Armand M. Nicholi, Jr., The Question of God: C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life (New York, NY: Free Press, 2002), 295 pages, ISBN 9780743247856.

On Easter Sunday, 1886, Sigmund Freud began private practice in the area of neuropathology in Vienna, the first step in the creation by Freud and his followers of what could be called “the Psychological Century.” Through his considerable self-promotion skills, writings, and lecture tours, Freud established himself as the leading thinker and theorist in the field of psychology; all others wrote and theorized either within his thought or against it. 65 years after his death in 1939, Freud’s theories and teachings still define both the field and image of psychology.

Some 45 years later after Easter 1886, a young English tutor at Magdalen College in Oxford, England, named Clive Lewis, set out in the side car of his brothers motorcycle to visit Whipsnade Zoo. He was as yet unknown and unpublished, apart from one volume of poetry, and still little more than a theist with serious doubts about the claims of Christ. But somewhere along the route to the Zoo, without having seriously thought about the subject, Lewis crossed the line to put full faith and trust in Jesus Christ. He would go on to write thousands of letters, articles, and books and give dozens of lectures until his death in 1963, becoming in the process the most articulate and convincing apologist for Biblical Christianity in the 20^th century—a fact that would have driven Freud to distraction.

Entrance to the Whipsnade Zoo.
Image: Lumos3 / Wikimedia Commons

Both Freud and Lewis had shared the same doubts and arguments against the claims of Jesus Christ, and religion in general, finding both to be irrational and imprisoning to the soul and the intellect of human beings. Both had been comfortably convinced that the path to the happy life and rational existence lay through the uncompromising rejection of foolish religious belief. One died still convinced, the other died converted. Why? And what does their personal story tell us about the general consequences of belief and unbelief, particularly in Jesus Christ?

That is the story that Nicholi tells in his book, presenting a fascinating dual conversation between men who never met, culled from letters, writings and family anecdotes, and pulled together in a compelling way by a master teacher from Harvard. In the US, PBS will be airing a series based on the book this coming October (2004).

Nicholi is well equipped to take us on this journey; a practicing psychiatrist, teacher at Harvard’s Medical School and editor of the Harvard Guide to Psychology, he also spent time personally visiting and talking with Freud’s daughter Anna, and other friends of the great psychologist. The book and the coming PBS series grew out of a seminar on Freud that Nicholi has taught at Harvard’s undergraduate school since 1972, and it is clear that Nicholi has refined the subject matter considerably over the years. The great achievement of the book is that Nicholi has managed to sympathetically present the views of both Freud and Lewis without demeaning either one; such an accomplishment should serve as a model for all apologists for the kingdom of God. Because Nicholi does not interject his own views into the discussion, the reader is left to choose which person’s worldview really did produce a life worth living, and a legacy worth dying for. As Nicholi put it, “Their arguments can never prove or disprove the existence of God. Their lives, however, offer sharp commentary on the truth, believability, and utility of their views” (p.5). It is the lives lived as a result of either the spiritual or the scientific worldview which Nicholi focuses on in the course of the book. “Whether we realize it or not,” Nicholi writes in the prologue, “all of us possess a worldview…we view the universe as a result of random events and life on this planet a matter of chance; or we assume an Intelligence beyond the universe who gives the universe order, and life meaning…Our worldview tells more about us perhaps than any other aspect of our personal history” (p.7). How did the worldview of each man affect how they lived their lives, and what does it tell us about each one?

Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001), 377 pages.

Readers of this journal tend to be inhabitants of the Pentecostal/charismatic movement, and are thus to some degree familiar with the theological terrain of the early Pentecostal movement. Pentecostals have not been, at least in the past, the best keepers of their own history. They have preferred to concentrate on evangelism and propagation in light of the “soon coming return of the King” (as I so often heard it expressed in my home church as a child) rather than wasting time on worldly things like records and oral histories. They did, however, leave a historical record in their printed justifications of their doctrine and doctrinal experiences. In recent years there have been a number of histories, pioneered by Edith Blumhofer and William Menzies among others, attempting to give an account of how Pentecostalism came to be. These accounts have tended to focus on the discovery of the theological distinctive of Spirit Baptism and how that distinctive survived and thrived.

Early Pentecostals defined themselves and were known to the outside world as those who “tarried” in the “upper room” until they had “prayed through” to the “baptism in the Holy Ghost and power.” But what were those believers like outside of the “upper room”? How did they manage to maintain the reality of their experience within the pressures of “real life”? It is this which has motivated Grant Wacker to crawl through the recycling bins of used bookstores and the shelves of archives and Bible colleges to retrieve this lost story. Wacker painstakingly excavates the world of these first Pentecostals because the “ideas, practices, and institutions they set in motion persisted long after their deaths and, to a great extent, continued to define Pentecostal patterns in America at the end of the twentieth century. From them later adherents learned what questions to ask of life and, perhaps more important, what questions not to ask.” (p.8) Wacker sifts through an enormous amount of evidence to allow us, eighty years later, to listen in on and observe the dynamic of the Pentecostal experience in the lives of these believers across the whole realm of human experience, from the upper room to the bedroom.

