My God and I by Lewis B. Smedes
**Overview of "My God and I" by Lewis B. Smedes**
"My God and I" is an autobiographical work by Lewis B. Smedes that explores his personal journey of faith, struggle, and transformation within the context of a Calvinist worldview. Smedes, whose family emigrated from Friesland in the Netherlands to the United States, faced significant challenges early in life, including the death of his father and feelings of isolation during his adolescence. His quest for understanding God led him through various educational and spiritual experiences, including a pivotal moment when he discovered a theology book that shifted his perspective on divine acceptance.
In this narrative, Smedes reflects on his intellectual and spiritual development at institutions such as Moody Bible Institute and Calvin College, and later his teaching career at Fuller Theological Seminary. He shares profound personal trials, including the loss of a premature child, which prompted him to reevaluate traditional beliefs about God's sovereignty and human suffering. Throughout the book, themes of friendship with God, the importance of hope, and the nature of Christian ethics are explored.
Smedes emphasizes that hope is essential for navigating life's complexities and suggests that meaningful conversations can occur between believers and non-believers despite perceived differences. Ultimately, "My God and I" serves as a testament to Smedes's evolving understanding of God as both Creator and a nurturing presence, fostering a deep relationship marked by gratitude and a yearning for connection in his later years.
On this Page
My God and I by Lewis B. Smedes
First published: Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2003, with introductions by Rod Jellema and Jon Pott and a coda by Cathy Smedes
Genre(s): Nonfiction
Subgenre(s): Autobiography; meditation and contemplation; spiritual treatise
Core issue(s): Calvinism; ethics; forgiveness; friendship; hope
Overview
The maternal grandparents of Lewis Smedes were from Friesland, the northernmost province of the Netherlands. Their daughter Renske (her name was later shortened to Rena), after marrying Melle Smedes, sailed to America and settled in Muskegon, Michigan. When Lewis was two months old, his father died, and the family struggled to make ends meet. As an adolescent, he became convinced that he was one of the reprobates, chosen by God for damnation before he had been born. He describes himself in high school as a lonely loser, someone to be pitied. If God was present during this time in his life, he did not make himself known.
Upon graduation from high school, Smedes moved to Detroit to work at Smedes Steel, his Uncle Nick’s company. After one year he left to enroll at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago in the hope of coming to terms with God. Although this hope was not realized at Moody, his coming to terms with God took place in the chance discovery of a theology book in a used bookstore near Moody. The book taught him for the first time in his life that what he needed to do was to stop considering his own acceptability or unacceptability and allow God to accept him.
Next he enrolled at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He describes it as a serious liberal arts school operated by Dutch Calvinists who wanted their children to get the intellectual equipment they needed to serve God and bring a patch of his kingdom into his broken world. Smedes converted to this brand of Calvinism, and it was the faith that sustained him for the rest of his life. At the same time he joined the Christian Reformed Church because it had a great vision of God as the Creator and Redeemer of the whole world and because of its orderliness, sobriety, and respect for education. He liked the practice of baptizing babies into the family of God, not treating them as lost sinners who still had to walk down the sawdust trail to be saved.
After earning his bachelor’s degree, Smedes spent one year at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia and subsequently returned to Grand Rapids to study at Calvin Theological Seminary. He married Doris Dekker during this period, and after seminary graduation they set off for Amsterdam, where he pursued his doctorate at the Free University. Having successfully defended his doctoral dissertation, Smedes served a small congregation in Paterson, New Jersey, located in a rundown section of town. After a few years of serving this multicultural community, he was invited by the Calvin College Board of Trustees to become a teacher of religion and theology at the college. He immediately developed a fondness for Calvin students. Calvin students were not like the students at Ivy League universities, but what they lacked in academic achievement they made up for in Calvinistic seriousness.
A few years after they arrived at Calvin College, Doris Smedes gave birth to a premature baby who lived for only a few hours. This shaped Lewis’s beliefs about God. John Calvin had taught that all things happen when and how and where they happen precisely as God decreed them to happen. Smedes could not believe that God had arranged for the tiny child to die before he had barely begun to live. He learned that he could not accept such hard-boiled theology. The Smedeses adopted three children.
In 1968 Smedes received an invitation to spend a year teaching at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. Halfway through the year after arriving, he joined the faculty as a tenured member. There he spent the rest of his working days.
For several years, Smedes suffered from severe bouts of depression. While undergoing a course of intensive psychotherapy, he lived in a secluded cabin for a couple of weeks. During this isolation, he seemed to hear the voices of his family and closest friends saying “I cannot help you.” Then God came to him and said, “I will never let you fall. I will always hold you up.” After that day, his depression was never again severe.
When Smedes retired from Fuller Theological Seminary, people asked him what he planned to do in retirement. Sometimes he replied that he was going to develop a closer relationship with God. They usually chuckled in view of his already close relationship with God, but he was serious. Abraham was God’s friend, and Smedes wondered why he could not be close friends with God. Part of the problem was that he found it hard to think that God could like him and admire him. In old age, he finally began to believe that he was someone God could admire. Toward the end of his life, he was finally on the way to really believing that God wanted to be his friend—not instead of, but besides, being his Maker and Redeemer.
In his old age, Smede had two primary feelings about God: gratitude and hope. When he was young, he hoped that Christ would never come, that Christ would stay in heaven and leave him alone. In old age, he yearned for Christ’s presence. Soon after he wrote My God and I, that hope was realized.
Christian Themes
Lewis Smedes’s approach to Christian ethics is based on the doctrine that God is a triune God. First, God the Father shows his creatures what is right and what is good. Second, God the Son has shown these creatures a new ethic, a more excellent way of following the old one, which involves an unselfish love. Third, the Spirit of God opens our eyes and ears to see and hear the voices of the human situation, which requires a moral decision.
Smedes discusses the relation between believers and unbelievers by developing a bridge metaphor. Some Christians hold that the differences between believers and unbelievers are so great that no bridge can be built to allow these two groups of people to conduct meaningful conversations with each other. Smedes finds this view faulty, and he holds that believers and unbelievers have enough in common to cross over and learn from one another.
Smedes subscribes to the Calvinists’ worldview, which he describes as follows. First, God made the world good. Second, human beings brought evil into the world near the beginning of their arrival. Third, in the end God will come to make the world good again. Fourth, in the meantime, his creatures are to create some imperfect models of the good world that will one day come about. In addition, we are to live with hope. Hope is a blend of three psychological ingredients: a dream, a desire, and faith.
Sources for Further Study
Smedes, Lewis. Forgive and Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don’t Deserve. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984. This volume explores the phenomenon of human beings forgiving one another.
Smedes, Lewis. How Can It Be All Right When Everything Is All Wrong? San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982. When human beings experience great evils in their lives, it is difficult to understand how God allows them to occur. This book is an original and insightful treatment of this difficult problem.
Smedes, Lewis. Mere Morality: What God Expects from Ordinary People. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1983. Smedes’s views on ethics made accessible to a popular audience.
Smedes, Lewis. Sex for Christians: The Limits and Liberties of Sexual Living. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1976. God’s expectations for Christians involving sexual practice and conduct.
Stob, Henry. Ethical Reflections. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1978. Stob was an influential teacher of Smedes and had much to do with shaping his ethical views.