I didn’t start the conversation. In fact, we’d known each other from the neighborhood for a good while, and I knew how heated these conversations could become.
On that day I really probably wouldn’t have struck up this particular conversation.
It’d been a long week, I was drained and niceties would have been more peaceful.
Yet, here my prone-to-argue friend was, just passing by as I was cleaning a mess in front of our old church building in Linda Vista before the morning sun came around the building. She pulled into the lot, then waded right in like Hagler squaring up on Tommy Hearns.
“I got in an argument with the priest down the street,” Peggy said.
“Nice to see you, too,” I said, chuckling.
“Yeah. Hi. But don’t change the subject.”
“What subject?”
“My argument with the priest.”
I really didn’t want to ask, but I did.
“About what?”
“Women’s rights.”
“So the guy down there wants to rescind your right to vote, eh?”
“Women’s healthcare,” she said, daring me to comment with a glare.
So I did.
“He’s opposed to women seeing their doctors?”
“Reproductive healthcare!”
“Ah… he’s against abortion.”
“Not that I care about his opinion…”
“He just offered that up when you ran into him?” I asked, sitting back on a window ledge in the shade in front of the church.
“Well, no. I brought it up. But what kills me isn’t his manly thoughts on the matter, it’s his insistence that God is against women’s healthcare.”
“You mean he says God is against abortion?”
“Well, yeah. But I don’t use the ‘A-word.’ It’s healthcare”
“So you’re upset that a person trained to study God’s word and glean from it holds a different opinion of what God thinks than you do?”
“He’s wrong! God wouldn’t want a woman stuck with a kid she can’t care for or one she’d be miserable raising! No way God would want that.”
“I mean God did carve onto those tablets for Moses ‘Thou shall not kill.” And abortion, euphemistically hidden or not, does terminate a developing human.”
She gasped and started to protest, but I plunged on.
“Where else do you think the Bible got God’s thoughts wrong?”
She stopped, shook her head, then warmed to the task despite my changing the subject some.
“Lots of places. All the sexual morality stuff, the ‘go and sin no more’ baloney, the part that makes men the priests but relegates women to the convent or the dutiful wife role…”
“Do you believe any of the Bible?” I asked.
“Yes! I believe Jesus did all those miracles. I believe he died and rose again.”
“If you believe those things, why do you not believe the other stuff?”
“Because it was written by men!”
“So why believe any of it?”
She looked perplexed.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“I mean if it’s all written by men, prone to corruption and biases, why hold to any of it? If you dismiss the claim that God’s word is divinely inspired because you find your opinions don’t match its claims about God, then how can you trust the virgin birth, the woman at the well, the crucifixion, the resurrection?”
“Well I think those things are important.”
“I agree! They’re very important. I just don’t grasp the reasoning that God was only able to preserve the integrity of the scripture in the places that you approve of. Seems to me that either God got his story, his thoughts, his ways down on those scrolls even using the mere hands of men to hold the quill — or it’s all a bunch of hooey!”
She started to say something, then stopped, taking a deep breath as she leaned back on the trunk of a small tree growing from a heavy concrete planter.
“I’m not trying to be rude, Peg, but it seems there’s three options. And only two of them stand up to reason.
“One is that God revealed himself in his word, showing his ways, giving his law and telling his story for the ages to read, and therefore it’s reliable and to be cherished, held sacred and given over to. That makes sense, given how it’s impacted the world.
“The second option is that men made up a fantastical epic full of imagination and the biases, manipulation and corruption of the authors’ fallible hearts, and it should be dismissed as mere propaganda or entertainment. That also stands to reason, although I’d dispute it.
“The one that makes no sense is the idea that only parts of it are right and true and those areas of rightness and truth align perfectly with the opinions and preferences of each reader. In other words, what’s true in the book is determined by the attitude of millions of differently tuned individual ideologies, whims and wishes.
“That might work for some malleable, interpretive poetry, but it can’t really drill down on universal divine truths, my friend. It’s actually a kind of silly thought.”
“I have to go,” Peggy said. “You’ve given me some things to think about.”
Think about them she did.
Before we moved East, she’d stop by and tell me how she was learning. It didn’t come easy, and she spent a lot of time shaking her fist at God. But she got to know him.
I heard from an old friend that Peggy passed away a couple of months ago. She would’ve been in her early 70s. Now, I pray she’s simply eternal.
Rest in him my once so contentious friend.
The Rev. James Hogan is a native of Stowe Township and serves as pastor of Faithbridge Community Church. His views do not reflect the views of the West Hills Gazette.
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