WHERE KENNEDY WAS SLAIN

Already since that fateful day of November 22, 1963, I have passed the site of the assassination a hundred times. The scene is a part of home to me, and it has been nearly all my life. I remember when they built those underpasses through which the presidential party was to have passed. And I have many times had the same feeling that Jackie Kennedy said she anticipated: “It will be cool in the tunnel,” even though I have long since become better adjusted to Texas heat.

The site of the tragedy is but a stone’s throw from the postal terminal where I mailed Bible Talk for five long years. And that little journal, the predecessor to this one, is one thought that would often come to mind when I passed what we Dallasites call “the triple underpass.” I would think about how a little paper like that could arouse so much thought and reaction --- what a furor it stirred up! But I don’t think about Bible Talk anymore when I drive through the triple underpass. My mind is upon that fantastic event that transpired there. Over and over I say to myself as I look at the scene once more: How could it have happened --- and here of all places?

Still as I fancy in my mind’s eye the movement of the presidential limousine, which I can spot exactly in the street by way of the photographs, and then look at Oswald’s perch up in that old building where I once applied for a job when a teenager, which is so far away for anyone to be shooting with any expectation of hitting his mark, especially a moving mark, I simply cannot believe it. That a shipping clerk in a warehouse could take his rifle to work with him one morning, wait at an open window for the president of the United States to drive by, and then shoot him dead, is still incredible to me. I have to accept as fact that which is too fantastic for me to believe. When I read in the press that Europeans are skeptical about it being that simple, I sympathize with them completely. And the Jack Ruby part of the story is even more fantastic, for it is true that one just doesn’t walk into a major police station. and shoot the world’s most famous criminal. I am like the Europeans, for I don’t believe it either!

And there’s Jack Ruby in the County Jail, just across the street from the assassination site, where I have called on prisoners through the years. Though I drive by all this nearly every time I go to Dallas, I still shake my head in disbelief. The most amazing tragedy in American history took place here --- here in my home town, right here! It is something like having bloodstains embedded on the front steps of your home, always there to remind you as you go in and out. Mystery has a way of frustrating us.

A strange aspect of November 22 in my life was a conversation that took place at the faculty table in the dining room at Texas Woman’s University, minutes before the tragedy struck. One professor had just heard the president’s speech in Fort Worth over the radio, and he was explaining how unimpressed he was. Another professor, who knew something about the precautions that were being taken in feeding the president, told us how the chef in Dallas set aside the choicest steak for him, but that the Secret Service instructed him to set aside twelve steaks for the president, and then when the time comes to make preparation, select one of them at random, as a safeguard against attempted poisoning of the president.

Then one of the professors took off on something she had read about how Kennedy was due to be assassinated due to the year in which he had been elected, which left me very much unimpressed. There was then an expression of uneasiness about Kennedy being in Dallas where something could happen to him. I recall one professor saying, “Well, if he has to be assassinated, don’t let it be in Dallas!” At that very moment Oswald must have had the president of the United States in his telescopic sight!

I walked out of the dining room back to my office where I had an appointment with one of my students. In a little while the student was in my outer office with a transistor radio, which I casually noticed was doing a lot of cutting up, even for a presidential visit, which I assumed it was covering. I opened the door and invited her in, asking her why there was so much excitement. She stunned me with “President Kennedy has just been assassinated in Dallas.” She said it quietly and reverently.

When I leave downtown Dallas, drive past the site of the tragedy, and on through what Jackie Kennedy called “the tunnel” onto the freeway that goes to Denton, and as I pass the Mart where the president would have eaten one of those twelve steaks the chef cautiously set aside for him, I invariably think about all of it all over again.

“Come now, you who say, ‘Today, or tomorrow, we will go into this city, and we will spend a year there, and we will trade and make a profit.’ People like you do not know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life like? You are like a mist which appears for a little time, and’ then disappears.” (Jas. 4)

November 22 was an auspicious day for John F. Kennedy. He had health, youth, and vigor; he had a beautiful wife and lovely children. He was the president of the United States. His future could not have been more promising. He was once asked what he would do after his eight years in the White House. His reply was that he had not yet decided, but that he would still be too young to retire. This is the man that left Washington one day in the fulness of earthly glory, but who returned the next day as a corpse in a box, his head half shot off.

