My community allows unrestricted fireworks of any type on July 3 and 4 until 11:00 p.m. Many people complain but those who enjoy shooting them off and making noise late at night argue that it is the “sound of freedom,” so get over it. These same people are living in nice cushy homes far away from war and the horrors that go along with it. The sound of freedom is, rather, perfect quiet and contentment.
If a person lives during a time of war, as during the War for Independence, the last thing such a person wants to hear is “the sound of freedom”—loud pops and blasts of muskets and cannon. For these sounds mean that the enemy is nearby, and one’s home and life are in danger—no one wants to hear these “sounds of freedom.”
Anyone who thinks that a person wishes to hear the blasts of gun and cannon, except on the movie screen, is wrong, at least respecting those who live during war.
Life is only filled with such noise when society and government have broken down and chaos reigns. The sound of peace is quiet, with the sound of wind and birdsong, not the blasts of artificial means of death and destruction.
So my neighbors who want to hear the “sound of freedom” actually want to hear the sound of war, or an imitation thereof—they wouldn’t know what to do if the real thing came along.
One of the blessings about where I live in the Arkansas River Valley is the prolific numbers of birds. Today I watched astonished as two red-shouldered hawks danced above me in the clear morning air, calling to each other. They were clearly mates, enjoying the cool air and sunshine, enjoying life. Watching them stirred some thoughts . . .
The hawks called to mind comments made by the 19th century naturalist and ornithologist Thomas Nuttall, who wrote of birds: “They play around us like fairy spirits, elude approach in an element which defies our pursuit, soar out of sight in the yielding sky, journey over our heads in marshalled ranks, dart like meteors in the sunshine of summer, or seeking the solitary recesses of the forest and the waters, they glide before us like beings of fancy.” “Their actions are directed by an uncontrollable instinct of provident nature”—the will of God directs their actions and instincts.
And Psalm 24 reads: “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein, for He has founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the rivers.” Or as Jesus said in the Gospel of Luke: “Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them.”
Observing nature, walking through a forest, strolling by the sea, watching the birds flitting in an about like fairies–such is what God calls us to do respecting the earth: treasure it, protect it, enjoy it.
The eighteenth century in America was a time of awakening from the slumber of the past. Light was shed on the darkness of superstition, irrationality, autocracy, aristocratic privilege, and dogma. The individual, weighed down by the chains of time, institutions, thought, and traditions, became unencumbered, liberated. The new science taught Americans the value of reason, the laws of motion, the tools of empiricism. Political and social philosophers on both sides of the Atlantic discovered the laws of nature that applied to society and government. Religious thinkers broke from the constraints of orthodoxy, presenting Christians with the gift of choosing how best to recognize, worship, and serve God. The Great Awakening, beginning in the 1730s, was a reaction to the limits of the past and to the social and economic constraints of the present. The awakeners shared a vision of a society based on the recognition that God’s will was the basis for human actions, thought, institutions, history, existence.
CALVINISTS AND PURITANS
American history, indeed, seemed to be shaped by the will of God. So argued seventeenth-century New England Puritans such as William Bradford (in Of Plymouth Plantation) and Cotton Mather (in Magnalia Christi Americana), who believed that divine providence led religious reformers to America to fulfill the visions of the first protestant reformers, in particular John Calvin. As Jeremy Belknap wrote in his History of New-Hampshire (1784), “It is happy for America that its discovery and settlement by the Europeans happened at a time, when they wee emerging from a long period of ignorance and darkness. The discovery of the magnetic needle, the invention of printing, the revival of literature and the reformation of religion, had caused a vast alteration in their views, and taught them the true use of their rational and active powers.” Likewise Calvin believed that God shed light upon His will and His works for those who could discern it and act upon such knowledge for the sake of His kingdom. Calvin thought that the cornerstone of the Protestant Reformation was the individual examination of God’s holy word in scripture and in nature. The awareness of what is the true and original expression of Christianity would lead to active reformation of those abuses in contemporary Christianity that were inconsistent with God’s will and word. Calvin, educated in French legal scholarship and the texts and assumptions of the Renaissance, envisioned congregations of devout Christians working in concert to achieve virtue in civil society that was never accomplished by secular governments. These saintly citizens of the bible commonwealth were to reform the world according to the model of the heavenly city of God found in the Old Testament and New Testament. Calvin and his followers organized these self-perceived Christian saints (those bound for heaven) into active soldiers fighting for the word of God. This joining of political and social concerns and actions with deeply held religious beliefs had a revolutionary impact on Europe, England, and America.
