13 — Like the Water? Go Navy!

A few days after my prayer experiment in Santa Cruz, the deposit check cleared and I had the $40 needed for gas on my return trip.  Rather than returning to Madison, I decided to go home to Louisville and figure something out to keep me from being drafted. 

I had been impressed by Loren at the Jesus commune who had recently finished his tour in the Navy.  I thought I might speak to a Navy recruiter about the "delayed" enlistment program that Loren told me about.  

My parents were happy to see me, and my mother didn't seem to be concerned about my new found interest in Jesus.  As far as she was concerned, Jesus had gotten me off drugs, so he couldn't be all bad.  Neither she nor I had any clue that this would lead me down a Christian road for the next 30 years.  And since she didn't believe in God and only occasionally attended our Reform temple, the Jewish vs. Christian stuff was not an issue.

My stepdad had served with Patton in WWII, and he was more than happy for me to be a swabby rather than a ground-pounder.   He too was a secular Jew, and didn't seem interested in my spiritual struggles.  My real father had served in the Navy during WWII, but I was out of touch with him at the time, as was often the case following his divorce of my mom 14 years before.

The following morning I visited the Navy recruiter and signed up with a delayed enlistment date of November.  I sold my car for $600--imagine what a 66 Mustang would be worth today!  I purchased a tent and some camping equipment and set for Santa Cruz.  During this time in California, I began to read the New Testament and tried to become a good disciple of Jesus.  I remember going to some more Bible studies, hanging out at the boardwalk mission several nights a week, and taking a short trip to Fresno to look up that attractive girl that I had met at the Bible study.  

She apparently wasn't my ideal California Girl.  She was a devout Catholic and I never could figure out what the interest was that drew her to those Bible studies.  After a couple of days in Fresno, I returned to Santa Cruz only to run into some other fraternity brothers who were making their way to San Francisco.  I decided to travel with them and experience the Fillmore and the Haight-Ashbury life.  

My frat brothers were wealthy Jews from the East coast, and although they were dabbling in hippie culture, they were booked into nice hotels in San Francisco.  I had to make my $600 last until November, so I sought shelter in another Christian commune.  This one was run by the "Christian Liberation Front", a Jesus freak organization taking their name from the radical political scene.  Their commune was strictly controlled with nightly curfews and the requirement of nightly Bible study attendance.  I just wanted to go hear some music, so we had a few disagreements.

By this time, I had begun listening to taped Bible studies by a pastor out of Houston.  He was a biblical scholar and had a gift for making the Bible applicable to everyday life.  Unfortunately, he was an extreme political conservative, but I wasn't paying any more attention to his politics than I had to the anti-Communist preaching of the mission pastor in Santa Cruz.  

I was more interested in Bible prophecy and had been reading the recently published, The Late Great Planet Earth, by Hal Lindsey.  You may remember this best-selling story of the end times.  Lindsey was the first to take teaching about the great tribulation, rapture and Second Coming of Jesus and make them sound like something from the nightly network news.  I would later discover that Lindsey had been a protégé of this Bible scholar in Texas.  

[In recent days, Lindsey has become an advocate of extreme rightwing views, challenging President Obama's citizenship and losing his show on the fundamentalist Christian TBN television network for saying that true Muslims are violent and moderate Muslims are not true Muslims.]

I had no idea that Lindsey was such a non-thinking extremist, and he probably did not hold such strange convictions in the early 70s.  Nevertheless, I was ripe for the picking as a brand new Christian, birthed outside of any theological influence.  Since I was a non-traditional, outside the established church, "I don't think the traditional church is really Christian," uneducated, straight off LSD, Jesus freak myself, I became fascinated by Lindsey's prophetic outline for the immediate future.

I found myself arguing with the other Jesus freaks at the CWLF commune on this very subject, pulling out Lindsey's book to back my contentions.  Needless to say, I didn't feel welcome there and they were happy to see me leave after a couple of days.  Since I was most likely their first encounter with a "Jewish" Jesus freak, they probably ascribed my contentiousness to my being Jewish.  They may have been partially correct.  One characteristic of my upbringing that remains with me to this day is my wondering spirit.  This leads me to challenge all assumptions, no matter what the source.  That is one of the benefits of having been raised as a Jew.  We are free to question everything, and when it comes to the Bible, we have a tradition of arguing theology that goes back as far as Jacob wrestling with the angel of the Lord.  Our institutions of Jewish learning have always encouraged argument as the best method for getting closer to truth.  Is it any surprise that so many of us Jews have excelled in law, medicine and science?  These three disciplines require posing challenging questions as essential procedure.

I was a wonderer, never satisfied with any answer for long.  And as November brought my new career in the Navy ever closer, I became ever more dissatisfied with the answers I received from my fellow Jesus freaks and the simplistic explanations of biblical prophecy proffered by Hal Lindsey.  

So, if Lindsey had learned under this scholar in Texas, maybe I should go to the source for the answers to my questions.  The pastor in Houston had a worldwide teaching ministry via reel-to-reel tapes which he freely distributed to all who asked.  It turned out that even Craig, Sandy and that strange guy, Al, were listening to his tapes.  Apparently, Al was buying into the conservative politics as well--that is probably why he seemed so out of place in a commune.  He was a social and political conservative living with a bunch of Christian hippies.

