian minister, Dr. Homer Wilson, who teaches at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. Wilson makes a number of jokes at his own expense, generally about the somewhat slim claim that Unitarians have to be Christians, or even theists for that matter. Unitarians, very much like mathematicians, are aware of the fundamental irrationality of their adherence to their calling. They nevertheless maintain a view that there may be something, call it divine, hiding behind the boundary of the irrational.
Peter Fromm, a hick from the Oklahoma Bible Belt, and offspring of true blue fundamentalist parents becomes Wilson’s student in Chicago. Peter is on a mission: to bring the notoriously humanist and liberal Chicago divinity faculty to its spiritual senses and back to the Ol’ Time Religion. He is energetic, passionate, and skilled (he had preached routinely as a teen-ager). But of course he fails; he fails not only in converting his colleagues but in maintaining his own evangelistic certainties.
It is this failure that is the real subject of Gardner’s novel, how it affects Peter but also Gardner’s prognosis about its impact further along in history. It is here that the book makes an important contrast between the religious and mathematical responses to failure. And it is here that one can see the reason for the persistence and sheer bloody-mindedness of American Fundamentalism. The issue he seems to be putting forth is: Can we make a rational response to a situation which is literally fundamentally irrational?
Mathematics is often put forth as the Queen of the Sciences, the ultimate carrier of truth. But it has also always carried a religious tinge from the days of the ancient Greeks (the Dionysus of Pythagoras) to the 21st century (the Supreme Fascist of Paul Erdos). Indeed numbers have been historically described as not just the words of God but the essence of the divine. It would seem that human consciousness, unable to entirely understand itself, is vulnerable to almost anything it can find to fill the chasm of irrationality that it perceives in itself. Some solutions are innocuous; others have horrendous consequences for one’s fellow humans as well as the rest of the planet. Gardner’s novel implicitly shows the alternatives and their consequences.
Not all mathematicians are acutely concerned with its irrational boundary or with lies ‘beyond’ it. Like Homer Wilson, they accept this fundamental uncertainty and get on, more or less pragmatically, with a life filled with numbers. Some, however, find this intellectual dead end troublesome and try to address it, even if only to move it only slightly into the beyond. Only rarely do they become obsessed with the beyond itself; and even more rarely do they make claims about the mathematical beyond that they then attempt to impose on other mathematicians as truth.
Similarly not all human beings, mathematicians or not, find the mysteries of human existence - ultimate causation, ultimate purpose, consciousness, free will, etc. - problematic. But some do and they often turn to religion or philosophy to provide some reasonable explanation for these apparently unreasonable questions. Having formulated some answers (or more likely heard some answers fifth-hand by someone who says ‘Trust me, I’ve seen the beyond), the Peter Fromm character in them either stops looking for other answers... or he goes mad. Actually even the first alternative is a kind of madness since it destroys communication with those who might share his concerns but insist on continuing their search.
In short, Fundamentalism, the establishment of fixed religious or philosophical doctrines, isn’t bad because it promotes wrong doctrines. Rather, it is disastrously destructive because it is an inhibition of the very human impulse to understand, a closure of the process of education, a betrayal of the capacity that human beings have to think and act together. It is wrong because it tries to stop not just thought but the society which makes thought possible. Mathematics is the hidden metaphor in Gardner’s novel for an alternative to fundamentalist tribalism, an alternative that expands the community of ‘believers’ indefinitely.
Forget the rash of recent books about the forgotten Americans who have found Trump. For those people Trump is quite literally an Incarnation of their Prosperity Gospel, the latest version of American fundamentalist psychosis. The Flight of Peter Fromm, although written almost an half century ago, is for my money a far better analysis of the existing cultural situation. Hillary Clinton’s electioneering remark about the Trump’s Deplorables is accurate but not accurately explained. I contend that they are largely the seekers who have stopped seeking, nihilists who move from absolute to absolute because they can’t tolerate the fundamental uncertainty of being human. They have demonstrated their fundamentalism with no regard for evidence, or logic, or their fellow human beings for the past year. It will be interesting to see where they alight next after their current fundamentals fail.
