Lewis B. Smedes. My God and I: A Spiritual Memoir. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2003. xix + 178 pages.

Reviewed by David R. Larson
(August 25, 2003)

Lewis B. Smedes died on December 19, 2002, shortly after completing this book. The world-famous theologian and author of such classics as Mere Morality, Forgive and Forget, and Sex for Christians never recovered from a serious fall at his home in southern California. Retired from Fuller Theological Seminary since 1995, he was 81. He was one of the most impressive persons I have known.

Smedes was a big man in every sense of the term. At six feet three inches tall, he towered over many. Yet it was the hugeness of his soul that impressed most. Although some in his community of faith thought him too liberal, he was a true evangelical, a genuine personification of good news. He wrote, preached, taught, and prayed; he also listened. He had a mind that treasured ideas and the feelings they always embody. He was also fun!

Lewis Smedes understood the hurts of others because he had suffered so many of his own. He tells us about his childhood home in Muskegon, Michigan, where his widowed mother, an immigrant from the Netherlands, supported her five children by cleaning the homes and washing the clothes of wealthier families. He tells us about his loneliness and sexual indulgences in high school and first jobs, his ups (usually academic) and downs (often social) in the colleges, seminaries, and universities at which he studied, and his frustrations with Christian fundamentalists. He tells us about the death of his long-awaited infant son, his cherished wife’s breast cancer, and the challenges of being parents of three adopted children, one of whom was a handful when a teenager. He also tells us something that we detect on our own: Lewis Smedes struggled throughout his entire life with the feeling that he was worthless.

"For years—most of my life in fact—I have not found it easy to think that God could like me," writes Smedes (160). "Love me, yes, no problem; it is much easier to love unlovable people than it is to like unlikable people. To be liked, a person has to be likeable and that’s that." Fortunately, this is not the whole story. "Today, in my old age, I have begun to believe that I am someone whom God does admire," he also writes. "True, there is a lot of rubble in me that he does not admire at all, and a lot he has to forgive. But I believe—God help my unbelief—that he also admires me" (164).

Although he does not list them this way, it is apparent from his narrative that Smedes’ tendency to loathe himself had at least five sources. One of these was the economic and social precariousness of his childhood. A second was his physical awkwardness. Being very tall and much too thin made him uncomfortable about his appearance in his early years. A third factor was theological. Smedes was reared in one of many Christian communities that sometimes attempt to exalt God by debasing humans. This is always a mistake, one with malignant and lasting consequences.

A fourth factor was Smedes’ relationship with his mother, a connection made even more complicated than it usually is because she sorely missed the father he never knew. He tells us that he learned of the love of his heavenly father from the love of his earthly mother. He also tells us that his mother was capable of repeatedly quoting his "born again" brother with approval: "Peter says that you are rotten, Lewis, yes, Lewis, rotten, Peter said so, yes, Lewis, Peter says that you are rotten" (18).

Perhaps the most important factor in Smedes’ lifelong struggle against depression was biochemical, something that was easier to address in the last portion of his life. "I must, to be honest, tell you," he writes, "that God also comes to me each morning and offers me a 20-milligram capsule of Prozac. With his medication he clears the garbage that accumulates in the canals of my brain overnight and gives me a chance to get a fresh morning start. I swallow every capsule with gratitude to God." (133).

Smedes had a splendid sense of humor. He tells us that he was once interviewed by a committee of two hundred (yes, two hundred!) for a teaching position after he had spent too many hours in an airplane because of bad weather. Suspicious of his theology, the committee’s first question focused on his understanding of hell. "I replied," he writes, "that, on that particular day, I thought of hell as being seat-belted in a fully packed 707 flying with a crowd of strangers over O’Hare airport for all eternity" (65). He did not get the job!

"I must admit that my distaste for fundamentalism comes from a deeper well than an intellectual disagreement about the Bible," Smedes writes. "I do not have the constitution a person needs to be a fundamentalist; the literalism and absolutism of fundamentalism run against the grain of my nature" (141).

Two things delight me about this confession: that Smedes pinpoints what causes many of us to feel uncomfortable with fundamentalism and that he takes these feelings seriously instead of dismissing them as of no theological significance. "Who cares about your ’constitution’ or ’the grain of your nature’?" some fundamentalists may reply. Smedes holds that Scripture is important, overridingly so; but our experience also counts, as do the Christian heritage and secular reasoning.

Smedes writes that, as a young man growing up in a church that emphasized biblical prophecies, he hoped that the End would not occur too swiftly, but that as an old man he often feels impatient that things are taking so long. "Because they measure the flow of events by the shortness of our lives," I wish I could ask him, "aren’t both attitudes worthy of reconsideration?"

I am certain that Lewis Smedes would take no offense at the inquiry. He would pause, slowly smile, and then reply with a thoughtful answer, or perhaps another question!

© 2003 Spectrum/AAF