Road Apples by Tim Sanders
May 31, 2010

Where theological discussions get you


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I told a lie once when I was a youngster, and I’ve regretted it ever since. It wasn’t much of a lie, I simply “misspoke,” but it was the only lie I ever told in my entire life. You need to know this so you won’t doubt that what I’m about to tell you is absolutely true. The story is as relevant as today’s headlines, and the gentleman who told the tale would be happy to verify it if he hadn’t died a few years ago. I think it was something he ate.

Erwin was in his early seventies, and was very adamant about theological discussions. He was dead set against them. His story went something like this:


“There’s one subject you ort to avoid at all costs, which is religion. Back when I was twelve or thirteen, me and Earl Grubbs was discussing first one thing and then another, and he ast me would I come to the tent meeting his church was having on Wednesday evening. Well sir, his people was all Penny Costals, which believed in pianos in church buildings and other deviltry, and I knowed full well they’d roll one out to that tent meeting and hammer away on it. So I told him I wouldn’t set foot in that tent. because of the piano, which was unscriptural.
Well sir, Earl he got his back up and told me it didn’t say nothing against pianos nowhere in the Bible. So I says right back to him: Earl, it don’t say nothing FOR pianos, neither! If Paul or one of them other apostles was to of hired a mob of furniture movers to borrow a piano from a dance hall or a Moose Lodge and push it down the road to one of their revival meetings, don’t you reckon the scriptures would of mentioned it?

Of course he couldn’t answer that, because his people hadn’t never really thought it out, but he come back with how in the world could it hurt to have a piano to keep everybody in tune during the congregational singing? I told him our people had the Lord to help ‘em make their joyful noises, but his people, especially his aunt Cora Dean who everybody knowed filled in for old Hollerin’ Hobson as song leader when his colon was acting up, couldn’t carry a tune in a wheelbarrow. So he said he had come past our church one morning and heard the awfullest racket you could imagine, like a roomful of tomcats, and we could of used a piano, or fourteen pianos, to drown out the caterwauling, and I told him at least our women kept silent in church and didn’t direct the choir nor have their hair all piled up on top of their heads to where couldn’t a one of ‘em go into a room with a ceiling fan, and Earl he said something or other about God turning Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt by day and a pillar of fire by night. I said yes, but if he’d of ever read Ezekiel he’d know that wasn’t punishment for a haircut, but only so she could lead the Israelites through the wilderness. But when Earl got an idea in his head, you couldn’t tell him nothing. So he called me a Campbellite and I called him a Pew Hopper and when his Momma come out to see what the ruckus was about we was rolling around on the ground and she run me off with a broom.

So come Wednesday evening me and Claude Pippin we snuck over to that tent meeting. The preaching was winding down, and sure enough there was old Louise Lindstrom sitting up front on a piano stool just waiting for the preacher to give her the nod to start hammering away. Well sir, we had a Mason jar full of yeller jackets, all of which was very mad because we had shooken ’em up a good deal, and when we uncorked that jar and rolled it down the old sawdust trail it livened that place up considerable. There was pew jumping and screaming, and while we was running for the woods I know good and well I heard plenty of bad words, too. Them Penny Costals can cuss like Methodists, no matter what nobody says.

But the next day when I seen old Louise Lindstrom with her face all swelled up on one side and her arm in a sling, I was sorry we done it. There didn’t none of them learn nothing from it, at least as far as pianos was concerned, so I give up religious discussions altogether. There ain’t no percentage in ‘em.”


And why is this relevant today, you ask? Well, in an April 10 CBS 11 (Fort Worth) report, Carol Cavazos tells of another theological discussion gone bad. This one involves Jehovah’s Witnesses, a Catholic priest, and a supposedly disinterested Baptist onlooker.

On Tuesday, April 6, a car with three Jehovah’s Witnesses pulled up at the residence of Father John Parnell, who lives behind the St. Augustine Catholic Church in Fort Worth. Two of the Jehovah’s Witnesses went to his door, where his 26-year-old daughter Mary told reporters they “talked at her” until her father “rescued her.”

At any rate, the priest and the Witnesses took the theological discussion to the street, where a fistfight ensued.

Parnell said that the Witnesses tore his shirt, beat him, and added that one “sat on top of me until. I passed out, completely unconscious.”

Eyewitness Harry Dwinell, a Southern Baptist who lives down the street from the church, said “I don’t have a dog in this hunt,” but contended the priest attacked the Witnesses. “Rambo down there commenced to beat on them ... He was in a fighting mode!”

So the Jehovah’s Witnesses are remaining uncharacteristically mum, the priest has filed charges with the Fort Worth Police, and the Baptist neighbor is just thankful for the entertainment.


Both are cautionary tales, and both prove that doctrinal discussions can lead in serious bodily injury. That’s why I never write about such things. Unless a) there are yellow jackets involved, or b) there are heavy-set Jehovah’s Witnesses sitting on top of pugilistic priests, with kibitzing Baptists sitting ringside.