The Bridge of Then-and-Now

The river was called the Distance.

It wasn’t like the Babel. It didn’t mutter in old languages. It was silent and grey and very wide, and it moved so slowly you could hardly see it moving, but it was deep, deeper than anyone had ever sounded. On the near bank, where they stood, was the country they’d been walking through, the land of the Book’s own time: olive trees and stone villages, shepherds on the hills, the smoke of sacrifices far off. On the far bank, misty in the morning, was a country Inquirer half knew. There were towns with church spires and market squares, farms and factories, cottages with smoke going up from the chimneys. It was his own world. It looked a bit like Mine-Own-Meaning, he thought, without the mirrors.

“Then,” said Plain-Sense, pointing at the near bank. “And now,” pointing at the far one.

“And the bridges,” said Analogy.

There were a great many of them. All up and down the river, as far as they could see either way, people had built bridges across the Distance. Some were grand and some were flimsy, some finished and some fallen in, and at the foot of each on the near bank stood a bridge-keeper calling out to pilgrims to cross his way.

The nearest one wasn’t a bridge at all. It was a catapult, a huge wooden engine with a great throwing arm and a leather sling, and a cheerful red-cheeked man in a striped jersey was loading a pilgrim into the sling.

“Step right up!” he called. “Why walk when you can fly? I’m Mr. Skip-the-Bridge! No need for all that tiresome business about what the text meant then. Just hop in and I’ll fling you straight across to now! What’s it mean for you today? Let’s find out! Wheee!”

He pulled a lever. The arm went up with a crack, and the pilgrim flew out over the river in a great arc, shrieking with delight. The three of them watched him go.

He didn’t make the far bank. Halfway over he came down in the middle of the Distance with an enormous splash, and the slow grey current carried him off downstream.

“Oh, they all come up short,” said Mr. Skip-the-Bridge cheerfully, reloading. “But they have such a lovely time going up! Next!”

“Where does the current take them?”

“Oh, round the bend and down to the sea. There’s an island there, I think. Very relevant. Cafés.”

“Relevant Isle,” said Inquirer. “Loose-Paraphrase takes people there too.”

“Small world!” said Mr. Skip-the-Bridge, and pulled the lever again.

The next bridge upstream was a rope bridge, very long and very narrow and sagging between two posts, crowded with people inching across it with enormous care.

Inquirer knew them at once. They were in the robes and sandals of the Lord’s own day, the women veiled and the men long-bearded. They were the frozen pilgrims from Anachron’s Clocktower, thawed out now, and here.

And they were stuck.

They had all gone out onto the rope bridge from the near bank carrying everything with them: sandals and clay lamps and waterskins, bundles of hyssop, little altars, scrolls of the old Law. They were trying to get everything across to the other side exactly as it was. But the bridge sagged lower and lower under the weight, and the ropes creaked, and they weren’t even halfway over. Some of them had been on it for weeks.

At the near end a stern, anxious, grey-bearded man was supervising.

“Careful! Careful! Don’t drop anything! Everything goes across! I’m Mr. Copy-Exactly. If the Book shows it, we bring it! If they wore sandals, we wear sandals! If they washed feet at every meal, we wash feet at every meal! If they greeted with a holy kiss, we kiss! If Timothy took a little wine for his stomach, we take a little wine for our stomachs! Everything across, exactly as it was!”

Near the front of the line, clutching a clay lamp and a sheaf of hyssop, Inquirer saw the young woman whose eyes had followed him in the cold gallery of the Clocktower. She was hanging on to the rope rail, white with exhaustion.

“You came,” she said when she saw him. “You told us east, and we came east. But we can’t get across. There’s too much to carry.”

Inquirer didn’t know how to help her. He looked further upriver and saw a third bridge, very different from the other two.

It was a single strand of wire, so thin it was nearly invisible, a fine bright filament stretched dead straight from bank to bank. A very lean, very pale man in a grey suit was walking across it like a tightrope walker, balancing with a parasol. He went quickly and easily, because he wasn’t carrying anything at all.

