Notes from a Travel Diary . . .

THE PROFESSOR AND HIS POODLE

My travels often take me into the homes of believers who are terribly discouraged by the status quo, and who are hopeful that my presence will help them to minimize the burden of hanging in until the church gains more maturity. Such was the case in a recent visit to a college town in Mississippi. By way of this publication I became a correspondent with a young history professor, and then through him I began to hear from a music professor, both with doctorates in their fields. Learning that I ventured forth in a simple ministry of encouragement, they asked if I might come their way. They were wi1ling to gather a few concerned friends for what if might be worth.

One of the preachers in the area that was invited became alarmed that I was coming around, and since panic is a weird contagion his calls to the elders of this town upset a number of people. Someone called an absolutely sound teacher at one of our Tennessee institutions to get confirmation that I was an absolutely unsound teacher. Whereupon the elders, protecting the flock from an invading wolf as only faithful shepherds would, called in the first professor referred to, informing him that he would forthwith and summarily be withdrawn from if he invited any of the congregation into his home to hear me. He was allowed to invite the other professor since he too was responsible for my coming, but that was it, except perhaps for a few preachers around who surely would not be damaged by such exposure.

Showing more conciliation than many free men would, the professor agreed to such terms, explaining that the main reason for my coming was to be with them and that I had not insisted on a large gathering. But still he was embarrassed by all this, and he assured me that he would understand if I cancelled the trip. I responded that such reaction as that was old hat to me, that I understood, and that I would come on if he still wanted me to. It was under those conditions that I flew into the Bayou state, being met at the airport by the two young professors, who turned out to be among the most delightful people I have ever met. The first afternoon of conversation was worth the trip, but the three of us were hardly prepared for what happened to us that weekend.

It was that day that I met Lisa, a poodle that I went for even though I don’t normally take to poodles. Lisa is obviously intelligent, her keen eyes sparkling in a solid white background, immaculately groomed of course. One almost has to go for Lisa, in self-defense if on no other grounds, for she is effervescently friendly, once she is adjusted to your being around. She now has a male companion, another poodle named Bozo, who appears to be extremely nervous, it being said of him that he suffers from an inferiority complex in the presence of the elegant Lisa. But Bozo should not feel inadequate, for he is always receiving caresses from the professor’s lovely wife, while Lisa must be content with being a man’s favorite.

The first night there we had an assembly of six or eight men, mostly preachers in the area who do not “fellowship” one another. They do not get along nearly as well as Lisa and Bozo, but they faired better than usual that night since they had me as a common concern. It was a meeting of limited success, I would say, for I can no longer get excited over situations in which brothers have come to debate. But the two profs had a good time, so that was all right with me. The next night was better, for the two small families and I dined quietly together and talked about our common problems around an open Bible.

The two brothers and their wives have had a hard time of it in their congregation, the situation being such that their spiritual needs have not only gone unsatisfied, but their desire to be free men has been consistently frustrated. Though still respected teachers in the local state college, their classes have been taken from them in the congregation. Though dedicated and faithful, they are accused of being liberal with all its attending implications. Their reasonableness has a sweetness and gentleness about it that I wish I had more of, which was manifest in their unnecessary capitulation to the browbeating tactics of an eldership who presumed to dictate whom one can invite into the privacy of his own home. A fearless eldership would have said, “Dear brothers, if it is important to you to visit with this man from Texas, then it is important to us. Frankly, we are uneasy about some things we have heard about him, so if you are going to be inviting our people to hear him, we too would like to come along just to satisfy ourselves about it all.” But even in the face of such gutter tactics as threats and reprisals they yielded in a spirit of love and tenderness. I commend the spirit of the sheep to the shepherds!

When Sunday morning came my hosts thought I might want to visit a congregation other than their own, perhaps one of those represented in the preachers’ gathering on Friday evening, a “non-cooperative” group or a Christian Church. But I suggested that we go to their own Church of Christ as they usually did, except that I did not want to be an occasion for upsetting the preacher, making him feel obligated to preach to me, however indirectly, to the boredom of everyone, including me. Having observed on Friday night that he is the kind that comes with prepared notes to meet a new brother, I figured he might not be able to stay with a lesson hopefully designed to edify the saints, but would have to give me some special attention if I were in his audience, at least through innuendo. But I grossly underestimated his lack of discipline in this direction!