Calvin’s followers in England, for example, sought to purify not only the Roman Catholic Church but the Church of England (the Anglican Church) as well. Each congregation of these Puritans performed illegal, treasonous actions in refusing to abide by all of the requirements of the Church of England, which included use of the Book of Common Prayer and obedience to the hierarchy of church authorities, culminating in the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Crown. Puritans believed in action to accomplish God’s will. Their singular devotion to a perceived divine cause resulted in dramatic consequences, the two most important of which were the English Civil War and the Puritan migration to North America.
American Calvinists such as John Winthrop saw in the examples of the Old Testament patriarchs and the teachings of the New Testament apostles models for uniting political and religious order under one system of government. The New England Way was very close to a theocracy, basing governing on religious belief and participation in religious activities. These first New England Puritans perceived themselves engaged in an errand into the wilderness, a notion that continued to guide religious and secular thinkers alike in coming centuries. The errand was to create a religious commonwealth, to civilize hence Christianize the wilderness and its native peoples, to stay true to the covenant that united themselves to God, to exercise constant restraint in material and secular matters, and to reform as much as possible human institutions.
As the decades passed, however, the errand into the wilderness was forgotten and ignored, its institutions altered, its ideals trod upon. Some Puritan ministers called upon the flock to repent and to form a new covenant with God, but in vain. Change forever has an impact on religious beliefs and institutions. The anxiety and uncertainty of sixteenth-century Europe brought about a religious response, the Protestant Reformation. Likewise social, economic, political, and intellectual changes in America during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries brought about varying religious consequences. Trade grew, particularly with England. Merchants became wealthy, inspiring in others the same goal. Population expanded because of immigration, better diet, and growing medical knowledge. As a consequence cities emerged from the wilderness. Success breeds jealousy and aggression among contestants for land and wealth. British Americans contested with Native Americans and French Americans over the rich frontier and important waterways of the Piedmont and lands west of the Appalachian Mountains. Wars in Europe yielded wars in America. The expanding frontier brought with it a host of political problems. Meanwhile Americans became aware of new ideas in science about the universe and its governing laws; in the philosophy of science and government; in the origins, progress, and significance of Christianity. Bombarded by the new and unknown, uncertain what were right and wrong, good and bad, some Americans rejected Christianity as untenable, others embraced it all the more. Such was the setting for the Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s.
OLD LIGHTS AND NEW LIGHTS
George Whitefield, an itinerant preacher from England, personified the uncertainty and restlessness that resulted in the Great Awakening. A man without a parish in America, a wanderer intent on attracting notice by dramatic speeches rather than solid theology, Whitefield caught the attention of masses of men and women, young and old, seeking release from life’s daily drudgery, searching for alternatives to the sermons of college-educated clergy who always had the same message. Whitefield was different. Theology meant little to him. Denominational distinctions, the intricate variations of the sacraments, the learned discourses of the educated, were meaningless next to the horror of the dread consequence of sin and the joy of salvation through Christ. Whitefield’s appeal to the emotions fit well the character of a people devoted to the practical and commonplace who eschewed thought for action, who were experiential and intuitive rather than logical and sophisticated. Whitefield tapped into common American qualities that transcended the individualism of a capitalist, frontier society.
Imitating Christ in his choice of venue, Whitefield preached in open spaces, fields, and meadows. Farmers journeyed from far and wide in response. Whitefield’s discourse, filled with imagery and drama yet void of doctrinal intricacy, fit well in such unpretentious, familiar surroundings. People listened in common, and responded en masse. The old ways of religious habit and perfunctory faith, a nod to God on Sunday and a return to sin on Monday, vanished as the multitude felt anew the presence of a Redeemer disgusted with the sinful neglect of His people, demanding wholehearted repentance and complete abandonment to His will.
