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Below, an excerpt from chapter 2.
Sunday afternoons found Donald on the old corduroy sofa, inert, a glass of sweet tea shedding tears of condensation all over a coffee table too wretched to protect with coasters. Most of his parishioners would be in the same position, though alert, not inert, a six-pack near at hand, suffering through the spectacle of the Angels creaming the Yankees with a superstitious attention that reminded Donald of Luther’s dictum: if only I could pray the way my dog looks at a piece of meat. He accepted the dictum but not the beer—there are limits to what post-Holiness piety can enjoy in good conscience. Communion wine was his only indulgence on that score, and he suffered no small amount of ribbing from his colleagues for it. Occasionally Donald considered spreading a rumor that he was a recovering alcoholic, as that seemed to be the only acceptable excuse for abstinence. But he couldn’t quite bring himself to lie.
As a rule, baseball was just compelling enough to absorb Donald’s depleted post-church consciousness, but on this day, by the innocent fault of the Sunday School, he was instead back in the grip of his mental debate with Grandfather Abney.
After the service, Donald had led Bible study for the adults upstairs in the sanctuary while the children trooped downstairs to sing with Mrs. Forrad and Ms. Gross. Afterwards they split up into makeshift classrooms partitioned by dividers hanging from the ceiling. When the education hour was over, Pastor Donald came downstairs to pray everyone safe and healthy through the week ahead before the mass exodus to baseball or football or lunch or shopping in Kuhsota.
But when he arrived downstairs, the children were twitching with excitement, the teachers beaming proudly. Before he could even open his mouth to ask, he was informed that the whole Sunday School had prepared a special treat for him, and wasn’t it lucky that he had chosen Joshua out of all the lessons to preach on that morning? The teachers had decided that chapter 24 was a bit abstract for their small charges, but it was a great opportunity to cover the battle of Jericho—a real favorite when they were kids, how come it never came up in the Sunday lessons?—and they had a song to go with it. Maybe Pastor Donald knew the song. Would he like to sing along?
Of course he did, and of course he would.
Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, Jericho, Jericho
Joshua fought the battle of Jericho
and the walls come a-tumblin’ down.
You may talk about the king of Gideon
You may talk about the men of Saul
But there’s none like good old Joshua
at the battle of Jericho.
Up to the walls of Jericho
He marched with spear in hand
“Go blow them ram horns,” Joshua cried,
“’Cause the battle is in my hands.”
Then the lamb ram sheep horns began to blow
The trumpets began to sound
Joshua commanded the children to shout
and the walls come a-tumblin’ down.
Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, Jericho, Jericho
Joshua fought the battle of Jericho
and the walls come a-tumblin’ down.
They loved the line, “Joshua commanded the children to shout.” Did they ever shout! They marched and kicked up their knees. Asher climbed on the piano while Marilyn played. Donald wrangled him free and set him on his shoulders. Asher played Donald’s head like a bongo. Saul held Kitty’s hand and stood proud at the singing of his name. When it was all over, Donald clapped and cheered and blessed them.
Then he came home, turned on the TV, and started stewing about his grandfather all over again.
It had happened at Thanksgiving during his first year of seminary. Donald, already acquitted of a bout at Bible school, knew full well the dangers of the first semester—the danger of knowing everything, or at least far more than the local clergy dulled by so many years on the circuit. He came home determined not to brag or enlighten. Grandfather and uncles and minister friends of the family prodded him, hoping to lure him into a first-year whopper, or at the very least oblige them with a good rousing quarrel over the foolishness that was being stuffed into his head at that “Luth-ern” seminary of his. Donald remained judicious and humble, to everyone’s great disappointment. But his resolve weakened before Grandfather Abney.
It being hunting season, and in view of the now-dissected bird lying in state on the table, conversation turned to shotguns the hunters had known and loved, which led to imitations of turkeys gobbling, which led to discussion of box calls, which led to speculation about hunting horns, which led to recollection of the role of horns in the Bible—always an immediate and relevant document in any situation, and none the less when hunting was at issue.
“I don’t think they used the horns for hunting,” Donald said.
“Is that right now?” said Charlie Abney. He was a nephew of Grandfather Abney and a first cousin of Donald’s father, home on furlough from mission work in the jungle lowlands of Peru. He smiled, and Donald knew he was hoping for the youngster to rise and take the bait.
“Horns served a liturgical function,” said Donald, in a flat and disinterested tone.
“Fancy vocabulary,” said Charlie with a grin.
“Call to worship,” Donald translated. He put a placid smile on his face. There were appreciative nods; a call to worship was relatable. “I can go you one better on the vocab. In Hebrew it’s called a shofar. Made of ram’s horn. But definitely for praise and worship, not hunting and trapping.”
“Well, unless you count what they did to Jericho,” chuckled Charlie. Various other uncles and cousins chimed in approvingly. Someone mimicked a horn blast and shouted, “Attack!” There was good-natured laughter.
