Newspaper Columns by Bishop Paul V. Marshall
God isn't done with us yet
Can religion embrace the Revolution?
July 2003
In my tradition, we have an obligation to observe Independence Day in church. It is, therefore, 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.
In Pennsylvania, many members of the Church of England and many Lutherans distinguished themselves in the Revolution. For even more of those people, the Revolution was a crisis of faith, and many of them did not participate. It rearranged their thinking not only about government but also about how God has ordered the world.
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. I hope I would have made the radical change we now take for granted, two centuries later.
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 the 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, and 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.Return to the index of Bishop Paul's columns for the secular press
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