TWENTY YEARS LATER

 I woke up at 2:06 a.m., maybe.  I take midnight arousings to be calls to prayer and meditation. So I began a meditation rehearsing the thoughts of the day's waking hours, or was it a dream state insight?

Four old friends sat together, after a twenty year HS reunion, not wanting the evening to end.  They were in a beer hall or coffee shop, not sure which?!  But, they sat and rehearsed how two decades had taken them down different paths. Matt, Reggie, George, and Jerry had known each other since grade school.  They had even gone to church together as teens.

George asked the group, "... do y'all remember old brother Connor, our teen Bible class teacher?

Matt quickly interjected, "yeah, I remember that old hardhead! He used to hammer us about memorizing scriptures and was always so pushy with the Bible..."

Then, George interrupted, "but, I learned so much from that old man. I remember some of the things that he said about scripture not being broken, and scripture being God breathed, and no prophecy being from the will of man, ..."

Matt then objected, "George, twenty years of being a preacher have warped you.  'Inerrancy'?!  The Bible is little better than fairy tales. It is a collection of victor-written history, troubled by trying to explain why Israel was such a loser if they were the chosen.  And, Jesus, is a rebel who got himself killed.  How Christians have spun that one!  And, the harsh morality of these fanatics who wrote and collected all that self-contradictory Book, shows it to be only one step above Hell.  Moderns have learned to love so much better than those misogynists and homophobes."

"Whoa, Matt!" George countered. "I'd say 20 years as a professor has certainly changed you! Where  in the world did you come up with all of that?!"

Matt insisted, "you need to read more, at least more broadly ..."

We all looked at Reggie for his thoughts on the Bible, and he blurted out, "Inerrancy is a modern construct imposed upon the Bible which assumes that the qualitative reliability of an ancient writing, such as the Bible, is determined by contemporary standards. Thus, people get into this game of trying to determine if every little fact such as a place or date is correct with the assumption that the story and message conveyed is only reliable as true if every last detail is without error. I’m not saying that the Bible has any such minute error but even if it does, the message proclaimed throughout the Bible — the entire narrative — is still reliable as truth because it depends not on any modern construct but on the Spirit who enabled this message, which is based on eyewitness testimonies, to be passed along as a living tradition and eventually told in and throughout a collection of writings..."

We all rolled our eyes, but then Matt interrupted, "nah! The scriptures are only man's best attempt to understand the incomprehensible ..."

"Really?!" Jerry exclaimed.  He had just sat there quietly through most of the brouhaha.  "I spent the last two decades with Uncle Sam.  I've seen a lot that would make me question all of this. I'm just a simple man. But at the end of the day, that old Book gives me a lot of peace and hope.  The promises. The prophecies. The people struggling to walk with God. The principles of love and holiness and so much more. You fellas need to take your shoes off when you're standing on holy ground."