Long live the Revolution
Bishop Paul V. Marshall
July 2009
[This is Bishop Paul Marshall's July 2009 column for secular newspapers throughout our 14 counties. It is published by The Morning Call, Allentown, on the first Saturday of every month. It usually appears also in ten additional papers. The combined circulation of papers that publish the column regularly is more than 400,000. More than 130 columns have been published over the past 13 years. If your paper does not publish the column and you would consider bringing it to the attention of the editor, please email Bill Lewellis, blewellis@diobeth.org]
In my tradition, we have an obligation to observe Independence Day in church, and we cannot help remembering how many of the founders were members of our church. It is, therefore, all too easy to forget that the American Revolution was opposed by many good Christians because the New Testament is clear about the duty owed to kings, and that members of my church were also represented in that group. Red and Blue have always been with us.
In Pennsylvania, many members of the Church of England and many Lutherans distinguished themselves in the Revolution. For even more of those groups, the Revolution was a crisis of faith; many of them did not participate. The Revolution rearranged their thinking not only about government but also about how God has ordered the world. The very idea that the government gets its powers from the consent of the governed was very uncomfortable.
That is, there is a sense in which the Declaration of Independence is a theological document that claims that God is the author of human life and human rights, that governments get their power from The People, and that The People have the right to overthrow governments that do not appropriately provide for those rights. For many Christians this flies in the face of passages by both St. Peter and St. Paul that command absolute loyalty and obedience to kings and emperors who, they believe, hold God's authority.
Had I been alive at the time, I believe I would have been as torn as many other Pennsylvanians who realized that a message from the secular, somewhat "Deist," culture was asking me to change my thinking about God and God’s relationship to the world. I hope I would have made the radical choice we now take for granted, two centuries later, that government is of, by and for the people.
I have my doubts, however, about myself and about you who read this because it was not a lesson we learned once and were done with. Christians opposed the abolition of slavery, remarriage of divorced persons, votes for (or the ordination of) women, earning interest on money lent, life insurance, and even Social Security -- all because of fairly clear passages or groups of passages in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures that would need to be reinterpreted or quietly discarded.
These resistant people were not stupid or benighted, but they did base their thinking on the idea that things do not change, the idea that the scriptures themselves do not show a variety of images of God and the evolution (let's at last embrace that word) of religious understanding. They also assumed that religion cannot and ought not learn from "the culture," much less from the spirit of the times.
But we do learn, all the time.
The assumption that religion must always be the judge and teacher of the culture and not also culture’s student and beneficiary seems strangely atheistic. It is, after all, quite scriptural to believe that "the spirit of the Lord fills the earth" and that nowhere and never is God "without witnesses," whether they know it or not.
At the same time, it is also true that Christians have put a unique stamp on some social movements, as the Rev. Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference or the work of Fathers Philip and Daniel Berrigan may illustrate.
My basic beliefs are rather conventional. I say the Creeds without crossing my fingers. At the same time, I do not find any reason to believe that God's Spirit does not work in and through the lives of those who do not know or accept Christ.
Artists, poets, scientists are examples of those in whom I see the Spirit working -- especially when they challenge or expand my awareness. My basic beliefs do not change because of their work, but the implications and the applications of those beliefs do change.
Even fundamentalists preach differently than they did a century ago because of what Freud began in Vienna. They have been taught by an atheist who sprang from another religious tradition. We do not need to resist this; we need to celebrate the multitude of our teachers.
Social movements, too, as well as art and science, present opportunities for perception to grow. July's celebration of the Revolution is for religious people the reminder that "the world" is not necessarily the enemy, but may in fact be our teacher or, at the very least, may ask us important questions. Long live the Revolution.
[The Rt. Rev. Paul V. Marshall is bishop of the Diocese of Bethlehem, 14 counties of eastern and northeastern Pennsylvania. His recently published book, Messages in the Mall: Looking at Life in 600 Words or Less (Seabury), is a collection of ten years of his monthly columns for newspapers. Additional columns and sermons by Bishop Marshall are available at www.diobeth.org.]
Thank you for that insight! I always learn so much when I read your writings, and I pray the Holy Spirit to keep my heart soft and attuned to God's leading.
Posted by: Kerri Wilder | August 09, 2009 at 05:36 PM