Restoration Review: Leroy Garrett, Editor

Travel Letter . . .

IN LINCOLN COUNTRY

I am writing these words in my hotel room in Lincoln, Illinois, where I am giving the B. D. Phillips Lectures at Lincoln Christian College. Writing “on the move” like this is rare for me since I usually have no free time. The lectures, three in all, are on Restoration history and are well received. The college is, of course within the Restoration heritage, related as it is to Christian Churches. This is their first time to choose one outside their part of the Movement to give the lectures, and they are to be commended for such openness. I am sure it would please brother Phillips, who has now gone home. The college generally shows a broader view of things than most of its sister Bible colleges, which is reflected both in its academic ideals and in exposing students to a wide range of influences. They have brought to their campus not only the ubiquitous Elton Trueblood, but the likes of Bruce Metzger and Andrew Blackwood of Princeton (both old profs of mine) and Roland Bainton from Yale. They also have Dr. Robert Ross of the Churches of Christ on their part-time faculty.

Our colleges must do more of this kind of line-crossing. I know of only one instance of a Church of Christ college having a Christian Church brother on its faculty, that being Pepperdine’s one-year appointment of Dr. Robert Fife, whom they borrowed from Milligan. That was great, and surely Pepperdine was blessed for doing it. I am also pleased that Pepperdine and Bethany College are co-sponsoring a seminar on Campbell at Bethany, July 7-9.

I told them in my introductory remarks that God surely does not recognize all these churches we make after our own image. In His sight there is no such thing as Church of Christ Churches, Christian Church Churches, and Disciples of Christ Churches, anymore than Baptist Churches or Methodist Churches. There is but one church, one Body, and it has no name. All of us who are in Christ are in that Body, and the sooner we overcome all our sectarian claptrap the sooner we’ll understand what the Restoration Movement is all about.

Lincoln is a city of considerable interest for its size, being the only city named for the Great Emancipator before he became President. Founded in 1853, the town was named for the popular young lawyer from nearby Springfield who served as circuit judge for this county. Those who chose the name based their decision as much on phonetic value of “Lincoln” as the like ability of the lanky attorney who rode in occasionally to conduct court for them. I am taking a picture back to Texas with me that shows Judge Lincoln christening the town with watermelon juice, an artist’s recollection of the event many years after the fact. The old-timers will be hard to convince that there are melons outside Texas big enough to “baptize” any town.

Henry Ford came here years ago and purchased the old frame court house where Lincoln sat on the bench, bearing it away to Dearborn as a museum piece. Years later the Lincoln cult in the area, realizing that they had been taken, created a replica of the original, which now stands on the original sight in all its glory. A museum on the campus of little Lincoln College (to be distinguished from the Christian college) has a roomful of Lincolniana, including some of Mrs. Lincoln’s dishes and jewelry, and a replica of the chair the President sat in that fateful evening in the Ford theatre.

My favorite piece however, is a statue of Lincoln as a boy with an open book in his lap, gracing the library grounds. “I shall prepare myself,” he is saying, “My chance will come.” That reflects a virtue as uncommon in our time as in the 1820’s. But “being prepared” still wins out a lot of the time even in our own confused culture, especially if you are black.

The Christian college is getting into the act with plans for a Lincoln prayer chapel, which can serve as one more stop on “the Lincoln trail,” which can begin or end at his tomb some 25 miles away. The proposal is moderately controversial. There are still those among us, even here, who tell of how Lincoln may have been baptized by a Campbellite, whisking him away from the White House some dark night or perhaps sometime during the prairie years back in Illinois. It is almost certainly pure myth, but we cherish our myths and do not care to have them challenged. The letter published among us now and again, supposedly penned by the preacher who secretly immersed Lincoln, is surely baseless in fact for lots of reasons. I would be embarrassed for Lincoln scholars to know that any of our folk take this claim seriously.

Anyway, it is no more important that Lincoln was baptized than any other 19th century American or any other President. The myth is born of sectarian pride. “Nixon’s the one” that we ought to baptize, if not actually then mythically. Besides, Lincoln’ is going to be saved by his good works, isn’t he? Surely one can’t save a nation and yet lose his own soul, or can he?

