Two weeks ago I wrote a piece about Ham and Enos, the chimps trained by the United States Air Force to participate in the space program. Ham was the first chimpanzee in space, and Enos was the first to orbit the Earth. The piece detailed how badly these chimps had been treated - from the slaughtering of their mothers, through their training as astronauts, their use as crash test chimps, their torture as biomedical research subjects, and their death. A kind reader in North Carolina wrote to remind me that Ham, at least, was rescued from biomedical research, displayed briefly at Washington’s National Zoo, then retired to a Zoo in North Carolina where he lived out the last of his years peacefully – only Enos remained in the laboratory and died there.
This was a comfort to the many who mentioned how disturbed they had been by the story of Ham and Enos. But it was quite disturbing to me. It was disturbing because as soon as I received the email correcting my information I remembered Ham’s peaceful retirement. I remembered seeing the story on the nightly news when Ham died. I was disturbed by my own failing memory. But I was more troubled that my source material was faulty.
Hopefully, most of us have learned that journalists are, like all other sentient, carbon-based life-forms, fallible. Some of them even have agendas that make their reporting selective and slanted. There’s that great line in the film Absence of Malice when Sally field is read a statement describing her relationship with Paul Newman: “Is that true?” she is asked. “No, it is not true, but it is accurate,” she answers. Some believe that it is more important for a story to be interesting, than that it be accurate. This is not just true of the tabloids (my mom used to call and say things like “I read in the paper the other day that the president was going to put Tom Hank’s face on Mount Rushmore.” I would ask, “What paper was that, mom.” “The Star,” she would reply), but of the major papers as well (cf. Jayson Williams). However, there are some sources one should be able to trust – The Journal of the American Medical Association, Scientific American, Foreign Affairs….
One of those reliable sources should be The American Scholar, my source of information about Ham and Enos (Summer 2005, pp.28-34). But the information I cited and shared was partially false. My source was faulty, my memory was faulty. What a mess. What a disturbing mess.
This is why I am so glad we have the Word of God, changeless and perfect. It alone is always solid, true, reliable. It alone is complete and self-contained. It alone is alive with the breath of God. It alone fully equips a person for every challenge.
I could, at this point, take one of several courses faceting out the blessing of having God’s word at our fingertips. I could compare the ancient and numerous sources for the Bible, with the scant textual sources for any other work of literary antiquity. I could discuss the absence of any significant textual variant among the thousands of extant texts. I could turn to Psalm 119 and just let David do the talking.
But what I want to do is mount the old hobby horse once again and encourage us all to read, read, read our Bibles. Bible sales are up, and sale of Christian publications have been up for several years, but the time an individual spends in the word each day has been trending downward for some time. Reading about the Bible, or reading a popular author who quotes the Bible is not a substitute for reading the Bible.
I thinned out my library recently, and the bookcase where I keep devotional literature was filled with names well-known decades ago, but unknown now. Thumbing through a book by Cushman, Huss, or Peterson reminds me of how well they wrote, but who remembers them? Buechner, Wangerin, and Nouwen write equally well, but they do not write scripture.
How liberating, how wonderfully liberating it is to pick up the Bible, and to know that I don’t have to take it with a grain of salt and a peripheral glance – I can place in it my complete trust, my whole heart.