Postscript: it strikes me that the themes of Gardner are remarkably reinforced and demonstrated as significant in Pankaj Mishra’s recent The Age of Anger: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
* This is not strictly true if his 1998 book Visitors from Oz: The Wild Adventures of Dorothy, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Woodman is considered as a novel.
**The problem can be stated simply: Does the set of all sets contain itself? The answer seems to be both Yes and No which is the kind of self-contradiction that gives mathematicians dyspepsia and nightmares.
*** By the time of WWII, Reinhold Niebuhr, the premier American Protestant theologian, could write a 600 page book, Human Nature and Human Destiny, with not a single mention of the central Christian belief of the Resurrection.
August 6, 2016
This book tells the story of Peter Fromm, a seminary student, who starts out as a teenage (boy wonder) Pentecostal fundamentalist preacher and then decides to attend a liberal seminary (University of Chicago). Consequently his beliefs begin to move incrementally in a liberal direction. Peter explores, adopts and gradually tires of numerous theologies along his path of changing beliefs. Each step along the way Peter studies and ponders with deep emotional feelings the various religious, philosophical, and scientific ideas. In general theses steps include the theory of evolution, German higher criticism, Roman Catholicism, Karl Barth/neo-orthodoxy, Paul Tillich/Richard Niebuhr/situation ethics, Communism, military service, historical biblical criticism, secular humanism, atonement theory and atheism. Peter's personality is described as follows:
The book ends after Peter has recovered from his climatic break with a conversation between him and his professor friend about faith. Peter says,
Wikipedia has an interesting article about Martin Gardner, the author of this book. He is known primarily as a mathematician who was a long time contributor to Scientific American magazine.
The following cartoon has nothing to do with this book. It just happens to be my favorite thological cartoon, and I'm using this book review as an excuse to share it.
Perhaps Calvin will grow up to be another Peter Fromm.
"... he had one rare, refreshing trait, a constitutional inability to accept any form of intellectual evasion."(9)The story is narrated by a mentor professor/preacher who virtually adopts Peter during his years at the seminary as an extended member of his family. The professor is a Unitarian minister, but in private conversations admits that he doesn't believe there is a God. Early in the book the professor explains the demands on his profession as,
"To be a Protestant minister today, in the typical church of a prosperous suburb, one must be as skilled as a politician in the rhetoric of ambiguity, circumlocution, and double-talk." (9)The problem for Peter near the end of the book is that he has finally arrived at the end of his studies with a PhD in theology, and he now has to face the prospect of entering a profession where he will be expected to deliver a weekly sermon to a church congregation.
"I feel the way young Barth must have felt...The good people of my flock will be sitting there, looking up, expecting me--expecting me!--to talk to them about God, to tell them what they should believe and what they ought to do. How can I do that when I don't know myself what to believe or do?" (207)His professor/mentor explains his choice.
"...you have to choose between being a truthful traitor or a loyal liar." (208)Peter has arrived at a point where intellectually he's a secular humanist but he still possesses remnants of the former Pentecostal within his heart. These dissident feelings lead to a climatic ending where he experiences a psychotic break while delivering an Easter sermon (or maybe it's an ecstatic spiritual experience; it would make a heck of a movie scene).
The book ends after Peter has recovered from his climatic break with a conversation between him and his professor friend about faith. Peter says,
"Faith is Quixotic. Faith is absurd. Who can pretend to understand it? There's a deep mystery about it. It's tied up with the enigmas of God and free will, with the incredible fact that a world exists and we're in it and we know we're in it and we know we'll soon not be in it. Faith is a kind of madness. I don't deny it. I can't explain why I believe. I only know I can't not believe." (271)The professor says he believes that Peter is evading all the dilemmas of theism by calling them mysteries. Peter answers,
"I don't think it's evasion. It's just an honest confession of ignorance. Thinking about anything has to end finally in mystery. And why not? After all, we didn't make the world any more than the jellyfish did." (272)I have given the book five stars because I admire the skill of the author to explore this subject in such depth in a readable novel. However, this book isn't for everybody. People who haven't passed through a similar faith journey will find the book to be nonsensical. This book is a novel, however it is set within a real historical setting with many references (sometimes including page numbers) to real theological literature and their authors. As such this book is more about theology than it is fictional literature. But of course, I know there are many of you readers out there who consider those two as being the same thing.