It turned out to be the ghastliest experience at a Lord’s day assembly that I recall, and it was surely the fiercest, rudest, and most inexcusable behavior I have ever witnessed on the part of grown men claiming to be disciples of the Prince of Peace. Not only was my name called repeatedly in the minister’s remarks, but I was branded as a false teacher with sinister purposes. An assembly of some 300 souls, who presumably gathered to hear the Word, were warned that this dangerous heretic was sitting in their very midst, that they were not to speak with him, accept any literature from him, or have anything to do with him.

I had a few copies of Restoration Review in my Bible and had just given one to a brother sitting next to me. “He’s talking about me,” I whispered to him, thinking he might want to hand me back the contraband lest he get caught with it. “I figured that,” he said in reply, but he kept the copy nonetheless.

Not only was I scolded for forty minutes or so, excerpts from my writings going back for 20 years being read in what must have been to the utter confusion of the audience, but the names of the professors were called as part of a plot, and the “secret meetings” in their homes were maligned. This incredible rudeness bewildered me, for what else could those men have done to satisfy the demands of their leaders for the sake of peace? They received an OK to have me in their homes, restricted in attendance to those cleared by the elders. Now they were being berated in spite of their conciliatory spirit. I am used to being the subject of such ecclesiastical madness and clerical gyrations, and have accepted it as part of the role of a reformer, but it hurt me deeply to see these good men abused in their own church. After all, I would be moving on, while they would have to live in the situation on and on.

One would have supposed that that would have been enough, but two of the elders joined in the fracas. One of them commended the minister for his courage, exposing a false teacher in their very midst as he had done, and he issued further warnings against me, telling the people to accept no invitations to any meetings. The second elder further exposed me, informing the assembly that the false teacher in question had tried to do his evil work in the morning class and that the elders had defended the gospel against my onslaught.

In my heart of hearts I had to demur in what both men said. It is hardly courageous to be a bruiser. Any fool can browbeat when he has the protection of the sacred desk, reserved only for himself. It is more daring to join in an open forum, where those that are accused have an opportunity to present the other side.

The class that the elder referred to, a small group of no more than eight or ten, was studying the confession. They had presumed the confession to be “a step” in the plan of salvation, one of five steps in fact: hearing, faith, repentance, confession, and baptism. I pointed out that the confession has no such place in scripture, that the relevant passages such as Ro. 10:9-10 apply to the believer’s continual profession of Jesus. I observed that there is no such step in any of the cases of conversion, except in the instance of the eunuch in Acts 8, which is conceded to be an interpolation and is thus omitted in other versions. I pointed to the difficulty of finding such a “step” in the conversion of the Pentecostians or of Paul.

The elders disagreed with what I said, which was all right with me, but I could hardly see it as a defense of the gospel. Not only was I not denying the gospel, but was trying to protect it from the arbitrary traditions of men. I’ve even known of cases where people were re-immersed because someone overlooked “taking their confession.” Walter Scott, that great pioneer preacher, is the one who gave us the five-step technique, to which I have no particular objection. But his five steps were: faith, repentance, baptism, remission of sins, and the Holy Spirit. He left out the confession and added the Holy Spirit, which I presume to be a double perversion of the gospel!

Bless us, if ignorance were a virtue, we would be an illustrious people.

Well, that was a mad Sunday in Mississippi. It was all so incredible. The minister’s sermon was on liberalism, with me serving as the arch liberal. He defined the term to refer to those who interpret the Bible subjectively, allowing it to mean whatever their feelings dictate, but not really accepting it authoritatively.

Only three days before I had lectured to a college class in Dallas on existentialism and had drawn an important distinction between subjective and objective views of truth, pointing out that existentialists favor the former. By way of illustration I observed that the charismatic movement has existentialist elements, subjectivism being one of them, especially in the notion that the Spirit continually reveals truth to one’s subconscious. I identified my own view of truth as objective, believing as I do that God was not only objectively (really and concretely) in Jesus, but that the truth He vouchsafed to the apostles and prophets is propositional. And so our feelings must always be judged in the light of what the scriptures reveal in propositional truths and not the other way around. The students probably thought me to be old-fashioned.

And here I was in my own church and among my own people being accused of what I have always taught against. There is nothing in any of my writings that remotely suggests anything but an adamant stand for the objective nature of God’s revelation in both the Living Word and the written Word. But I have learned that when men’s suspicions have been aroused against one there is little that he can do except to pray for saner days. If one shows benevolence, it only confirms that all his talk about love and brotherhood is part of a sinister plot.

