Just Go Straight

Back when I was a fundamentalist member of a Church of Christ sect, I listened to a lot of sermons by a man named Orvil who had little formal education but who studied the Bible a lot. But he did not study it with an open mind. He studied the Bible in order to take each verse, each word, in an absolutely literal manner, and in addition to force it to fit into the sect’s doctrine. He did not believe that the Bible had any figures of speech, any approximations, or any human context of interpretation.

This is not always what the fundamentalist Churches of Christ say. Back in the 1980s I attended some lectures by John C. Clayton, who headed up the “Does God Exist?” ministry of the Church of Christ. I was surprised to hear that he is still alive. In one of his magazines, Clayton said that literalism does not mean that the Bible cannot have figures of speech or approximations. But Orvil would have considered Clayton to be misguided and flat-out wrong. Clayton was, after all, a member of one of the branches of the Church of Christ that ours thought was in error. If Clayton’s church used multiple cups for communion instead of a single cup as Jesus did (I am not making this up), then what else might they be wrong about?

One time, Orvil was telling me about a road trip he took with his wife in their mobile home. He had driven most of the way, and he wanted to rest. He asked his wife to drive. They were on a major interstate and he told her to just go straight.

He awoke to some heavy bouncing. He found that his wife had driven the RV out onto a dirt road. The interstate had curved, but this road was the one that was closest to going straight ahead so she took it. (Even she did not go absolutely straight.)

Orvil told this as a funny story, but if his interpretation of Truth was correct, what his wife did had to be the right thing. She was the literalist in this instance.

Sometimes to follow a road “straight” you have to curve all around, sometimes (as in my recent drive through northeastern Kentucky to visit Cherokee sites) in lots of tight circles. You could call it “Kentucky straight,” although this sounds like a kind of whiskey. For me, the “straight” road is no longer one of doctrine, but of love. I can see Love in the distance, and I want to get there, but there is no straight road to it. All I have to make sure of is that I do not do unloving things during the journey toward it, something at which I have occasional success.