OUR CHANGING WORLD

 

I met recently with a men’s Bible study made up of old-timers around Denton, a class that has been meeting for almost a half century, but not connected with any church. They presently meet in a funeral home. They meet early and swap old stories over coffee, then settle in for what is “church” to a number of them, while others hurry off to meet their wives and attend some church. A lady comes in just long enough to play the piano for a few songs, and then takes off. After prayer they study the Bible together in about as unsectarian a way as you can imagine. The day I was there an old acquaintance of mine, a lawyer in our city, read a paper written by a former judge of the Texas Supreme Court on the trial of Jesus from a jurist’s point of view. It was so well done and so moving that I conned him out of a copy. The judge praised the Hebrew judicial system in the time of Jesus as eminently fair, and as even more exacting for justice than our modern systems. An example is that in the Great Sanhedrin, the Jewish supreme court where Jesus was “tried,” a guilty sentence could not be passed on the same day of the trial, while an acquittal could be. He noted that almost all the safeguards for justice were ignored in the case of Jesus. Anything for a guilty verdict! Even by having the trial at night, which was one of the violations. I was not only impressed by the paper but also that a bunch of old cronies get together like that to study together. Maybe that is what the kingdom of God is like in our time. It is like old fuddy-duddies getting together in a funeral home to swap yarns and study the Bible together.

In early March I had to leave Ouida sick to be part of the 20th anniversary celebration of a merger of a Church of Christ and a Christian Church in Normal, Illinois. I was with both churches back in the days when they were talking and praying it out. In 1971 they effected a union and became one congregation on the basis of what they had in common. They have had two decades of both spiritual and numerical growth, with two Sunday morning services. I was pleased to be on the program with the highly-esteemed Bruce Parmenter. Ouida was worse when I returned, a respiratory infection that really laid her low, the sickest she has ever been, and for a time discouraged her and zapped me. Our niece, who is a nurse, helped with Mother Pitts, who, like a baby, has to have attention regardless. We eventually turned to a new doctor, an ear-nose-throat specialist as well as an allergist, to attend to Ouida, who put her own a powerful and expensive antibiotic. There is some suspicion that her problem was an allergy. We thank God that she is now almost back to normal.

The Christian Standard, a journal that circulates primarily among Christian Churches, is this year celebrating its 125th anniversary, which makes it the oldest continuously published journal in the Protestant world. When President Bush sent congratulations he expressed an awareness that one of his predecessors in the White House, James A. Garfield, was one of the founders of the paper. He also quoted from President Andrew Jackson to the effect that the Bible is “the rock on which our Republic rests.” President Bush said Jackson said that because he knew that the Bible shaped our forebears’ concept of individual liberty and their vision of a free and just society. We join President Bush in congratulating the Christian Standard.

We sometimes hear that the Roman Catholic Church discourages the reading of the Bible. That would be news to Pope John Paul II who recently issued this statement from the Vatican: “The Church recommends the reading of the Word of God as a source of Christian prayer, and at the same time exhorts all to discover the deep meaning of Sacred Scripture through prayer “so that a dialogue takes place between God and man. For ‘we speak to him when we pray; we listen to him when we read the divine oracles.’”

There are encouraging signs that Churches of Christ have begun to take a critical look at the way they have been interpreting the Bible. Books published by the ACU Press have called for a closer look at the way we have treated the Bible, and a seminar is soon to be conducted at Harding Graduate School of Religion on biblical interpretation. Two representative men, Bill Swetmon of Dallas and Jimmy Jividen of Abilene, will present different views on the old Church of Christ dogma of “the authority of the silence of the Bible,” which is the mother of our factions and sub-factions. I know and respect both men. I hope that they will not only hang our dirty linen on the line, but do a little scrubbing while they are at it. I want the “traditional” view to be well presented so that it can die a noble death. This can be done with due respect for our well-meaning forebears who invented the dogma in an era of debates between brethren that should never have happened to start with.