John Updike (1932-2009)

Updike's Middle-Class God

Like all great novelists, John Updike used fiction to explore, explain and expose truth. "One thing that's given me courage in writing," Updike once told an interviewer, "has been this belief that the truth, what is actual, must be faced and is somehow holy."

For Updike, who died Tuesday at age 76, that search for holy truth often involved the lives of small-town, middle-class Protestants. His people. Updike was the grandson of a Presbyterian minister. He was raised in the Lutheran church in Pennsylvania, but joined the Congregational church as an adult. In his later years, he became an Episcopalian and dated a Methodist chaplain.

The prolific author liked to joke about his lifelong "tour of Protestantism," and that he "never quite escaped the the Christian church," but it's clear that mainline Protestant theology formed the spiritual foundation of his work. "My subject is the American Protestant small town middle class," Updike told Jane Howard in a 1966 interview for Life magazine.

In a 2004 talk at the Center for Spiritual Inquiry in New York, Updike said his classic character, Harry Angstrom, was infuenced by his study of Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish Christian philosopher. Other characters such as Rev. Fritz Kruppenbach and Rev. Tom Marshfield were influenced by Updike's reading of theologians Karl Barth and Paul Tillich.  Read ita all here

Religion and Theology in Updike's  novels

At a talk on religion in his work Thursday evening (Nov. 18) at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in Manhattan, Updike told the audience of 300 that his Christian faith had “solidified in ways less important to me than when I was 30, when the existential predicament was realer to me than now. … I worked a lot of it through and arrived at a sort of safe harbor in my life.”

While much of his earlier work contains traces of Updike’s furious immersion in Christian theology, he said he looked more to the congregation of his hometown Massachusetts church as the rock of his faith today.

“When I haven’t been to church in a couple of Sundays I begin to hunger for it and need to be there,” he said, standing at a podium in front of the altar, against a backdrop of Byzantine-style mosaics and dressed in a gray suit befitting one of America’s elder statesmen of letters. “It’s not just the words, the sacraments. It’s the company of other people, who show up and pledge themselves to an invisible entity.”

As a young man studying at Oxford in the mid-1950s, Updike said he devoured new translations ofSoren Kierkegaard at Blackwell’s bookstore, discovering him “so positive and fierce and strikingly intelligent, like finding an older brother I didn’t know I had.” He pointed to his classic character Harry Angstrom, of the Rabbit tetralogy, as an example of the Danish philosopher’s influence. The Swiss neo-orthodox theologian Karl Barth informed another character in the first book of the series, the Lutheran minister Fritz Kruppenbach, who faces off with an Episcopal priest in a scene Updike chose to read. Upon going to Kruppenbach’s house to discuss Rabbit’s desertion of his family, Rev. Eccles is treated to a diatribe against meddling in others’ affairs. Kruppenbach sounds like a stand-in for Barth himself.  Read it all 

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