Wikipedia has an interesting article about Martin Gardner, the author of this book. He is known primarily as a mathematician who was a long time contributor to Scientific American magazine.
The following cartoon has nothing to do with this book. It just happens to be my favorite thological cartoon, and I'm using this book review as an excuse to share it.
Perhaps Calvin will grow up to be another Peter Fromm.
February 2, 2022
A brilliant polymath who doesn't buy Christian orthodoxy.....
==========
Human beings are driven by a quest for certitude. We want to feel a sense of security in a world we cannot control, so we seek comfort in ideologies, belief systems, political or religious that, sadly, usually prove destructive to the individual seekers and to those they disagree with.
This semi-biographical novel by Martin Gardner, a brilliant polymath whom I had not heard of before, is just such a quest that ends in destruction.
Much of the quest is an exploration of whether the Bible, and by extension, Christianity are true. I went though such a pilgrimage myself from the year I entered college to about age 30. I was raised Roman Catholic, but did not know the Bible. I came to know it well over this stretch of time. I also read and studied many of the apologists covered in this story: C.S. Lewis. G.K. Chesterton, John Henry Cardinal Newman, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I also read Kierkegaard and Barth. In the end, I saw that all these apologists fell short and that the Bible was full of contradictions and more often than not fostered hate and violence. I am no longer surprised that most Christians in Nazi Germany lined up behind Hitler, or that Trump has such a large Evangelical and right wing Catholic following. (Attorney General Barr, for example, is a member of the fascist Catholic lay cult, Opus Dei).
As I read the tragic story of Peter Fromm, I also thought of many I knew who are still following certain paths that Fromm experimented with: rigid Biblical fundamentalism that ignores the contradictions, the fantasy believer who sees in The Lord of the Rings a cosmic war between God and Satan, the Kierkegaard-Barthian who engages in the blind leap of faith, the college friend who became president of an evangelical denomination that is hostile to gay people.
It is also no surprise to me that younger generations have lost interest in any of this. As even the Bible says: "the tree is known by its fruit" and the fruit is rotten. These generations quickly ascertained that it's all about politics and has nothing to do with human kindness.
===========
Corroboration from archaeologists.....
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
=========
On the topic of C.S. Lewis, American evangelicals have tried to turn him into some kind of infallible plaster saint. What they are not acknowledging is that as a scholar he was skeptical about the Bible on a a matter that completely overthrows the theology of some of these groups.
https://bloggingtheology.net/2016/05/...
========
Some still idealize the Reformation. They are mistaken. We know the abuses of the RC Church, but this is the ugliness of what a return to the Bible wrought....
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
=========
author bio....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_...
=========
Young people bolting from the churches....
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/...
==========
Human beings are driven by a quest for certitude. We want to feel a sense of security in a world we cannot control, so we seek comfort in ideologies, belief systems, political or religious that, sadly, usually prove destructive to the individual seekers and to those they disagree with.
This semi-biographical novel by Martin Gardner, a brilliant polymath whom I had not heard of before, is just such a quest that ends in destruction.
Much of the quest is an exploration of whether the Bible, and by extension, Christianity are true. I went though such a pilgrimage myself from the year I entered college to about age 30. I was raised Roman Catholic, but did not know the Bible. I came to know it well over this stretch of time. I also read and studied many of the apologists covered in this story: C.S. Lewis. G.K. Chesterton, John Henry Cardinal Newman, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I also read Kierkegaard and Barth. In the end, I saw that all these apologists fell short and that the Bible was full of contradictions and more often than not fostered hate and violence. I am no longer surprised that most Christians in Nazi Germany lined up behind Hitler, or that Trump has such a large Evangelical and right wing Catholic following. (Attorney General Barr, for example, is a member of the fascist Catholic lay cult, Opus Dei).
