Midlife Meditation

I never expected to bump into Randy. It was the summer of 1984. I was scouring the Pacific Northwest for my first teaching job, driving for interviews on the coast, in the rain forest, the desert, the mountains, in both Oregon and Washington. In between these trips, I frequently stopped off in Salem to visit my friend Scott, occasionally sleeping on his couch. During one of these visits, Scott introduced me to a friend he'd made in law school, who, to Scott's surprise, I'd actually known for nine years. Randy was a fellow alumnus of Philomath High School, where he'd graduated the year before me. He'd gone to college somewhere in Portland, taken a year off or something, then come to Willamette. Randy had always been an irritating person to have a conversation with, stubbornly worrying at an argument until I felt like chewing off my oratorical leg, which made him a perfect candidate for the legal profession. In the years since I'd last seen Randy, he had ho...

  This. Is. A. Book.   So spoke the seminary professor after throwing a Bible to the floor and stomping on it. I never witnessed this act--it was years before my arrival at Perkins--but it was a story the professors I knew loved to tell. I don't remember the name of this particular professor, but I wholeheartedly agree with the point he was making to a shocked classroom of East Texan Methodists: idolatry is a sin. Anything besides God can be made into an idol, including, perhaps especially, this book. And yet Christians of every persuasion routinely assign it more weight, power, and authority than the God it supposedly tells them about--the one this very book quotes as saying not to make idols of anything, including books.   You may, like those East Texan seminarians, be in a state of shock that I am casting aspersions on this book. You may consider it the Word of God. You may even consider it the inerrant Word of God. If that's the case, it's best you s...