“I’d like a horn that takes out all the bucks in the forest! Just like those walls of Jericho,” said Aunt Helen’s son Wayne.
“Pay good money for that,” said Uncle Mort.
“Well, it didn’t really happen that way,” said Donald before he could stop himself.
He swore afterwards that everyone fell silent, stopped chewing, and as one rotated their necks in his direction with ominous unanimity.
As if in unspoken deference to his age and authority, no one said anything until Grandfather Abney saw fit to break the silence. “What’s that you say now, Donald?”
Donald cursed his big mouth. He considered backpedaling, then cursed his cowardice. The inevitable quarrel would not result in a swift toppling of walls but, at best, a war of attrition. “It’s just that. Well. The archaeological evidence suggests that no such thing as Jericho’s collapse ever took place. It’s just part of Israelite national mythology. Later redactors invented the story. Probably something significant happened at Jericho that they were remembering, but not that. Not the walls tumbling down.”
There were no words, at first, just a resumed chewing of turkey. The various implications of Donald’s speech were being worked out. Then all at once:
“What do you mean the archaeologists didn’t find anything?”
“The Old Testament isn’t mythology; it’s fact.”
“Redactors?”
But Grandfather Abney saw straight into the heart of the problem. He never got distracted by fringe details. “Donald,” he said, staring relentlessly into his grandson’s heart, “have you lost your faith that God works miracles?”
“I’m not sure you and I define ‘miracle’ the same way,” Donald hedged.
“Nonsense,” declared Grandfather Abney.
It was nonsense. Donald knew that well enough. He had to divert the old man, who would shake him like a dog shakes a rat till everything came out. “Look, since the nineteenth century extensive research has been done on the biblical texts. What we now call the Old Testament was the work of four different strands, one from the northern kingdom, one from the south, another from a priestly editor interested in cultic ritual, and the fourth from a Deuteronomist concerned to develop a certain understanding of the law. It’s a really helpful theory, Grandfather. It explains why there’s two creation stories, for instance.”
Grandfather Abney was unflapped. “The first speaks to the unity of the human race; the second, its division into male and female.”
“There are two Noah stories, too. In the first Noah takes only one male and female of each species, but in the other he takes seven pairs of clean animals and four pairs of unclean animals. Why are they duplicated but with conflicting details?”
“The Lord intends us to probe the meaning of each.”
It was a non-answer, but still, Donald felt a little desperate. The minister uncles and cousins and friends were watching him now like vultures preparing for a feast.
Might as well go down for a whale as for a minnow, he thought. “For that matter, all responsible science indicates that the world is much more than six thousand years old. It’s actually billions of years old.” Oh, Lord, why had he gone for that? Wasn’t it better to argue about Jericho than the age of the universe? But, strangely, the latter was familiar territory for debate—Donald had come around on matters of biology and physics already in college—and therefore less threatening. The Jericho problem unsettled him far more, for reasons he could not fathom.
“The Scriptures say the world was created six thousand years ago, Donald,” Grandfather Abney said softly, like a warning.
“But it wasn’t,” Donald said flatly. “What of the dinosaurs? The Scriptures say nothing.”
“The fossils are a test to see whether we believe God’s holy word or our own human devices.” Grandfather Abney returned calmly to his green bean casserole.
“But would the God of truth and wisdom intentionally deceive his own people?” Donald challenged.
“Would he deceive them by giving them a faulty Scripture?”
There it was. Impasse. Donald mumbled his way out of the debate, but Grandfather Abney’s eyes followed him the rest of the evening, peering into his heart again and again, probing his brain like it was the two Noah’s ark stories, and praying, Donald knew, for his soul. Not with fear or anger, but with love and a bit of pity.
Back at school Donald studied with a vengeance, searing the pages of his assigned books with hungry eyes. His fellow seminarians read casually. They liked their theology hot and shocking, but only to other people; the attraction seemed to depend on who would be offended by it. They loved to talk about the theology of the cross, calling this and that and the other thing a cross, bearing all their crosses with a smug wonder at their good fortune. They disposed of Moses’s authorship of the Pentateuch, the miraculous nature of the plagues (all, it turned out, could be explained scientifically), and the parting of the Red Sea as handily as Joshua disposed of the wall around Jericho—except, of course, he didn’t. It was a smooth ride from Jericho to Bultmann. The pinched, unemotional New Testament professor declared with authority that Jesus rose in the hearts of his apostles but not bodily in any tomb. Donald suspected there were other broken hearts besides his in the classroom, in which neither Jesus nor anything else rose but despair. Their faces gave away no more than his did, though, so he said nothing to them and they said nothing to him. At night he went home to yet another cousin’s house where he lived rent-free. If these matters were hashed out in the dorm at night, Donald never heard it.
Either all of it’s true or none of it’s true. That’s how it worked. His uncles and Grandfather Abney said the first, and Donald couldn’t buy it. His professors and fellow students said the other, and Donald couldn’t stomach it. Anything in-between was arbitrary, implicitly making Donald the final arbiter of reality.