Christianity has always thrived on loneliness, despair, anxiety, meaninglessness, pain, and fear. The Great Awakening brought such suffering, an awareness of its causes and consequences, to the surface, where it lost its illusory singularity and achieved common recognition. Personal anxiety, fear, suffering, and pain were revealed as universal human experiences. One could sob and wail in the open, surrounded by strangers, and yet feel the comfort of releasing a burden to one’s intimate friends. Surprised by joy amid suffering, one could laugh and shed tears of happiness without embarrassment. Religious affectations became emotions to share with others rather than to experience in private. This was an awakening of fundamental humanness. New light was shed upon the darkness of the soul.
Jonathan Edwards, the Yale-educated pastor of Northampton, Massachusetts, understood these feelings of loss and hope, repentance and redemption, the abandonment of self to God, that were products of the New Light experience of the Great Awakening. In A Treatise Concerning Religious Affectations, Edwards argued that the emotions rather than the intellect were the true foundation and expression of religious belief. Who can have an intellectual understanding of the Incarnation or the Resurrection? One can only feel Christ’s sacrifice, empathize with it, and make the experience one’s own. In A Divine and Supernatural Light, Edwards showed that reason relies on intuition, thought is dependent on emotion. Knowledge of God comes from God, who makes Himself known in the human heart and soul–only later does the mind acquire recognition. Edward’s Personal Narrative provides wonderful insights into his own religious journey, his abandonment of reason and thought to his base feelings of sin and depravity, and his joyful emotions of healing and redemption through Christ, not self. Yet Edward’s A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, which focuses on the revival in Northampton, describes the Great Awakening as a group rather than an individual phenomenon.
For some clergy, the emotional response of tears and wailing and writhing on the floor of the New Lights did not fit at all the decorum, piety, and restraint required of the pilgrim when worshipping in the house of the Lord. The Boston clergyman and theologian Charles Chauncy responded to Edward’s joyful tracts with literary attacks on the enthusiasm, spontaneity, and emotions of the masses. The uneducated common herd of mankind could hardly know how best to worship God. Emotion is not an adequate tool to measure God’s will and ways. Christ requires piety, forbearance, silence, reason, order in His worship. Chauncy’s Enthusiasm Described and Caution’d Against, published in 1742, was welcomed by the solid middle and upper classes, the well-educated and professionals, who were suspicious of the immediacy of New Light religious conversion. Their experience taught them that God revealed Himself to the intellect not the emotions–conversion took time, was a subtle occurrence rarely recognized until by learned hindsight one could trace it and accept it. Chauncy and other Old Lights, content with the ways of their fathers, could hardly accept Edward’s description of hell, in Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, which was graphic, horrifying, and intent on eliciting the most emotional response. The uneducated lacked the intellectual resources to decide such matters of God’s benevolence, justice, and love for themselves. The Old Lights refused to accept the logical contradiction of a just and loving God who condemns His children to unending torment in Hell. New Light arguments–that human sin is universal, inherited from the first man and woman, Adam and Eve; that all humans deserve condemnation; that God for unknown reasons mercifully saves some from hellfire; that humans do not have the free will to determine their own eternal fate–did not accord with a rational God currently being fashioned in Europe and America by Arminians and Deists. Chauncy and the Old Lights, raised in the Calvinist theological environment of Congregationalism, slowly rejected Calvin’s claims and the revolutionary consequences of Calvinist social thought.
Portrait of Charles Chauncy
RELIGION AND REVOLUTION
Indeed, it is not surprising to learn that as the eighteenth century progressed the Old Lights were less apt to embrace the revolutionary political arguments of Whig statesmen, unlike the New Lights, who could accept the paradoxes and dangers of the American Revolution simply because their theology taught them that life is full of paradox, that human reason is limited, that God Himself threatens all of His sinful children with eternal damnation, that security in mind, body, society, and institutions is illusory. The Great Awakening taught its adherents that God does not respect class, inheritance, fame, and power. All humans are equal in respect to God, who alone is separate, elevated beyond all others. New Light religious beliefs did not allow them to accept the pretensions to power and rank of the British aristocracy, the House of Lords and House of Commons, the King. Politics made little sense without religion, and if religion taught equality among all men and women, politics must follow. The revolutionary tendencies of the Great Awakening spilled over into the revolution against Great Britain.
