THE LEGAL EAGLES
Robert Meyers

Sometimes a phrase sticks in the mind even against the mind’s will. I forget data important to me as preacher or professor, but remember for years the jingle of an old ad: “You’ll wonder where the yellow went, When you brush your teeth with Pepsodent!”

Nor can I forget an old Groucho Marx movie in which the great old comic actor set up for business under the name of J. Cheever Loophole, The Legal Eagle. Partly, I suppose, because I’ve met so many religious legal eagles who belonged to the Loophole family, eternally obsessed with discovering some hidden sub-section of law or with making ingenious inferences from language as tenuous as morning fog.

These legalists define life by rules, and grow so enamored of them that they go about looking for them so as to fit them to every conceivable circumstance. If they do not exist, the legalist contrives to create them. He can fabricate one at the drop of a hat, spinning it off with marvelous dexterity.

To such a man, all of the Bible is a codebook of rules. It is impossible for him to comprehend what Paul meant when he said that the letter kills, but the spirit gives life. He is unable to see that “letter” and “law” are equivalent in this text, and that his legalism is therefore a hopeless, destructive way of life.

Nothing ever illustrated legalism better than a religious debate I heard once in which each man took his stand upon a base of rigid law. They were trying to prove that is was right, or that it was not right, for one church to cooperate with another in certain good endeavors. They used subtleties of argument that would have done justice to the best of medieval scholastics. No Supreme Court lawyer ever quibbled more earnestly over the connotation of a word than these two men over their semantic tidbits.

As I sat there my mind kept escaping from the floodlit arena where the two men boxed at each other with proof texts from Scripture. I thought of Russia and America, two giant antagonists squared off against each other with the most awesome destructive power ever known; of an immense drug traffic which seems out of control; of the evils of poverty, illiteracy, crime, cancer, over-population, tyranny.

This is the world we live in, I thought, and right in the midst of it I had gone to a church building to hear two men discuss whether it is scriptural for churches to cooperate with each other to preach the gospel and do good works!

One man said that each church had to be independent, but that if it sent money to another church for a program like the Herald of Truth, it became dependent. I never quite understood why this had to follow, but he was sure of it. He explained the subtle theological distinctions between being “dependent,” “independent,” and “interdependent.” He drew multitudes of circles on the blackboard, and then put more circles within the circles, and sometimes the mind had difficulty following the logic. But he said that it was all so terribly important that we might be forever damned if we didn’t get it straight.

I couldn’t help thinking about the early Christian folk, not many of them wise, not many wealthy. I doubted that members of the Christian communities in Corinth, Colossae and Philippi could have grasped such subtle distinctions as this man made. He labored for ten minutes to show that a church can send “alms” to another church, but can’t send “money.” The “alms” could take the form of money, but so long as it was “alms” it would be scriptural. My mind jumped wildly to the name of Phoebe, deaconess in the Cenchrean church, and I wondered if she could have gotten that distinction clearly enough to please God.

But it was fascinating that night to watch legalism at work. I saw that when two legal eagles debate an issue from that stance, each spinning out complicated laws from any whispered hint in the Bible, the one who is more clever will always win. It will not matter whether he is right or wrong; he will win simply because he is more ingenious. If he can spin out laws like cotton candy, and make his own prooftexts sound more plausible than the other fellow’s, he will win. If he is glib and authoritative and impressive—if he can crack jokes, wheedle persuasively, thunder powerfully, and come up with fetching slogans—he will win.

Intellectually, I was on the side of the man who said that groups could cooperate. Besides, he was the nicer of the two. But the man on the other side won. His demonstration of legalistic genius was superior; he knew all the tricks in the book. I felt a certain grudging admiration for his skills, though I wondered at the same time how many visiting preachers were squirming a little at the memory of the last time they told a “sectarian” that the Bible was a simple book which all men could see alike if they only would.

I cherish the deep concern which brought many to that meeting. They wanted very much to know what the word of God had to say to them. But otherwise it was a profoundly depressing experience and, surely, a dying game. How many can go on believing that God would balance our eternal destiny on some turn of phrase, or send us irrevocably to hell because we fell victim to the wrong legalist’s creative mind?

When I think of all the ancient quarrels which have divided us and broken so many hearts, I am comforted by a certain poignant tale printed some years ago in Life magazine. It told of the reunion of Union and Confederate troops at Gettysburg one hot summer day back in 1913, fifty years after Pickett’s division had charged toward the low stone wall where the Union’s Second Corps waited. When these old men met, all rancor had vanished, replaced by a feeling which many of them unashamedly called love.

They reenacted the charge and the yells; the Confederates gained the wall and stopped, holding out their hands. The Federals stretched theirs out to clasp them, and the ranks stood eye to eye. There was silence for a moment and a few of the old men began to weep, their tears coursing down into grizzled beards. Those beards had given them the standing joke for the day: “We all wear gray now.” Age had overtaken them, one and all, and reminded them of their common humanity.

On the last day, when all but a few of the old men had departed, two of them dawdled on the railway platform in Gettysburg, reluctant to say goodbye. Repeatedly they shook hands, and finally they threw their arms around one another. Neither was particularly good with words, but both sensed that the occasion called for something more than handclasps and an embrace. The idea struck them simultaneously: on the platform they took off their coats and exchanged them. The Union veteran from Oregon went home in gray, and the Louisiana Confederate in blue.

In our religious civil wars many of us, grown older, have found the love that swallows up differences. Can we find a way to teach younger men, so that they will know their brothers sooner and have no need to go to war at all?