It is difficult for us to see that each day of our lives is just as uncertain as November 22 was to John F. Kennedy. How could one be more secure than to have the Secret Service and the FBI guarding him, even to the point of standing over cooks when they prepare your food. Still there could be no certainty. “People like you do not know what will happen tomorrow.”

“Boast not thyself of tomorrow, for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth” (Pro. 27: 1). The Stoics, who could probably philosophize about things like the Kennedy tragedy better than most Christians, taught: “How foolish it is for a man to make plans for his life, when not even tomorrow is in his control.” Socrates also talked more like a Christian than many of us do when he rebuked one of his disciples who had said, “I will do so if you wish, Socrates:’ The old master said to him: “Alcibiades, that is not the way to talk. And how ought you to speak? You ought to say, ‘If God so wishes.’”

It may take cruel reminders to make us realize that the future is not in our hands. God is the Ruler of the universe, the King of all kings, the Lord of all lords. The future is His just as the present and the past are His. “In Him we live and move and have our being.” We may have plans for the future, but they may not be what God plans for us. We must ever be of that disposition that says, “If the Lord wills, we shall live, and we shall do this or that.”

One of the inconsistencies of the tragedy in Dallas is that of all the interpretations that were made by this so-called Christian nation of what had happened, there was no theological interpretation given, none that I heard at least.

“He was not, for God took him” is a sober reminder from the Bible that God rules in the affairs of men, that He is active in the struggle between nations, and that He is the author of history.

ON WHAT CHURCH TO LOVE MOST

I have such regard for Prof. W. E. Garrison, the venerable patriarch of the Disciples of Christ, that I read anything he writes with great respect, and it is with reluctance that I question any of his conclusions. There is one point, however, in one of his recent pronouncements that I would like to question, believing that it may prove provocative to our readers.

In an address before 1,475 ministers of the Disciples of Christ at their recent International Convention, the professor spoke of his own spiritual birth and long years of experience among the Disciples. He identified himself with “the mainline of Disciple principles and traditions,” and said that he felt himself bound “to this particular fellowship of the faithful.”

Then he added: “This is not sectarianism. It is not that we love other Christians less, but that we love our own family of faith more. In the words of Charlie Weaver, ‘these are my people.’”

While it may appear innocuous enough for “the grand old man of the party” to speak to his own people in such sentimental terms, I fear that it reflects a basic fallacy that is too much with us --- the us being all groups of discipledom. Dr. Garrison refers to the Disciples as “this particular fellowship of the faithful.” Is there more than one fellowship in Christ? Does not the fellowship include all Christians? “God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord” (1 Cor. 1: 9). And is any denomination “a fellowship” within the larger fellowship? “That which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you may have fellowship with us; and our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ” (1 John 1:3).

My own affiliation is with what we call the “Church of Christ,” but I think I err if I view this as a particular fellowship, for my fellowship is not with any denomination, but with the Father and the Son. If any of my “Church of Christ” associates happen to be saints of God, and surely many of them must be, then we are together in fellowship with Christ, and consequently with each other. And if Prof. Garrison is in Christ, he is in the fellowship with Christ. This makes us brothers together, not in different fellowships, but in the only fellowship there is --- Christ!

I do not intend to be quarreling with the venerable Disciple historian merely about words, for my objection goes deeper than phraseology.

He says, “This is not sectarianism. It is not that we love other Christians less, but that we love our own family of faith more.” It just may be that this is sectarianism, and that most of us are guilty. Why should I love the “Church of Christ” or the “Disciples of Christ” more than the Baptist Church or the Episcopalian Church? If I believed, of course, that one of these churches is the one and only church, the one for which Christ died, while all the others are pagan, it would be consistent to love it just as Christ loved that church. But if I believe that the body of Christ is not to be identified with any particular group, but is rather scattered amongst them all, then my feelings will be different.

I find it difficult to muster much love for any denomination. If I know my heart, I love all the people that make up these churches, and I can claim a special love for all those who are Christians indeed, wherever they may be found.

If the man who truly loves Jesus happens to be a Baptist, I love him no less than a “Church of Christ” member that truly loves Jesus. They are both my brothers in the same way and the same degree. I have no half-brothers in Christ.