Neither theology nor politics are black and white, and sensitive eighteenth-century Americans often found themselves caught between the Old Light/New Light debate as well as the struggle between Loyalists and Patriots. It was difficult to reconcile the order and decorum at the meetinghouse on Sunday and the disorder and chaos of town meetings on Monday. Some Old Lights such as the Boston clergyman Mather Byles, refusing such contradiction, became notorious (if consistent) Tories. Others, such as the New Hampshire pastor Jeremy Belknap, sought ways to avoid the confrontation of religion and politics by questioning the traditional beliefs of his fathers. Belknap was raised in the still Calvinist environment of mid-eighteenth century Boston. Belknap was descended from Increase and Cotton Mather on his mother’s side. He found as a communicant of South Parish a mentor in the Rev. Thomas Prince, a clergyman interested in science and history. At Harvard College Belknap discovered the writings of Jonathan Edwards, which inspired in him a search for God’s saving grace. His great uncle Mather Byles counseled the young pilgrim not to seek the type of emotional conversion described by Edwards. But Belknap was dissatisfied with a rational approach to God. He refused to consider the ministry until he experienced the saving change of God’s grace, which occurred during the long New England winter days of 1766. Belknap became the pastor of the First Parish of Dover, New Hampshire, in 1767 and proceeded to try to inaugurate an awakening among his parishioners. But Dover was not Northampton. Belknap found a few close associates willing to allow emotion and intuition to guide them; but his religious zeal alienated many others.
Eventually Belknap, like many clergymen, turned his religious zeal toward political issues. He became a firm if conservative patriot, like many of his colleagues of the cloth who were alumni of Harvard or Yale. The pastor and his family suffered economic privation during the war, and rarely were free from the dismal feeling of possible doom should the British gain the upper hand in the war. Belknap’s solace was his historical and scientific studies. But as a clergyman he was called to study the Scriptures as well. One bleak day in 1778 Belknap experienced a revelation while reading the book of Daniel in the Old Testament. He felt sure that Daniel prophesized the eventual defeat of Britain and American independence. In other words, it was God’s will that America become free. Excited and astonished, Belknap preached a sermon and told his friends and family about his insight. For the remainder of his life, twenty years, he lived according to this revelation of the divine will.
That the divine will might enter into and direct society and government was not a new idea. Pagans and Christians, Muslims and Jews, if devout, rarely purposefully act in contradiction to what they perceive to be God’s will. The uniqueness of the Protestant Reformation was the range of interpretation of God’s will. Calvin channeled the perception of God’s grace that he and his fellow saints had purportedly experienced into an active crusade to spread Christianity and the awareness of God’s will on earth. It is slightly absurd, of course, to proclaim the omniscience and omnipotence of God and in the same breath proclaim that notwithstanding the limited perspective, clouded by time and sin, of one’s life one still knows God’s will. Some Christians, both New Light and Old Light, turned their freedom of the will into God’s will, and vice versa. Jonathan Edwards, in his essay Freedom of the Will, argued that free will, which obviously exists, is not will itself, just like human goodness is not the good itself. These were not new ideas. What was new was the unique situation of eighteenth-century America. Edwards and his parishioners felt the presence of the Holy Spirit, God’s overwhelming will, even as they felt called upon to exercise their respective freedom to choose. This differed from John Calvin. One senses from Calvin’s Institutes a sense of the inexorable will of God that no human can reject. Calvin needed the help of the community of believers to substantiate this feeling that he was chosen, against his will, but according to God’s will, to act for the sake of God and His kingdom. Calvin manufactured a kind of certainty amid all the overwhelming uncertainties of life. And yet he still felt terrible anxiety, knowing that his will was never perfectly free, yet bound to Another.