My flight from Dallas to St. Louis (I’m always flying to St. Louis!) was not as uneventful as usual. The lady I sat by, young enough to be my daughter (though I’m not old enough to be her father!) has a phobia of flying. I first thought her tenseness was due to my sitting down beside her instead of the handsome young chap that sat elsewhere. She braced herself for takeoff as if she were getting ready for an electric shock. When we climbed into the overcast, where it was as soupy as inside a bowl of mush, she hid her eyes in her hands and turned toward me as if I might free her from her agony. “You will be all right,” I assured her, and “I understand,” which seemed to help. After all, if God intended us to fly around in a mess of soup like a bunch of wild geese He would have endowed us with wings.

I suggested she watch for the sun, for we would soon be bathed in brightness and that the angry clouds would be far below us, like troubles dropped into a deep pit. As if the pilot had taken the que, the plane at that moment lifted above all the murk and we were free. Life is like that, we decided. We all have to put up with a lot of dark clouds, but we must believe that light will always break through. Believing helps to make it so. For the believer, “the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings,” however long be the night. And healing is what Jesus is all about.

The young lady had a fearless landing in St. Louis. She happens to own a paperback bookstore in Dallas, and I plan to accept her invitation to drop in and see her again, on the ground this time.

Before coming on up to Lincoln from St. Louis, I stopped off for the weekend to be with a campus group at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, called Christians Unlimited, led by the able Don Wooters and Phil Orr, and I addressed the Western Heights Christian Church on Lord’s day. Jack Knopp is the enabling minister for this group, and that describes him well, for he is one of the few men I know who ministers to a congregation with a view of enabling them to learn to build themselves up in love, as the scriptures direct. His task is not an easy one, for his people see his approach as so different.

Sunday evening I spoke at Reed’s Station, near Royalton, where Harold Chastain has been teaching. When he and his family sing for us, which includes his wife Bonnie, I really get turned on, for they are really something else. I told this old congregation that I was pleased to stand where the great Daniel Sommer and J.D. Roady often proclaimed the word, for they take us back to the pioneers of the Movement. This prompted some of the old-timers to start recollecting, but they couldn’t recollect as much as I wanted them to. The ones who knew the old stories are dead and there are no records kept. But I must tell you about Herman and Thelms Sims, who meet at this place. I “met” Herman by correspondence and as a reader of this journal. For sometime he has been sending me expositions on biblical themes, painstakingly worked out in beautiful script that betrays his 70-odd years. Seeing that they love and need company as badly as I, I conned them into letting me spend the night with them.

They live like the simple folk I knew as a boy preacher in the backwoods of Tennessee and East Texas. Herman still lives in the house in which he was born back at the turn of the century, and even sleeps in the same bed. Thelma, whose life has been touched by tragedy, has joined him in more recent years. Not as concerned for “progress” as most of us, Herman has not bothered to put either plumbing or electricity in the house (His mother feared the latter), so I had the pleasure of going to my bedroom with a coal oil lamp in hand. I could hardly await the morning since there were antiques all over the place, the lamp light barely revealing their splendor. They take to hiking all through the Ozarks, bringing back wood and stone pieces that blend well with glassware, dishes, tapestries, and furniture that have become antiques without any effort of their own. “I don’t know how long that’s been here,” Herman would say when I’d ask him about a table or a secretary.

My bed must have been the most unusual that I have ever tried to negotiate with my long frame. Before it unfolds, it stands majestically against the wall, displaying a large magnificent mirror, with fine carved appointments on all sides, done in oak veneer. That piece alone must be worth enough to wire the house for electricity and then some. I retired amidst what seemed to be the gates of splendor. I was surrounded by bric-a-brac, and against one wall stood a stately old organ, beautifully appointed. Thelma’s art crafts were everywhere. The last one to sleep in the old bed, or one of the last, was old brother Jesse Love, who was one of our great debaters in those parts in yesteryears.

