The Flight of Peter Fromm Review

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(More customer reviews)This is one heck of an entertaining book. The main reason is this: Gardner's narrator, Homer Wilson, is downright hilarious. Both his telling of Peter's story and his asides remind me of Uncle Screwtape in C. S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters. Throughout the book, Homer subtly spins every story he recounts and every subject he addresses. His descriptions of certain real-life people are especially funny. For example, Homer describes C. S. Lewis, whose works were broadly Christian, as an "Anglican apologist." He describes J. Gresham Machen, who hated to be called a fundamentalist, as "the last of the scholarly fundamentalists." And those are just two little examples of Homer's spinning. It is strangely exciting to read a story narrated by someone you know you can't trust.
_The Flight of Peter Fromm_ is poignant in that Peter is ultimately ruined by Homer's spinning. Reason does not demand the loss of faith that Peter experiences, but the constant influence of the culture in which he lives, which subjects all things Christian to radical doubt while accepting the bases and consequences of agnosticism unquestioningly, eventually wears him down. Fortunately, Peter's end is hardly the necessary one for those committed to the life of the mind.
Finally, this story is eye-opening in that it reveals what can happen to those who are too brash and self-assured. Peter just knew he would convert the University of Chicago; instead the University toppled him. If Peter had been a little more humble he may have emerged from divinity school with his faith alive and enriched and refined.
I would recommend _The Flight of Peter Fromm_ to both agnostics and Christians. Agnostics, as they enjoy the outcome of Peter's story and conclude that that outcome was inevitable, should take a moment to notice the subtle deceptions of Homer Wilson, and at least consider the possibility that they should test their own thinking more rigorously than they usually do. Christians should take a good hard look at the road that leads, step by tiny step, to unbelief, and ask whether reason demands each step taken down that road. Hopefully all readers will appreciate the meticulous research, wonderful details, and humor that combine to make _The Flight of Peter Fromm_ a truly remarkable work of intellectual and historical fiction.

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This 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.

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