Uncertainty and consequent anxiety are the sine qua non of life. Some respond in silence and humility, become a monastic in theory or in fact. Others give voice to their fears in writings and confessions, hoping to solicit a silent empathy from listeners and readers. Still others are driven by anxiety to join in common with others equally in despair, where numbers and a collective voice drown out solitary cries, giving energy, even if elusive and fleeting, to one’s individual impulses. It feels so much better, when afraid, to act when others are acting as well. Collective action gives legitimacy to individual actions. One person might not challenge the world but a host can; one person might not challenge authority unless joined by countless others; one person might not speak in tongues, or scream and faint in the presence of the congregation, unless others have removed its singularity. To do something strange or untraditional requires a certain anonymity, which the collective provides. If the Great Awakening had been the awakening of one soul to God, it would be a footnote not a chapter in the pages of history. Social, religious, and political movements require the subjugation of the individual self to the collective self, which ironically legitimizes and strengthens individual self-perception. Scores of people believing and acting give credence to the claim that it is God’s will that drives such actions.. It felt good to Edwards to reduce his freedom to a single spark in the light of Freedom. Likewise, it felt good to Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, and all the other Patriots who rejected tyranny for freedom, to universalize their feelings, to make their cause the Cause, to make their perceptions self-evident to all humans. Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence reads like a religious tract in its focus on the will of the people, the necessity of history, the laws of nature and God. Some Patriots, like Jeremy Belknap, applied Jefferson’s secular, deist tone to a religious format. But clearly Jefferson’s vague allusions to the divine and concrete images of human experience and action struck a chord with the mass of Americans, who by 1776 had been awakened to a recognition of God’s will, no matter what form it might take.
Hence the Great Awakening succeeded, but only through transformation, adjustment to the perceived realities of the Enlightenment. The Enlightened thinker of the middle to late eighteenth century had come to realize the power of human reason. Yes, there might be this vague universal force, Reason, but it was distant, growing more anonymous, giving a perfunctory nod to Reformation and Revolution. Freedom of the will grew in stature before, during, and after the American Revolution. There might be a transcending Will, as the French believed in their Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which legitimized the violence of the French Revolution, but even this transcendent force was the General Will of the people rather than the universal will of God. Social and political movements still sought St. Augustine’s City of God but with a secular twist. Theirs was a heavenly city, a utopia, on earth, where all humans would find happiness; disease, starvation, poverty, ignorance would be eliminated. The millennium still beckoned, could still be inaugurated on earth. The millennium of the enlightened philosopher of the eighteenth century, of the utopian thinker of the nineteenth century, was still eschatological, still divinely sanctioned, however vaguely. Yet this millennium lacked Christ. It lacked the Second Coming, the sound of trumpets, Armageddon, Judgment. It was a secular millennium that the philosophers and quasi-religious called for and expected.
THE SELF-RELIANT BELIEVER
Social and ideological movements of the late eighteenth, early nineteen, centuries were still caused by uncertainty about life, anxiety brought about by the fear of change and death, the manifold wars, epidemics, famines, and the like. The mind struggles to make sense out of disaster, mortality, and suffering, and finds answers to fit the times. The answers of the early nineteen century were of an astonishing variety: Deism, Universalism, Unitarianism, Transcendentalism, Millennialism, Mormonism. The apparent diversity of these responses to the uncertainty and anguish of war, revolution, and industrialization should not blind us to their similarities. Groups who take political and social matters into their own hands, who rise up and revolt and realize their power, understand sovereignty not according to the exclusive right of kings and aristocrats but the inclusive right of all people. They experience power as a possession, an expectation, a fundamental right. Having experienced such power, they will hardly relinquish it to others, human or divine.
The years before and after the American Revolution, then, hosted the unabashed awareness of the power of the human mind. Deists allowed human reason to penetrate all facets of the human and natural past. Thomas Paine referred to his time as The Age of Reason (1794), where superstition and the supernatural took a back seat to science, mathematics, historicism, and empiricism. “My own mind is my own church,” he proclaimed. Unitarians used logic and experience to proclaim that God is a Unity rather than a Trinity. Universalists assumed that their kind of God would not contradict human expectations of goodness and justice in condemning humans, both guilty and not guilty, to eternal torment in Hell. Unitarians and Universalists, like Transcendentalists, ignored revelation, sources of truth and inspiration such as the Old Testament and New Testament, preferring instead their own reason and experiences to gauge what is truth and what is falsehood, what is divine and what is not. Taking a page from the Old Lights, the Unitarians and Universalists could not countenance beliefs and institutions based on the fundamental assumption of human sinfulness, for humans are inherently good, and Adam’s fall has no bearing on the present.