“Ah,” he called down from halfway across. “You’ve seen Copy-Exactly. Dreadful, isn’t it? All that baggage. I’m Mr. Thin-Principle. I travel light! I take every passage in the Book and boil it down to its principle. Its timeless essence! Then I leave the rest behind. Look! David and Goliath: believe in yourself. The Exodus: freedom is good. The Sermon on the Mount: be nice. The cross: love is important. Simple! Weightless! I can get across any bridge you like with that.”

He skipped the rest of the way over and stood waving his parasol on the far bank.

Inquirer looked at the fine bright wire, and then at the sagging rope bridge with its load of sandals and altars and hyssop, and felt something close to despair.

“One carries everything and can’t get across. The other carries nothing and gets across with nothing worth having. Be nice. The cross is love is important? He’s ground it so thin there’s nothing left.”

“That’s it exactly,” said a voice behind them. “You’ve put your finger right on it.”

They turned round. A woman was standing on the bank leaning on a spade, big and sunburnt and grey-haired, in a canvas smock covered in stone-dust and tar, with a carpenter’s rule in one pocket, a mason’s level in another, and a rolled-up plan under her arm.

“I’m the Bridgewright. I’ve been building a bridge over the Distance since before your Herald was born, and it’s the only one that gets all the way across with the right load. Most pilgrims never find it. It’s further upstream, and it’s slow.” She grinned. “Everything good on this road’s further upstream and slow. You’ll have noticed.”

“We have,” said Inquirer, with feeling.

“Come on, then. I’ll show you.”

“Wait.” He looked back at the rope bridge, where the young woman from the Clocktower was still clinging to the rail. “Can they come too?”

The Bridgewright followed his look, and her face softened.

“If they’ll put down what they can’t carry. Tell them to come back to the near bank, all of them. Tell them they don’t have to carry it all. Tell them to bring it to me and I’ll show them what goes across and what doesn’t.”

Inquirer went down to the end of the rope bridge and called out to them. At first none of them would come. Mr. Copy-Exactly shouted that it was faithlessness to put down anything the Book showed. But the young woman looked at Inquirer for a long moment, and then, slowly, she started to inch back along the rope toward the near bank, and one by one the others came after her.

The Bridgewright’s bridge was a mile upstream. It was built of grey stone, and it wasn’t beautiful. It was plain and massive and very old, carried across the Distance on five great piers, each standing on its own island of rock in the river. Over the entrance on the near bank was carved: For Whatsoever Things Were Written Aforetime Were Written For Our Learning.

“Five piers,” said the Bridgewright. “Five steps across. You can’t skip any of them. Skip one and you’ll end up in the river with Skip-the-Bridge’s lot. Let’s walk it.”

They walked out onto the bridge, the three pilgrims and the Bridgewright, with the young woman from the Clocktower and a dozen of her companions coming uncertainly behind.

At the first pier there was a stone table with the Book lying on it.

“The first pier is everything you’ve learned so far. What did it mean then? What did the author mean, to his readers, in his day? You know how to find that out now: prayer, text, tongue, history, context, form, shape, grammar, words, main point, the story, the whole Book, the creed. You’ve walked the whole road to get to this pier. That’s why Skip-the-Bridge’s lot fall in. They never stood on it. If you don’t know what it meant then, you can’t know what it means now. All you’ll know is what you mean.”

She opened the Book. “Let’s take one passage across with us and watch what happens to it. Here. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, chapter eight. Meat sacrificed to idols. What did it mean then?”

Inquirer read it through, and then, slowly, using everything the road had taught him, he told her. In Corinth most of the meat in the market had come from animals offered in pagan temples. Some Christians said that since idols were nothing, they could eat it freely. Others, just converted out of idolatry, felt that eating it was worshipping the false gods they had left behind. Paul agreed with the first lot that the idols were nothing. But he told them not to use their freedom in a way that would drag a weaker brother back into idolatry. If meat make my brother to offend, I will eat no flesh while the world standeth.