As I read the tragic story of Peter Fromm, I also thought of many I knew who are still following certain paths that Fromm experimented with: rigid Biblical fundamentalism that ignores the contradictions, the fantasy believer who sees in The Lord of the Rings a cosmic war between God and Satan, the Kierkegaard-Barthian who engages in the blind leap of faith, the college friend who became president of an evangelical denomination that is hostile to gay people.
It is also no surprise to me that younger generations have lost interest in any of this. As even the Bible says: "the tree is known by its fruit" and the fruit is rotten. These generations quickly ascertained that it's all about politics and has nothing to do with human kindness.
===========
Corroboration from archaeologists.....
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
=========
On the topic of C.S. Lewis, American evangelicals have tried to turn him into some kind of infallible plaster saint. What they are not acknowledging is that as a scholar he was skeptical about the Bible on a a matter that completely overthrows the theology of some of these groups.
https://bloggingtheology.net/2016/05/...
========
Some still idealize the Reformation. They are mistaken. We know the abuses of the RC Church, but this is the ugliness of what a return to the Bible wrought....
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
=========
author bio....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_...
=========
Young people bolting from the churches....
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/...
May 8, 2007
Must read-3
April 29, 2018
I loved this book. The only reason I didn't give it 5 stars was the writing was a little off at times. Unfortunately the audience for this book will be quite small. For me, I have and am going through the journey of Peter Fromn and it resonated with me very personally. I liked the theological digressions, though at times they assumed knowledge that even I didn't have (let alone someone who did not grow up in a protestant church) and were a little dry. I thought the narrative arc was well conceived and pulled the narrative along. I kept wondering where Peter would end up and why he collapsed in church.
The afterword was bizzare in that the author explained all his choices and symbolism (as well as saying "this isn't really autobiographical" , and then proceeding to show how autobiographical it is).
I came to the story with no knowledge about Gardner and half way through read up on him. It was interesting having the before an after especially considering the voice of Homer. I had assumed it represented the author and was overbearing and know-it-all. Realising it was just a character made more reasonable.
The author has done a wonderful job of making a story seem incredibly real. This is a must read for anyone struggling with what to believe about god.
The afterword was bizzare in that the author explained all his choices and symbolism (as well as saying "this isn't really autobiographical" , and then proceeding to show how autobiographical it is).
I came to the story with no knowledge about Gardner and half way through read up on him. It was interesting having the before an after especially considering the voice of Homer. I had assumed it represented the author and was overbearing and know-it-all. Realising it was just a character made more reasonable.
The author has done a wonderful job of making a story seem incredibly real. This is a must read for anyone struggling with what to believe about god.
May 7, 2009
Update***
I finally found this book and finished it! I can give a full review now. The climatic moment is pretty crazy. I think it made this book worth a read, maybe a skim if you don't enjoy all the lengthy parts.
For the most part my opinion hasn't changed. I guess I don't mind reading it through once, but I do believe that there are probably books similar to this that are not as difficult to get through. For me there were maybe three chapters in this book I liked reading.
***
I didn't actually finish this book, but was very near the end, which is a bit frustrating. I lost the book and haven't been able to find since.
My impression of the book was slightly different from what I ended up reading. It seemed like a very dry read and I'm not sure if I really liked the perspective, but perhaps the idea was to give a sort of objectiveness to it.
The actual journey and overall of the book I think was interesting. However due to length and the writing I'm not sure I could really sit down and read it again. A good book, but I wasn't as blown away or moved as I hoped to be.
I think this would be more interesting to the people into theology or those who can relate more easily to the characters.
I finally found this book and finished it! I can give a full review now. The climatic moment is pretty crazy. I think it made this book worth a read, maybe a skim if you don't enjoy all the lengthy parts.
For the most part my opinion hasn't changed. I guess I don't mind reading it through once, but I do believe that there are probably books similar to this that are not as difficult to get through. For me there were maybe three chapters in this book I liked reading.
***
I didn't actually finish this book, but was very near the end, which is a bit frustrating. I lost the book and haven't been able to find since.
My impression of the book was slightly different from what I ended up reading. It seemed like a very dry read and I'm not sure if I really liked the perspective, but perhaps the idea was to give a sort of objectiveness to it.