If he humbles himself and tries to make the best of a situation, it only reveals his feigned sincerity. If he turns to reason and seeks to answer resourcefully, he is only showing off his insipid education. If he resigns in silence, he is but acknowledging the weakness of his cause. If he goes elsewhere to church, it confirms that he has no conviction and that he “fellowships anybody and everybody.” If he ventures to meet with his own, he is up to something. It would indeed be a frustrating situation for anyone who has any other ambition but to please Jesus.

While the preacher was doing his thing, I was having thoughts that he could never have guessed. I thought of the occasional brother through the years who has bothered to apologize to folk like Carl Ketcherside (whose name was also called) and me for just such outbursts against us. In a unity meeting one preacher confessed his long-harbored hatred of me, saying that he now loves me. Sometimes they write, sometimes they call by, to say they are sorry for what they said years ago. Oftentimes they themselves are being berated as they once berated. So I chose to entertain that possibility with this man. “Father, forgive him, for he doesn’t realize what he is doing,” was my prayer, and in my final greeting, I told him that I loved him and invited him to visit me in Denton sometime.

He and the elders sinned against their own congregation more than against me. They moved them to near violence, verbal if not physical. One brother, a complete stranger to me, accosted me with no greeting at all, accusing me of dividing a church somewhere in Louisiana, a town that I had never heard of, much less visited. Another brother was brutal, consigning me to hell if I did not repent. I put a hand on his shoulder and asked him how he could afford to serve as judge and jury over the souls of his brothers in the light of warnings against such in scripture, quoting one of them to him. “Ah, you just use verses like that to your own advantage,” was his reply. I reminded him that he really had no idea about what I believed. He assured me that he had all the information he needed from what the preacher had said. It was all uncanny!

A brother approached one of the professors and “withdrew fellowship” from him right on the spot, whatever that may mean. An atmosphere of hate, suspicion and rejection had been created in an assembly gathered to break bread in the name of him who urges us to “Love one another, even as I have loved you.”

I apologized to one of the elders for being present, that I would not have been in the assembly had I any idea that I was going to upstage Jesus and be the subject of the hour. “It would have been more edifying,” I said, “if the people could have heard about Jesus instead of Leroy Garrett.” When he proceeded to talk about defending the church against error, I said to him: “Now listen, my brother, there’s no need your playing games with me, for the truth is that you don’t know beans about what I teach. I know it and you know it.” But he did too know my teachings. The previous evening the preacher and the elders had a strategy meeting, and the elders became informed of one Leroy Garrett, heretic, as the preacher read to them from my writings!

I can walk away from such insanity unscathed, realizing that such struggles are part of our ministry to a sick church, but my heart ached for the two teachers and their wives. We had planned to dine out following the assembly, but the group was more interested in prayer and fasting than in eating. Repairing to one of their homes, I tried to explain to them why things like that have to happen. I took the story of Jesus, tracing his pilgrimage from heaven to earth, from synagogue to synagogue, showing how he was rejected by his own people, his own family, his own brothers, and how his home congregation in Nazareth not only rejected him but tried to kill him. Why? He was a threat to them, they thought. Even when he healed the man called Legion, the one with many demons, the townspeople reacted by asking Jesus to leave, for they didn’t want him around. They feared the changes that his power would bring to their lives. Our problem is as simple and profound as that. Never yet in history has a reformer gone unpersecuted.

They responded to it all so beautifully, loving and praying for those who had abused them, and thanking God that they could suffer for His name. The wives showed quiet submission to the Lord’s will, their faces radiant with joy and hope and their lips free of rancor and bitterness. It was a glorious moment that God gave me in His kingdom, a mountaintop experience, a thrilling victory of love over malice. They were hurt, to be sure, but it was the kind of pain that builds strength of soul. The history prof is an especially sensitive man and it was evident that the wounds had cut deep into his soul. But Jesus was there in his heart and I knew he would find victory in letting the Lord put it all together for him. All he needed was time.

Once our session together was over, the door was opened and in rushed Lisa and Bozo with their usual jubilance. The professor, still for the most part speechless, gathered Lisa into his arms. It was as if I could see him reflected in her concerned eyes. Had she not been a dog, I’d sworn she could tell something was wrong. She cuddled in his arms, nestled her head under his chin, and cleansed the moisture from his cheeks with tender licks of her tongue.

At that moment an indescribable horror came over me that chilled the full length of my backbone. Had I been a Frost or a Burns, it might have inspired a poem. The drama before my eyes found me saying to myself, “My God, has it come to this, that a man finds more compassion from a dumb brute than he does from his own brothers in Christ in the house of God.” Only then did I choose to weep, but I didn’t have it in me. —the Editor