“Good. That’s the first pier. Walk on.”

At the second pier a deep notch had been cut in the stone of the bridge, and you could see the river through it, flowing slow and grey.

“The second pier is the width of the river. What’s different between then and now, between their situation and ours? It might be a difference of culture: they had temple meat markets, and we don’t. It might be a difference of covenant: they were under Moses, and we’re under Christ. It might be a difference of situation: Paul was writing to one church in one city about one problem. Measure the river before you build over it. Copy-Exactly’s lot never measured it. They thought there wasn’t any river. They thought they could step straight from then to now and carry the whole lot across.”

The young woman from the Clocktower was listening hard. “So the sandals,” she said. “The foot-washing. The holy kiss.”

“Ask the question. Is the sandal the message? Or is it just the custom of the country the message came in? When the Lord washed His disciples’ feet, was the point that we’ve always got to wash feet at supper? Or was it that He, their Lord, took the lowest servant’s job, and we’re to do the same for each other? Foot-washing was how you honored a guest in a dusty country where everybody wore sandals. What’s the lowest servant’s work in your world? That’s how you wash feet now.”

The young woman looked down at the clay lamp in her hands. Then, slowly and carefully, she put it down on the stone of the second pier.

“And the holy kiss?” asked one of her companions, an earnest young man with a beard.

“A kiss was how friends and family said hello back then. Paul tells them to greet each other with a holy one: as family, in Christ, warmly and purely. In some countries today that’s still how families greet each other. In others it’d be very strange. The point is to greet one another as family, warmly and purely. How your world does that is something you’ll have to work out with wisdom.”

“But how do we know?” said the young man. “What’s message and what’s custom? What if we get it wrong?”

“That’s the third pier. Come on.”

The third pier was the tallest, and the bridge rose over it like the back of a whale. At the top stood a stone pillar carved with a great many words, a lot of them crossed out and carved again.

“The third pier’s the principle. What’s the theological truth the passage teaches? Not the custom, not the situation, but the truth about God and man and how we’re to live before Him that this passage puts into words in its own day. This is where Thin-Principle goes wrong. He finds a principle all right, but it’s so thin and vague it could have come from anywhere. Be nice. A true principle has five marks.” She ticked them off on her stone-stained fingers.

“One, it’s actually in the text. It comes out of what the author meant, not from somewhere else. Two, it’s timeless: it was true for Paul’s readers and it’s true for you. Three, it’s grounded. It rests on something that doesn’t change: the character of God, the order of creation, the work of Christ. When Paul grounds a teaching in creation, the way he does with marriage, that teaching crosses whole. When he grounds it in a local situation, you look for the deeper reason underneath. Four, it’s taught elsewhere in the Book, or at least fits with what is. That’s Analogy’s rule. Five, it’s specific enough to bite. Be nice never bit anybody. Paul’s principle in chapter eight has teeth.”

“What is it?”

“You tell me.”

Inquirer thought. “Christian freedom’s real,” he said slowly. “But it’s got to be ruled by love for weaker brothers and sisters. We mustn’t use our liberty in a way that leads another believer to sin against his conscience. Because Christ died for him.” He looked up. “And through thy knowledge shall the weak brother perish, for whom Christ died? That’s what it stands on. Christ died for that brother. So I can give up a freedom for him.”

“Good. That’s not be nice. That’s a principle with blood in it.”

The fourth pier was lower, and in the middle of the bridge above it there was a gap. Not a break: a gate, set across the roadway, and through it Inquirer could see the bridge going on. But the gate itself was shaped like a cross.