Thelma operates both a wood and a coal stove in her kitchen. It was a cold morning on those Illinois plains. Sausage and eggs, butter and biscuits, cold cider and hot coffee, honey and syrup never smelled or tasted so good. At the table Herman shared his views of the coming kingdom, the New Jerusalem come down to earth, the Lord’s reign in Zion. When he described the conversion_ of the Jews, their rebuilding of the temple and the reinstitution of animal sacrifices, Thelma raised the question as to why the Jews, now believers in the Messiah, would be offering animal sacrifices since they would then believe Jesus to be the pascal lamb once for all. I was enjoying breakfast too much to do any more than referee, but I thought it was sweet that they could disagree like that without throwing their antiques at each other. Down Texas way she might be expected to “withdraw” from him. That Thelma is no slouch of a thinker. Not only can she ask devastating questions, but she is something of a poetess. It was only when I was about to leave that I learned of this talent, but I took time to look in on her notebook of poems that speak of faith, hope, and charity.

If their home is filled with love and art, their yard is bedecked with flowers and gardens. Several barns are full of old farm equipment, stuff his father used over those acres in a bygone era. It was incredible. I urged him to get the machinery to some museum before something happens to it. There was a wagon that I had seen only in the old Tom Mix movies, still in excellent condition. In another barn was an old Model T pickup, the like of which I do not recall ever seeing. The barns have weathered the years, being sturdily built by strong hands. It was evident that his father had worked hard and had frugally managed to provide for his little family, only to be killed by a hay bailer while young Herman stood by helplessly, neither of them being well acquainted with the new equipment.

These are my kind of folk and how I do love them and all others like them the world over. The day before I had talked to some of the philosophers at the university. I was in Taiwan with one of them, had shared in a lectureship with another, and had worked with a third on a high school pilot course in philosophy. But these are my people and they are different, and it is in their home and at their side that I am most comfortable. I can see old Herman now, beside his flickering lamp, writing still another page of exposition on the scriptures. He showed me a dozen or so notebooks full of careful and responsible comments on much of the New Covenant scriptures. And there’s Thelma, without even one of the 28 electrical gadgets that we have in our home, writing her poems of love as well as reading her Bible, living as if she has discovered the real point of life.

They are not exactly poor folk, sitting on top of upwards of 100 acres of prime Illinois farm land as they do. They just don’t have much income. Herman taught school a few years, but for a long time he has worked at a dry cleaning establishment. Inflation has cut deeply into their livelihood. Since he has no heirs, I urged him to dispose of some of his land and enjoy more of the comforts of life in these last years, along with some travel that he and Thelma might like to do. Even though Thelma showed signs of liking the idea, I have since had second thoughts.

Why spoil life for them by bringing in a bathroom and a dishwasher? Or electric lights and a vacuum cleaner? There’s something about lifting the chimney of a kerosene lamp with one hand, making a cup with the other, and gently blowing oneself into darkness. And in the evening when one is inclined to repair to the outhouse, he can walk a primrose path, lined with flowers on either side. Sitting there with the door ajar, he can look out over the acreage that his father tilled as a young man and where he has worked since childhood, all gloriously bathed by the moonlight. He can then climb into the same bed in which he came into this world, which is staying about as close to mother’s womb as is possible. On the nights that one is disinclined to walk the primrose path, there’s a “portable,” which is closer and more convenient than the most modern bathroom.

And for one who meditates upon the New Jerusalem come down out of heaven, prepared as a bride for her husband and embellished with all the glory of heaven, realizing that this is for real and it is for him, and that rather soon, what does he care about New York, Istanbul or Taipei? Who cares about seeing the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace when he can anticipate the grandest drama of the ages: angels at the portals of heaven announcing a new heaven and a new earth, wherein dwells righteousness.

Herman, that ain’t bad. How I wish those of the world were rich like you, blessed as you are by Him “who became poor, so that through his poverty you might become rich.” And while I have no way of knowing how the King will put it all together in the Age to Come, if the New Jerusalem is here on this earth. all made new, here’s hoping that He places you right there where you’ve been all these years. I repent. Don’t sell an acre of it (as if you would!), for that will make it simpler when the angel comes by to give you an eternal title to the place, or for a thousand years, or whatever. But one thing is sure. By then you will have blown out your last lamp, for Jesus will be your light. No darkness, never again. what a blessed thought. Not even in Illinois!