The actual journey and overall of the book I think was interesting. However due to length and the writing I'm not sure I could really sit down and read it again. A good book, but I wasn't as blown away or moved as I hoped to be.
I think this would be more interesting to the people into theology or those who can relate more easily to the characters.
September 27, 2017
Not sure where I heard about the book or what made me pick it up. My greatest problem (purely my own) was that I read the book as non-fiction. Then began to reflect afterwards whether or not it was true. Nevertheless the sentiments and philosophies of the author are likely a true depiction of his thoughts.
One needs to be well versed in philosophy and religion (especially Barth) to keep up with the author's telling of the development of the religious mind of Peter Fromm. I'm certainly a novice at the reading and all the quotations that are listed in this book though the names.
On a side note, the author seemed to himself be a little obsessed with communicating the details (many unnecessary) of the sexual escapades of young Peter. (See the chapter on Queenie). There were several places in the book where he took the time to describe a young ladies figure or their notice of her when it wasn't necessary.
I guess my most important concern with the book was the arrogant attitude of the author as he described Peter's spiritual development. Even his patience with Peter was guised in "just give him enough time and Peter will see the true light of the resurrection and the Incarnation".
Don't think I could recommend it to anyone even though the storytelling is compelling.
One needs to be well versed in philosophy and religion (especially Barth) to keep up with the author's telling of the development of the religious mind of Peter Fromm. I'm certainly a novice at the reading and all the quotations that are listed in this book though the names.
On a side note, the author seemed to himself be a little obsessed with communicating the details (many unnecessary) of the sexual escapades of young Peter. (See the chapter on Queenie). There were several places in the book where he took the time to describe a young ladies figure or their notice of her when it wasn't necessary.
I guess my most important concern with the book was the arrogant attitude of the author as he described Peter's spiritual development. Even his patience with Peter was guised in "just give him enough time and Peter will see the true light of the resurrection and the Incarnation".
Don't think I could recommend it to anyone even though the storytelling is compelling.
August 23, 2016
Was given this over 30 years ago and only just found time to come to terms with it. The novel is not a masterpiece in the sense that, say, Tolstoy is. Will defend five star ratings for Leo to anyone. Will not defend this five star rating. This book appeals deeply to me—others' mileage will almost certainly vary based on how familiar or deeply alien the worlds this book describes are to them. Vast portions of its topography—geographical and spiritual—are utterly recognizable terrain. Gardner's encyclopedic knowledge of Christologies and theologies and the world of the University of Chicago and secular humanism—everything in this book seems made to touch strings I still and will always vibrate to. Tells the story of a callow Pentecostal evangelical who enters the divinity school at the University of Chicago and how his faith evolves. While it is a great story, if you don't have patience with sometimes brisk and overly familiar explanations of long-rejected arcana of theological debate, you will find it difficult to plough through and perhaps enjoy it less.
November 14, 2008
I will admit that at times I had a difficult time reading this book. I do not have an academic background in theology and have not heard of many of the theologians and their arguments that are expressed in this book. During those sections I had to force myself to continue and I am glad that I did.
In the end I loved the story of Peter, a student of theology, and his journey and crisis of faith. Raised as a very orthodox Pentecostal he attends a liberal college of theology. To his credit he is very open to examining and questioning the very fundamentals of his belief systems and redefines much of what had been his Christian based belief system.
The last four chapters of the book were well worth the time and effort. I won't spoil it but I found myself both laughing and crying as his crisis reached a climax. In many ways I can relate to his examination of his faith and the dissonance that it causes.
In the end I loved the story of Peter, a student of theology, and his journey and crisis of faith. Raised as a very orthodox Pentecostal he attends a liberal college of theology. To his credit he is very open to examining and questioning the very fundamentals of his belief systems and redefines much of what had been his Christian based belief system.
The last four chapters of the book were well worth the time and effort. I won't spoil it but I found myself both laughing and crying as his crisis reached a climax. In many ways I can relate to his examination of his faith and the dissonance that it causes.