A good example of the movement toward a less rigorous Christianity, a more accommodating spirituality of love, goodness, and peace, was the Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau and his friends and associates, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, believed that the route to truth lay within the human heart. Intuition, not reason, nor revelation, nor tradition, taught the individual self what to believe and how to act. Self-reliance, independent thought, personal authority, personal knowledge: these were the credos of the early nineteenth-century Romantic. Thoreau and his type rejected the rationalism and empiricism of the Enlightenment thinker and Old Light as well as the energetic acceptance of God’s will of the awakened New Light for the self in search of meaningful human experience. The only authority was the scripture of self, searching for and finding God within oneself via the conduit of Nature. Emerson felt “perpetual youth” in nature, and childlike innocence as well. Sacrifice, suffering, atonement, redemption, crucifixion, resurrection, blend in, become lost in, the untold variety and plenty of nature, where all is good and life is peace. The phenomenon of social movement, the idea of a Great Awakening, were ignored, become inconsequential, to Transcendentalists such as Thoreau and Emerson.
Self-reliant philosophies such as Unitarianism, Universalism, Deism, and Transcendentalism could hardly sponsor-rather could only eschew-the religious concerns of the mass of people. In retrospect a Second Great Awakening was inevitable given the confident, passive tone of early nineteenth-century religion and philosophy and at the same time the overwhelming anxiety caused by modernization. Americans, particularly in the northern states and especially the growing middle-class, were going through a dramatic period of questioning and seeking answers. Independence brought with it a host of concerns. How could a society based on the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights sponsor such glaring abuse to people of color, slave and free? How could the factories of the north continue to rely on the raw materials of the south grown through human suffering and despair? What would be the price of the coming Industrial Revolution? How could Americans avoid unstoppable growth, urban blight, increasing poverty and inequality? How best could ambitious young people best utilize their talents and energies in a society and economy exploding to the west, up rivers and canals, over the Appalachians, down the Ohio and Mississippi, up the Missouri, across the Rockies? The decade of the 1830s repeated the experiences of the 1730s-the change, the anxiety, the search, the discovery, the answer.
For some Americans the answer to economic and social change was religious change-a new ideology, new scripture, new church, new life. John Humphrey Noyes at Oneida, New York, headed a community of believers who reveled in their perfection-and their sexuality. Shaker communities in New England practiced celibacy and awaited Christ’s imminent return. Joseph Smith proclaimed his revelation that Christ had all along picked America as His chosen land, the place where He would return to reign for a thousand years, a millennium.
Indeed, millennialism was on the minds of quite a few people during the first half of the nineteenth century. The Second Great Awakening of the 1830s resulted from new ideas about Christianity, the sinner’s relation to God, Christ’s role in redemption, and the millennium. The great spokesman of the Second Great Awakening was Charles Finney, who preached to the farmers and shopkeepers of New York, particularly upstate New York along the Erie Canal. Here were towns and cities undergoing tremendous change. Rochester, for example, experienced a population explosion, new trade and business; it was a bustling atmosphere with young people willing to work hard, intent on achieving material success. Finney like Edwards and Whitefield of a century earlier was a grand orator who could hold the audience of the hopeful in the palms of his oratorical hands as he recreated hell and suffering for sin, then painted a picture of redemption and heavenly success. For Finney, the sinner can achieve salvation completely by his or her own means. Just as the businessman needs to change his lifestyle to succeed, so the sinner needs to change her lifestyle to reach heaven. But before death bids us to such joy, the redeemed sinner, having made the conscious decision to reject sin for salvation, will enjoy signs of heaven on earth. Material prosperity awaits the person who chooses to be saved. Gone from Finney’s sermons were God’s anger and the damnation of sinful souls, born in sin, predestined for hell. The preceding century had taught rational Americans that God left the choice of salvation entirely in each person’s hands. Self-reliant, independent, freedom-loving Americans could experience do-it-yourself salvation. Conversion does not come from some hidden, unexpected source in response to one’s appeal to God for help. Conversion is a conscious decision to succeed, rather like the choice to go into business.
