Patton Dodd's "My faith so far" no "Thus far by faith"

I just finished reading My Faith So Far by Patton Dodd (Jossey-Bass, 2005) am not sure what I think about it. First, I admire the way he writes. He has real potential as a writer, a scholar, and possibly a theologian. My favorite part of My Faith is Dodd's ability to be critical of evangelicalism without ridiculing it.

But on further thought, I have to wonder a little (as other reviewers have) about the appropriateness of writing a spiritual autobiography when one is only thirty years old. Dodd deliberately invites comparison with writers such as Bunyan, Lewis, and Merton when he tells us that "[t]his is a retelling of a very old story: conversion and confusion, acceptance and rejection, spiritual highs and psychological lows." (p. xii) However, it is not really the story of a conversion. His conversion is pretty much summed up in one sentence, "After months of deliberation, I have decided to become a Christian." (p. 1) Rather, it is the story of his gradual disillusionment with mainstream evangelicalism.

One longs for the kind of fear and trembling in Bunyan's Grace Abounding or the intellectual passion in Lewis' Surprised by Joy or Merton's desperate attempt not to hear and heed the call to the monastic life in Seven Storey Mountain. Instead, Dodd gives us an acocunt of how between the ages of 18 and 20 he first embraced the Pentecostal/evangelical experience and then became disillusioned with it. There's value in telling the story; many of us are familiar with his vocabulary of "quiet time," Francis Schaeffer, "name it and claim it," and so on. But even so, Dodd has given us a very small slice of his very young life and his experience of only one corner of the Christian faith.

And then there's his title... Intentionally or not, My Faith So Far evokes the phrase "Thus far by faith," a phrase I associate with black churches in general and the civil rights' movement in particular. And that forces the comparison between Dodd's experience and that of black Christians. A faith that has been tested by racism, prejudice, economic injustice, violence, and systematic discrimination is a faith well-worth writing about. It is a faith that has stood the test. Dodd's faith may indeed be that kind of faith, but his book skates along a bit superficially. There is ample evidence of angst but it is the angst of a middle class white kid, rather than that of a person marginalized by economic and racial oppression.

This is not to dismiss Dodd. Far more of us have gone through the kind of "dim (not dark) afternoons (not nights) of the soul" that he chronicles than the kind of shattering experience of a person who confronted dogs and firehoses in Birmingham.

A Ph.D. candidate at Boston University, I am sure that Dodd must have the intellectual and scholarly equipment to put his faith in the context of Christian theology and history. I suppose he was not aiming his book at middle-aged scholarly Episcopal priests (like me) but at those whose experiences have parallelled his more closely. That being said, he does give a good account of the origins of Pentecostalism.

Finally, I would leave him with this story about renegade Baptist preacher Carlyle Marney:

Once when Marney was speaking at Duke University a student asked him, "Dr. Marney, would you say a word or two about the resurrection of the dead?" Marney said, "I will not discuss that with people like you." Surprised, the student asked,"Why not?" "I no longer discuss such matters with anyone under 30," Marney replied. The student pressed Marney a little harder, "Why is that?" Marney said, "Look at you, in the prime of life, powerful and filled with potential, never have you known honest-to-God failure, heart-burn, real disappointment, weakness, solid defeat, brick walls, mortality. So what can you know of a dark world which only makes sense if Christ is raised?"

That's what I miss about evangelicalism in general and Dodd's book in particular: a sense of hanging on to faith in spite of being nailed to a cross, a light that shines (however dimly) in the midst of real darkness. I am grateful to him for sharing his story but I think I would have appreciated it more if he'd traveled just a bit farther toward that dark place in the midst of the woods from which Dante wrote.