April 16, 2012
The Flight of Peter Fromm is a novel of ideas. In this case, the ideas are philosophical theology ideas. It's kind of enjoyable if you know the theological ideas and people, as the book's narrator gives it's commentary on the various ideas and figures. The book is the story of a fundamentalist who goes to college and who loses their faith in an orthodox notion of God over a period of time, and the book is about the various ideas passed through along the way. A major aspect of the book is the tension between being a truthful traitor and admitting one's deviations from an orthodox faith, or being a loyal liar and avoiding admissions that may disrupt the faith of more traditional believers.
Just a note: This book is assigned at seminaries, so if that adds credibility, then just take it at that. I ended up finding this book off of the list used for an Apologetics class taught at a local conservative baptist seminary.
Just a note: This book is assigned at seminaries, so if that adds credibility, then just take it at that. I ended up finding this book off of the list used for an Apologetics class taught at a local conservative baptist seminary.
July 31, 2008
Another book read during Div. School. It’s kind of a right of passage of sorts at the U of C, where the book is set. It was great fun reading the book which referred with such accuracy to so many of the places where I spent so much of my time. Not to mention the fact that the main character has a little bit of a breakdown, and one of the wisest things said to me during those three years came from a student a few years ahead of me who told me as long as I had the perspective to think I was going crazy, I would be fine. It was when everything around me appeared normal that I needed to worry. An asided – there were several profs who actually had this on their syllabus. I think it was an intro to the New Testament class. Not the intro to the New Testament class that I took, though.
July 14, 2016
A not very original story about a simple, naive fundamentalist going away to the big city and losing his faith. The story is embellished by making him a boy wonder pentecostal preacher who goes to a modern (1930s modern) seminary where is is exposed to progressive Protestantism and mentored by an atheist Unitarian minister. Boy suffers a crises of faith and possible PTSD breakdown.
I thought the more interesting and problematic character was the mentor narrator, an atheist, protestant minister, a "loyal lier". His story might have been more original.
All the big names, Barth, Tillich, Bonhoeffer, C.S. Lewis, Niebuhr, Schweitzer, Kierkegaard, Chesterton (?) were dropped and disparaged.
I thought the more interesting and problematic character was the mentor narrator, an atheist, protestant minister, a "loyal lier". His story might have been more original.
All the big names, Barth, Tillich, Bonhoeffer, C.S. Lewis, Niebuhr, Schweitzer, Kierkegaard, Chesterton (?) were dropped and disparaged.
July 30, 2010
Great book on Christianity, religion.
July 6, 2015
Never has the cover of a book so screamed, 'Grandma's nightstand', nor been at such odds with the brilliance of its content.
December 16, 2020
A very eye-opening view of the decline of religious belief in the 1940s. Peter Fromm is a seminary student who loses his faith. The story is told by one of his professors who, despite being a seminary professor and pastor, does not believe in God or the truth of the Bible.
October 5, 2025
Excellent book, but it was too depressing to finish.
April 29, 2020
Brilliant and challenging. Reads like fiction at some points and non-fiction at others in a way that is fascinating and intoxicating. This book has given me much to think about.
January 1, 2024
Read this for one of my Theo classes in college. Incredibly sad story. One of my most disliked reads.
April 30, 2017
This novel has been in the back of my brain since I first heard of it back in the mid-1970s. I didn’t even remember WHY I thought it would be interesting. Recently, in a used bookstore, I ran into the novel again. Adding to my intrigue was the realization that it had been authored by the great Martin Gardener. Now I KNEW I had to read it. And, I am so glad I did. The novel is almost impossible – in less than 300 pages it essentially reviews all important religious (mostly christianity-related), psychological, political, and economic movement of the 20th century, even physics theory is covered, through the eyes of a struggling young born-againer seminary student and his Unitarian-Universalist agnostic/atheist professor. The story runs from around 1919 up through the early 1970s. What is amazing and impossible about this is that Martin Gardner manages to make this both an interesting and VERY readable narrative (though you do have to have some background in some of the topics to fully understand what is being said). How he kept it going without it bogging down under the weight of its subject matter(s), I don’t know. A great read – reminded me of a modern version of Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh.
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