Things That Matter Most. . . No.7

THAT ‘LOVE AND TRUST STUFF’
ROBERT MEYERS

Some things astonish us by their loveliness, some by their ugliness. It is more pleasant to be thrilled by the beautiful than to be shocked by the hideous, so I actively seek the delightful. But occasionally I turn a corner or open a page and find ugliness without intending to. This has just happened to me in reading a bulletin written by a minister I know.

My friend, who would succor a victim on the Jericho road, who loves his wife and kids, who talks and smiles charmingly in the living room, writes bitterly of the premillennialists among us. He says they failed to change the church (i.e., the Church of Christ) by debates, but they are now making great progress “by injecting this ‘love and trust stuff’ into people . . .”

That is an unbelievable phrase. It has to be seen in print to be credited as possible from a twentieth century pen. If one said, without proof, that people still write this way in religious journals, he would be accused of gross exaggeration. Yet I have just read it, soberly printed and mailed out for reading.

I date back far enough to recall vividly the great premillennial controversies in the Church of Christ. I bought all the books and debates on the subject I could find, and I followed Foy Wallace, Jr., around ardently as he fired his heavy artillery at the pre-mills. Later I, the little imitator, fired away at them too, with my BB gun.

I didn’t know any of them, but that made no difference. In fact, it helped, for when one is attacking as I was, it is best not to know people as people. It was years before I got to know some of them personally and had enough time and sense to listen to them. I was not able to agree with their views, but I found them gentle, good people who disliked public controversy. In my own experience they were more often than not pushed and provoked into debate.

But be that as it may, I am most profoundly shocked by the contemptuous dismissal of some of their present-day editors as men who go for this ‘love and trust stuff’. It seems to me that a man may as well scoff at ‘this gospel stuff, this Jesus jazz, this cross bit’. For when one speaks scornfully of love and trust, belittling men’s intentions and refusing to open his own heart to their overtures, he blasphemes the very heart of Christianity. If there is heresy, surely this is it.

When he has finished with his denunciation of the ‘love and trust stuff’, my friend makes judgments about the religious world around him. He says:

“The denominations love the Lord also, according to this (premillennial) editor. I deny it—for Jesus said, ‘If ye love me, keep my commandments’. They do not keep the commands of Christ and therefore do not love the Lord and I wonder just how much liberalism and premillennialism love the Lord today by the way they trod (sic) under their unholy feet the authority of Christ revealed in his word. Beware fellow Christians—premillennialism is not dead, it is simply coming in through another door.”

Poor frightened soul! He has dedicated himself to battling demons and ghosts and things that go bump in the night. He is filled with fears that his doctrine will be corrupted. He sees a hostile world menacing him on every hand. He stirs up his brethren to fear, to hold spear-point at the ready. What a way to live!

We have often been called paranoid, we people of the Church of Christ, and we have resented it, naturally. It is only in recent years that we have been able to speak with much kindness of psychologists and then usually only when they are faculty members of our schools. But perhaps their judgment was not altogether wrong. Paranoia is a form of mental disorder in which the victim feels persecuted and in danger, despite the fact that to others around him no obvious danger can be discerned.

Often the disease has no marked effect on the rest of the personality. A paranoid can be thoroughly charming in all the rooms of his house except one. But if you turn the door handle to that one, dark gloom rushes out and strange, distorted shapes are seen swimming in the murk.

So the pre-mills, as we jocularly called them, are coming through another door. What a gruesome prospect that is. It blots out such minor worries as secularism, population explosions, hunger, war, man’s immemorial hatreds, the H-bomb, and religious liberals. Nasser thinks he has problems! He should have to face the prospect of being infiltrated by premillennialists talking that ‘love and trust stuff’.

And if that isn’t enough, up jumps the old bugaboo of “the denominations.” There in the dark they lurk, fearsomely, with their monstrous faces and their malevolent intentions. I recall how we grew up at home with this scare-word on our lips constantly. We were The Church; everybody else was in Denominations; and Denominations were Awful. We were paranoid, all right. We thought everyone in town was against us but we could hold out, for Christ’s sake and the gospel’s. The truth was that they weren’t even thinking about us, but I suspect that fact would have been too much for us to bear.

How long shall we have to wait before our Bible professors start sending their students to the dictionary to find out what the word “denomination” means? It is time to turn the floodlight on this particular goblin and show all the children that it is only a tattered sheet waving in the night wind. The simple truth is that the word means a thing, person, or group which is denominated, or named. And if the Church of Christ is not named—on signs, in literature, on legal documents, in advertising, on the monthly invoices—then the moon is made of green cheese nibbled by little three-headed mice.

We are informed that these denominational people do not love the Lord because they do not keep his commands. The implication is that we in The Church do. But the bleak truth is that when we speak of keeping the commands, we ordinarily mean a selected group which we have decided are important. Others we overlook on the basis that they are not binding today, or were only customs, or were meant to be understood figuratively.

Such confidence is staggering. This man blithely charges that all the rest of the religious world lies when it claims to love the Lord. Only he and his brethren love the Lord. And not many of them, for a premillennialist is always popping up here, a liberal there, a Herald of Truth supporter yonder, to spoil the wondrous harmony of the Elect. There is, finally, only one end to this line of thought: the only man who really loves the Lord is me, for I understand and keep all his commands—at least all that matter.

Then comes the final warning that we should beware of the insidious premills who are coming to get us. They were not really stomped to death by Foy and his boys (I was one, may God forgive me). They survived that bloody pounding, we being less invincible than we thought, and are now trying to sneak in by another door-the ‘love and trust stuff’ door.

I suppose my friend sees them everywhere, their feet half through the windows, their evil eyes counting the orthodox souls they will soon corrupt. He hears them say they want “love and trust” to prevail everywhere and that they accept him as a beloved brother in Christ, but he knows they are only covering a sinister plot to undo him and his faithful band. So he rejects them.

How very sad it all is, but yet how instructive. For this is the paranoid world many of us came out of, and it is necessary, occasionally, that we revisit it just to be sure we know how to prize our freedom.

Remembering premillennialists I have known over the past twenty-five years, and thinking at this moment of an especially wonderful family here at Riverside who grew up with this persuasion and among these godly people, I am moved to issue this invitation: if there are some premillennialists around who want to slip into Riverside and bring that “love and trust stuff” with them, will they please write at once? Better still, call collect.

We need you, brothers in the lord. We may not agree with your interpretations (we are free man, we often disagree with one another), but we most desperately yearn for more of that “love and trust stuff.”

The doors are open to you. And the windows. We’ll even knock down a wall if you have a regiment on the way. We will take our chances with your literalistic interpretation of Revelation 20. We figure we may get by with the good lord even if we should go honestly astray on that point, but the love and trust stuff we absolutely must have.—Wichita State University