Heaven Below details the worldview and experience of life among early Pentecostals and the implications of Pentecostal belief in all areas of life, including some areas not previously focused on in standard Pentecostal histories: temperament, authority, rhetoric, customs, boundaries, nation and war, to name a few. All are examined in pursuit of establishing Wacker’s key premise for the book:

The genius of the pentecostal movement lay in its ability to hold two seemingly incompatible impulses in productive tension. I call the two impulses the primitive and the pragmatic…idealism versus realism, or principle versus practicality…Pentecostals’ distinctive understanding of the human encounter with the divine, which included both primitivist and pragmatic dimensions, enabled them to capture lightening in a bottle and, more important, to keep it there, decade after decade, without stilling the fire or cracking the vessel (p.10, author’s emphasis in italics).

The primitivist leaning of Pentecostalism is well documented; early Pentecostals (and many of their present day descendents within the Pentecostal and Charismatic tents) believed that by means of their baptism in the Holy Ghost they had bridged 18 centuries of institutional and experiential obstruction to direct contact with God, as had been experienced by the first believers in Christ on the day of Pentecost and after. But less known and, Wacker argues, less acknowledged has been Pentecostal pragmatism, the success that shows, “that at the end of the day pentecostals proved remarkably willing to work within the social and cultural expectations of the age. Again and again we see them holding their proverbial finger to the wind, calculating where they were, where they wanted to go and, above all, how to get there. That last instinct, the ability to figure the odds and react appropriately, made them pragmatists to the bone.” (p.13-14) Some may take this quote to mean that Wacker is accusing Pentecostals of being mere opportunists, who have naturally followed what works rather than what is right. In truth, some Pentecostals have been anointed more by the spirit of pragmatism than the Spirit of God—in larger truth, all believers in all ages have faced that temptation. But Wacker is not convicting Pentecostals of this; rather, he is pointing out that those first Pentecostals were adaptable and willing to change the way they delivered the message while keeping the content the same. This is perhaps the key lesson to take away from Wacker’s tome; if we are to honor our predecessors in the faith, we would do well to face our own culture with similar flexibility.

The Pentecostal/charismatic (P/C) pastor and teacher comes to the proclamation of Scripture with two critical issues in mind: the need to speak in such a way that he or she becomes transparent and God is seen in transforming power; and the opposite need to speak in such a way that the preacher’s own passion does not subtly misshape the message of Scripture. In other words, the need is to let the Spirit and only the Spirit speak to God’s own people.

Gordon Fee, longtime Pentecostal scholar and educator, sets out to aid the pastor/teacher in this crucial job by offering a collection of essays titled, Listening to the Spirit in the Text (LTST). Written over a period of 15 years, they demonstrate Fee’s passionate belief that “the ultimate aim of all true exegesis is spirituality, in one form or another” (p.5). This is balm to the weary P/C pastor’s heart. Fee defines what it means to be spiritual by saying that “True spirituality, therefore, is nothing more nor less than life by the Spirit.” (p.6) Therefore the aim of unpacking Scripture is,

to produce in our lives and the lives of others true Spirituality, in which God’s people live in fellowship with the eternal and living God, and thus in keeping with God’s own purposes. (p.6)

Fee asserts that proper exegesis cannot be done unless we understand and experience who God is in Christ Jesus just as the inspired penmen did. Having this understanding and experience is made possible only by the grace of God, mediated through the person of the Holy Spirit. Fee urges that for true exegesis, we must do more than merely recognize the spirituality of the Biblical authors. Participating in that spirituality, through study of the text, is what Fee longs for his readers to be doing.

Some of the essays deal with how one goes about properly interpreting the text, while the others demonstrate it in Fee’s own words. This is especially true in regards to the issues of women in ministry, spiritual gifts in the church, and the need for the laity to reclaim their role as the usual ministry within and without Christ’s body. Because LTST is a collection of essays demonstrating a consistent hermeneutic style, Fee can speak to the broad range of issues that plague the P/C movement from a firm biblical basis. The chapter on the Christian and wealth is particularly helpful for those grappling with the health and prosperity currents in the movement. Fee’s essay on the ministry of the laity constitutes a powerful antidote to the authoritarian streak of pastoral leadership that occasionally cripples local churches.

Throughout the collection, Fee’s leitmotif remains steady. True spirituality produces true exegesis resulting in true disciples. As Fee observes in the opening chapter, “true exegesis attempts to engage in the author’s Spirituality, not just in his or her words.” The Biblical authors invited us not to merely hear nice words about Christ, but to believe in and experience the reality of who God is in Christ. Those who would break the bread of life for others must invite others to do this as well if they “are to hear the text on Paul’s terms and not simply our own” (p.11).