One day after a discussion of the absolution of sin in systematic theology class, Donald asked Professor Fenstermacher, “If you don’t believe any of this is true, how do you get away with telling people their sins are forgiven?”
Fenstermacher laughed at him. Donald was funny; all that Holiness baggage. “It is true. People really feel better. They can’t believe it coming from themselves, but they’ll take it from someone else.”
“So it’s just psychological?”
“What’s just psychological about it? Psychology is real.”
“But the forgiveness is a big blank. It doesn’t actually refer to anything.”
“It matters that they believe it. Faith justifies, right? Believe it and it’s yours.”
“But what is it that’s yours if you believe it?”
“Forgiveness,” laughed Fenstermacher again, squeezing himself away from Donald’s further questions.
Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, forgiveness was a snake biting its own tail, and Donald thought about becoming a plumber.
Then the second semester began, and a minority opinion surfaced in the form of a professor who did think that Jesus rose bodily from the dead, and that the “it” you got from faith was not the psychological rattle on the snake’s tail but the risen Jesus himself. The Bible said it, Luther said it, and Dr. Kjaer said it too. As soon as he could, Donald cornered Kjaer and said, “How can you have it both ways? How can you say that Jesus is risen from the dead when Moses didn’t write the first five books of the Bible?”
The professor turned slowly from the blackboard and looked at Donald a good while. Then he smiled. “Apples and oranges, Mr. Abney,” he said.
“But it’s all the Bible,” insisted Donald.
“The Bible,” said Kjaer, turning back to the chalkboard, “is an earthen vessel. ‘Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men’s hands. They that make them are like unto them; so is every one that trusteth in them.’ Psalm 115,” he added.
“I know,” said Donald.
“Do you?” said Kjaer. He smiled again.
“The Bible is an idol?” Donald pressed.
“In your hands,” said Kjaer.
Donald went back to his cousin’s house and took up his Bible. He stared hard at its cover, willing it to disclose its secrets, then dropped it like a hot potato when he realized the idolatry inherent in the desire. “But this is how I know you, Lord,” Donald pleaded in prayer.
A notion came to him. He picked up his Bible again, found Mark’s Gospel, and paged through to chapter ten. Yes, he’d remembered right. Blind Bartimaeus was sitting on the road out of Jericho, whose walls may or may not have come a-tumblin’ down centuries before. “That’s me,” he said aloud. “That’s where I’m at. Sitting in the shadow of Jericho. And I can’t see a thing. When will you come knock down these walls and restore my vision?”
An uncomfortable place to live, for sure. But Donald found, and sooner than expected, that he could actually live there. Not comfortably. But honestly.
Such emerging insight, however, did not grip Grandfather Abney the way it did Donald, even though he tried to explain himself over Christmas, and again over a long weekend in February when Donald went home for his mother’s birthday. Grandfather Abney would not relinquish the either-or. “If you sacrifice Jericho, you sacrifice the one who was sacrificed for you, and that is a sacrifice you don’t want to make,” he said, relishing the rhetoric.
“But why?” Donald pressed him. “Jericho was so long before Christ. It’s buried in a mass of tradition and superstition and nationalist ideology. It’s not like the story of Christ.” Donald felt like an eel saying it, implying that the Old Testament wasn’t as good as the New. He got the impression some of his classmates felt that way, but in Donald’s world there was no preaching of Jesus that wasn’t built on a scaffold of Isaiah and the Psalms and Exodus and Joel and much more besides.
“All of it is about God,” said Grandfather Abney.
“I know it’s all about God!” Donald protested. “I believe every bit as much as you do that Jericho tells us of God and his righteousness. I just don’t think it happened quite the way the story says it did.”
“Donald,” said Grandfather Abney suddenly, leaning forward from his rocking chair, “if Jericho didn’t happen, what ground do you have for saying that a righteous God intervenes on behalf of his chosen people? All you have is an example of something that never actually happened. You can say all you want, ‘God is good, God is holy, God is powerful,’ but if you don’t think the Bible reports to us what God actually did to show forth his power, how dare you assert such things about God at all? You are naught but a liar. A pious liar, at that. The worst kind of all.”
It was just what Donald had implied about Professor Fenstermacher, coming right back at him.
“Preach me a sermon about Jericho, Donald. Tell me it didn’t really happen, yet convince me that God lives and reigns and triumphs over his enemies. You do that, and make me believe it, and you win.”
That was the bargain. Donald accepted it, without the slightest conviction he could ever pull it off.
In the end it didn’t matter. As it turned out, that February was the last time Donald saw Grandfather Abney awake and alert. Just before Easter he had a first stroke. Donald called off his trip out east with Carmichael to meet her parents—only five months together and they were already at that point—and during his frantic drive to the homestead in southern Indiana, Grandfather Abney had a second stroke. Donald got there in time to hold his immobilized hand, whisper his love, promise to honor him with his preaching.
A few hours later Grandfather Abney slipped away. Donald felt that a mighty bulwark shielding him had crumbled and dissolved into dust.