“The fourth pier’s the one most bridges leave out. Every passage, before it crosses to now, has to go through Him. Through Christ, and what He’s done. You saw on the Covenant Highway that all the promises meet at the cross, and so does every application. You can’t carry a law from Moses straight into your kitchen without asking how Christ has fulfilled it. You can’t carry a command of Paul’s into your life without asking where you’re going to get the power to obey it. If you try, you get moralism, be like David, a heavier load and no help carrying it. Every command in the Book comes to the Christian through the cross, as the grateful life of a forgiven child, not as the hope of a slave trying to earn his keep.”

She looked at the earnest young man with the beard, who’d been listening with his mouth slightly open.

“That’s why your friends were trying to carry the altars and the hyssop,” she said gently. “The sacrifices and the ceremonial law. They pointed to Christ. They were the shadows and He’s the substance, and when He came the ceremonies were fulfilled. They don’t cross the bridge the way they were. They cross only in Him. The old confession puts it plainly. The ceremonial laws are now abrogated under the new testament. The civil laws of Israel expired with that nation, except as far as their general equity still teaches us. But the moral law, summed up in the Ten Commandments, binds everyone for ever. Not as a way to be saved. As the shape of a life lived for the God who saved you.”

The young man looked down at the little altar he’d been carrying ever since the Clocktower. Then he set it down at the cross-shaped gate, very gently, as though it were precious. Which, Inquirer thought, it was.

They all went through the gate.

The fifth pier stood close to the far bank, and as they walked out over it Inquirer saw that the bridge didn’t end in a single road. It branched. Dozens of little paths ran down from the end of it into the country beyond, to every cottage and farm and church and market and workshop in sight.

“The fifth pier is now. The application. What does this principle, through Christ, mean for these people, here? And it’s got to be specific. Not we should all be more loving; that’s Thin-Principle again, only at the other end. Ask: what does it mean for what I believe? For how I worship? For how I live? For my heart and my head and my hands? For this person, in this church, in this kitchen? The Book was always meant to land somewhere. But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only. A sermon that never lands is a bridge that stops in mid-air.”

“How do you know which path to take?” said Plain-Sense.

“You learn your people. You learn their world as well as you learned Corinth. What are the idol-meats in your world? Where do strong Christians use their freedom in ways that wound the weak? It might be drink, for one. It might be what they watch, or how they spend their money, or how they talk about other churches. It’ll be different in every town. But the principle’s the same and the cross is the same. You carry the principle across, through the cross, and then you walk down the right path to the right door.”

They came down off the bridge onto the far bank, into now, and the first path they took led to a small farm cottage with a low roof and a vegetable garden and a thin trickle of smoke going up from the chimney.

The door was open. Inside, at a scrubbed wooden table, a woman of forty or so sat with a Book open in front of her. She had work-roughened hands and a tired face, and she was crying quietly.

Inquirer stood in the doorway and for a moment couldn’t move, because he knew who she was. Not her name. But he knew her.

She was the farmer’s wife. The one Mr. Felt-Meaning had talked about, long ago, in the Hall of Mirrors back home. The farmer’s wife has no need to know what Paul meant to the Galatians. She needs to know what the Book means to her, this morning, in her kitchen.

Well, here she was. In her kitchen. With the Book open.

“I’m sorry,” she said, looking up and seeing them, and wiping her eyes. “I didn’t hear you. Come in, if you’re travelling. There’s soup.” She looked down at the page. “I was only reading. We’ve had a hard year. The harvest failed and my husband’s been poorly. And I came to this bit in Philippians, I can do all things through Christ. I’ve always loved it. I always thought it meant that if I only trusted enough, God would make everything come right, the harvest and my husband and all of it. And it hasn’t. So I’ve been sitting here wondering what’s wrong with my faith.”

Inquirer came in and sat down across the table from her. He told me on the wall he’d never been so frightened in his whole life, not on the Kneeling Stair or in the Clocktower or in front of the Knight of the Closed System. Because everything the road had taught him was for this, and now it was in his hands, and somebody was crying.

He didn’t say anything clever. He didn’t polish. He asked if he could read the passage with her, and she turned the Book round for him, and he read it slowly from the start of the paragraph, the way Plain-Sense had read it to the Promise-Box man in the Mosaic.