[The Houston pastor was Robert B. Thieme, Jr.  He graduated Summa Cum Laude with a Master of Theology from Dallas Theological Seminary.  He left Dallas Seminary before completing the requirements for his doctorate when he became pastor of Berachah Church in Houston in the early 1950s.  Much of Thieme's focus while at Dallas had been eschatalogy, with a special emphasis on the "Last Days" which he believed to be imminent.  

He had taken 5 years of Greek and Hebrew while at Dallas, and with his keen organizational mind, began developing a teaching system centered around historical context, categorical summary, and detailed exegesis of the biblical text.  During WWII, he was the youngest person to achieve the rank of Lt Col in the newly formed Air Force.  He turned down both a military career and a Rhodes Scholarship to attend Dallas Seminary.  

Having grown up in a wealthy and politically conservative California family, he used his inheritance to fund his ministry at the struggling 225 member Berachah Church.  Through his leadership and teaching skill, he turned it into the first real megachurch in the 70s.  Ordained a Baptist in Arizona by his wife's father, he operated the church independently as his own theological fiefdom.  Attendance was between 800-1000 every weeknight reaching 3500 in multiple services on Sundays.  In addition to the church in Houston, there were thousands of "tapers" faithfully listening to his Bible studies individually and in groups all around the world.  He pioneered the use of satellite churches using directed broadcasts via dedicated phone lines to at least a dozen remote locations in the US and Canada.  "Tapers" recognized Thieme as their only pastor-teacher, and in many cases, did not have any other church affiliations.  He asked his followers to call him "Col. Thieme" after his retired rank or just "Bob."  He disliked the title "Reverend" and its religious connotations.

Thieme had influence on Hal Lindsey, Chuck Swindoll and John MacArthur, but his extreme teachings concerning the "blood of Christ" led to his alienation from his mentors and friends at Dallas Seminary.  By the mid-70s, Bob Thieme and Berachah Church had become isolated from the rest of the evangelical Christian world.]

As I began listening to these tape series, I also figured out why the commune's local "scholar" who ran the Bible studies in his Santa Cruz home was so focused on Greek.  Thieme went into agonizing detail expounding on the underlying Greek of the New Testament and Hebrew of what Christians call "The Old Testament."  

Since I was asking difficult questions about everything, it helped to have a teacher with access to the original languages of scripture and for him to share the grammar and syntax that led him to his conclusions.  So, it was no longer just "Greek to me," but something in which I was vitally interested.

Of course, a little knowledge can be dangerous.  And I had a very little knowledge that I flung around at every opportunity.  My limited knowledge of Greek and theology in general would get me into trouble on a number of occasions during my military adventures that were about to begin.

I returned to Louisville in October and was soon on a bus headed for Great Lakes Naval Training Center, north of Chicago.  My basic training would be during the cold winter months which would add to the fun!

I didn't know how confused I was at the time.  Do we ever know how confused we are during the moment?  It is only looking back that we can see how mixed up we are at any time in our history.  I was really of two minds with regard to military service.  I really didn't support the war in Vietnam, not so much because of principle, but more from the standpoint of the threat that it posed to my self-centered lifestyle.  I didn't want to be in the military because I didn't want anyone else controlling my life.  Yet on the other hand, I always thought of myself as a patriotic American.

At some point before my 7 days in May, I had made a short trip to Canada to check out the prospects of moving there to avoid the draft.  After an uncomfortable night spent sleeping in my car in a Toronto grocery parking lot, preceded by a day wandering around by myself unable to meet anyone on a college campus, I returned to Louisville.  I concluded that the Canadians just weren't friendly!  I guess I expected them to somehow notice that I was an American and welcome me to into their homes.  Like I said, I was a pretty confused kid.  It was after that short trip to Canada that I stopped over in Madison and had my LSD trip where I meant Chris and Dave.

I felt strange in Canada.  My whole concept of self was as an American and I had watched all the John Wayne movies, the documentaries about WWII, and had spent weeks pouring over day by day situation maps that my stepfather had left from the Sicily campaign when he had been on Patton's staff.  I was drawn to the romantic appeal of being part of a cohesive military unit--I just didn't want to be an infantryman.  I couldn't really call myself a conscientious objector, because my conscience really had no foundation I could draw on to make a non-military claim.  I wasn't opposed to war.  In fact, I saw the war against Germany as serving a morally good purpose in rescuing thousands of my Jewish kinsmen from Hitler's "Final Solution."  I just didn't want to go to Southeast Asia.

And then there was my new Christian persona.  As I was listening to Thieme's Bible study tapes, I was also hearing a lot of conservative political opinion.  I was being told that as a Christian, I should do "all things, heartily as unto the Lord."  That meant that I should be diligent in all my activities.  If I were a doctor, I should practice the best medicine; if a janitor, the best at cleaning; if a salesman, the best salesman.  And if I were a soldier  . . . Wait for it!  If I were a soldier I should best killer in my outfit!  Whoa!  What?  That is what was being slid in between the verses of the Bible passages I was studying on tape.

Well, somehow I carried these two different minds with me on the bus on that cold November day as we pulled into Great Lakes Naval Training Center.  I would soon try to take those two paradoxical mindsets through basic training.  

Next:  A Day in the Sand on the Beach--A Frozen Beach!