I cannot love a man simply because he is identified with the “Church of Christ” or the “Christian Church,” except as I would love any man. If he is indeed a child of God, then he is my brother, and I love him as I do all my brothers in Christ, whether he worships beside me or not.

So I must dissent from Prof. Garrison when he loves “Disciples of Christ” more than other Christians. Why should he, if it be not in some way related to denominational pride? I can understand how we can love one Christian more than another, as Jesus did John, but this would not be because one is in “my church” and the Other is not. I might love a man more because of the many experiences we have had together, the toils and sufferings we have shared, and the mutual joys that are ours, but such a man might be an Episcopalian or a Methodist. I love him more, not because of the church he grew up in, but because of the closeness we share together in Christ.

When the Bible says, “Love the brotherhood” (1 Pet. 2: 17) I cannot see that it is speaking of the “Church of Christ” or the “Disciples of Christ,” but of all those who are in Christ Jesus. This idea of having splintered brotherhoods, one of which we love more than others, does not appear to me to be true to the spirit of Christianity.

PAUL AND THE COMPUTER

Those who have concerned themselves with problems of textural criticism are aware that there is a question as to whether Paul wrote Ephesians, First and Second Timothy, and Titus. I recall a paper I did at Harvard in which there were several quotations from what are called “the pastoral epistles,” which were attributed without question to the apostle Paul. My professor wrote in the margin: “Many scholars would be offended at your assigning these letters to Paul.” As I recall my days at Harvard it seems that I was about the only one in my class that dared to suggest that Paul wrote these books.

It appears that critical study of the New Testament scriptures has about reached the place where it is willing to question the assumptions of yesteryear. Though scholarship has long assumed, with some good reasons of course, that Paul could not have been the author of these letters, it is now reconsidering. In a recent issue of Expository Times, published in Edinburgh, Scotland, Prof. A. M. Hunter of Aberdeen, in a survey of New Testament studies over the past quarter of a century, has a few things to say about Paul’s letters and the scholars. As to whether Paul wrote Ephesians or the pastoral epistles, the Scot assures us that scholarship has not been able to reach unanimity over the past twenty-five years. The “liberals” at the big universities are going to have to be less sure than they were when I was in graduate school, for they then made one feel odd if he took the traditional position. Prof. Hunter concedes that the scholars are by no means agreed on this. To be sure, there are top-flight scholars who defend Paul’s authorship of these letters.

During the past year or so there has been a sensational development in this area of study. A minister of the Church of Scotland has taken the problem of Pauline authorship to the computer. After feeding his machine the pertinent information, the results showed that of the thirteen epistles attributed to Paul in the New Testament he was the true author of but five of them: Romans, First and Second Corinthians, Galatians, and Philemon. May we assume that our electronic age has at last determined the authorship of these books? Prof. Hunter, who tells about this in his survey, hardly thinks so. Computers have their place, the prof admits, but it all depends on what kind of information is fed into them as to the answers they’ll give.

The professor advises. his fellow Scotsman to test his computer on none other that the old Scot bard, Bobby Burns. “We suggest to Mr. Morton as a Scot that he try his computers on, say, Tam O’Shanter and The Cotter’s Saturday Night to discover which of them (if either) was written by Burns.”

This computer idea may prove helpful in other areas of Paul’s life and work. If Paul lived in our time, which church would he choose? (One writer was sure he knew the answer to this one, while I’m sure I don’t) Was Paul more of a Greek than he was a Jew? Was he the minister of a church after the likeness of the modern pastor, some of whom (especially among us) are sure they are doing it “just like Paul did”? And what would be his reaction to some of our efforts for more fellowship and brotherhood? Then there are the more crucial issues of the purpose and destiny of humanity, the existence of so much evil and the problem of freedom.

Or are the crucial issues such ones as congregational cooperation, orphanages, premillenialism, open membership, Sunday School, and how the Lord’s Supper is to be served?

Shall we follow the enterprising Scot and take all these questions to the computer? It might not be a bad idea, for we would all surely get the answers we are looking for. In one respect a computer is like the Bible: it has a way of saying what we want it to say!