Not that I speak in respect of want: for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: every where and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.

Then he told her, gently and plainly, what Paul meant. Paul was in prison, thanking a church for a gift, telling them he’d learned the secret of being content when he was hungry as well as when he was full. Then Inquirer told her the principle: that Christ gives strength to bear every circumstance, plenty and want alike, with contentment in Him, and that the all things isn’t a promise the harvest will never fail. It’s a promise that when it fails, Christ will be enough. He told her it rested on the cross, on a Lord who was Himself abased and hungry and in want, for her. And then, because she’d asked, he told her what he thought it meant for her, in that kitchen, that year.

He told her there was nothing wrong with her faith. He told her the failed harvest wasn’t a sign she hadn’t trusted enough. He told her Paul himself had gone hungry and learned contentment in it. And he told her the strength Christ promised wasn’t strength to make everything come right. It was strength to keep going, through what hadn’t come right, in Him.

She listened. She read the passage again herself, slowly, with her finger under the words. Then she sat a long time with her rough hands flat on the table.

“That’s harder,” she said at last. “Than what I thought it said.”

“Yes.”

“But it’s truer,” she said slowly. “Isn’t it. It doesn’t hang on the harvest.” She looked up at him, and her face had changed. “I can stand on that. Whatever happens.”

They had soup with her, and she wouldn’t let them go until they’d taken a loaf for the road.

When they came out of the cottage there was a young man sitting on the garden wall.

He was thin and weather-beaten, his clothes travel-stained and patched and his boots nearly worn through. But there was something in the set of his shoulders Inquirer knew, and when he looked up, Inquirer saw it was Pliable-Gloss.

The scarlet coat was gone, and the gold chain, and his curls had been cut short. But it was the same face, cheerful and uncertain. And in his hands was a plain, battered Book with a great many notes in the margins.

“Master,” he said, and stood up.

Inquirer couldn’t speak. He crossed the garden and threw his arms round him.

“How?” he managed eventually.

“I remembered the Balance. Like I promised. I stayed on at the Exchange a while. A long while. And every time I listed a reading, I’d think, what would it weigh? And after a bit I couldn’t list any more. I didn’t believe in them.” He gave a small, rueful laugh. “So I left. I went back to the start, all the way back to the Kneeling Stair, and I went up it on my knees this time. Then the Lighthouse. Then the Copyists. Then all of it. I’ve been walking behind you the whole way, Master, about two months back. I saw your name in the Register at the Diggings, and at the Quarry. And the old woman in the Museum told me you’d been through.”

He held up his battered Book. “I’m slow. I’m not clever the way I was. Mrs. Usage says I still put too much gloss on things. But I’m learning to read.”

Inquirer couldn’t think of anything to say. He just took his old apprentice by both shoulders and held on.

The Bridgewright walked with them a little way past the farm, to where the paths from the bridge joined the King’s Highway again. It ran east, white and plain, through green and peaceful country, and at the end of it, so near now that it filled half the sky, stood the City of the Word.

It was enormous. Its walls were white and its gates gold, with towers past counting rising above them, and the light that came from it was the same steady white light Inquirer had first seen through his amber spectacles, from the window of his workshop on the Street of Reflections, a lifetime ago.

“One more stage,” said the Bridgewright. “Only one. You’ve learned to hear the Book and you’ve learned to carry it across. Now you’ll learn to speak it.” She looked at the four of them: Inquirer and Plain-Sense, and Analogy with his stick, and Pliable with his battered Book. “There’s a river before the gate. You’ll see. It’s not like the Distance. It’s the last thing on the road.”

She shook hands with each of them in her strong, stone-dusty grip and turned back toward her bridge, and the young woman from the Clocktower and her companions went with her. They’d decided, they said, to stay and learn to build.

And the four pilgrims went on together up the King’s Highway toward the gates of the City of the Word.