Portrait of Charles Finney
One can imagine the enthusiastic response to such a doctrine of salvation and success open to all with very little inconvenience. The people of the industrializing north, the people of Rochester, embraced such ideas and put their hearts to the grindstone to learn to be “perfect, as Christ is perfect.” Christ’s perfection, of course, resulted in terrible suffering and death. But the atmosphere of business, materialism, success, Americanism, and free will of the 1830s would hardly accommodate such a negative theology. Life had changed during eighteen hundred years, and so too had the church, the elect, sin, and salvation. Gone were the days of priests, confessions, the damned, God’s wrath, suffering, and the cross. The Second Great Awakening and consequent evangelical movements gave the American in approaching the afterlife what he had always had in life: free choice, self-reliance, independence.
Religious social movements in America from 1730s to the 1830s possessed a peculiar irony. Americans responded to anxiety and uncertainty by allowing themselves to be caught up in a movement involving large groups of people who conformed to the requirements of the majority, and who accepted the teachings of the religious spokesman. Yet these teachings tended to contradict the nature and function of the revival itself. Social movements sweep up the individual, make him a part of a whole, force him to relinquish some of his freedom, demand the merging of his identity with that of the group. The sacrifice of the individual earns rich dividends in return. By becoming a part of the group one feels more an individual. By giving up freedom to act on one’s own one achieves the freedom of salvation. Free will is elusive in theory yet in practice one can revel in it. And best of all, one can agree that the teachings of Christ-humility, peace, acceptance, poverty-are best realized in the pride of conversion, the violence of reform, the pursuit of progress, and the rich signs of salvation.
The mirror of the past is the only way to peer at the image of what is human. The reflection is darkened by time and sin. Specters of the dead, haunting the dusty stacks of long-ago thoughts, turn up repeatedly, if indistinctly, on library shelves and in the dens of archivists. Storytellers such as the Greek Homer, abstract philosophers such as the Athenian Plato and John the Evangelist, poets such as King David and the Italian Petrarch, historians such as the Romans Livy and Tacitus, biographers such as the Greek Plutarch and the Physician Luke, essayists such as the Roman Seneca, the emperor Marcus Aurelius, and the Frenchman Michel de Montaigne, lived the past, made it their own, spoke to it and heard a response. Such writers expressed empathy toward past lives that span the ages. They engaged in a dialogue with the past, a discussion of self in light of others, creating a sensitive portrait, based on the varied experiences of humans at particular places and times, of the image of God in human, apparent throughout the ages. This is true history.
This site is called The American Plutarch as a paean to the writer, philosopher, historian of ancient Greece, Plutarch, whose lives of ancient heroes drew me, many years ago, into the world of the classical past, made me yearn to resurrect past lives, to find in the past the clues to contentment in the present and ways to meet the future. Plutarch’s ability to empathize with past lives became my goal as a writer, philosopher, and historian: to empathize with human lives, those of the past and present. As the years have passed, I have come to realize that empathy to past and present lives should not be limited to human lives, but should be expanded to all lives: all that lives, has lived, will live, on this Earth. Plutarch, too, believed in respecting all life on the Earth–he continues to be a model for what I believe.
The bits and pieces of writing and thinking at this site, The American Plutarch, represents a variety of turns of mind I have experienced during my previous scores of years living on Earth. You will find a bit of the skeptic, a bit of the humanist, a bit of the naturalist, a bit of the existentialist, and a bit of the theist. Life has taught me that what we think we know is more of a shadow of reality than reality. These shadows can be haunting, darkening, hiding the true light of reality. I am unprepared to say that something does not exist just because I have not seen it. I have experienced the presence of the supernatural in my life that discounts all of the pretenses of the skeptical humanist and atheist, who appear downright arrogant and misguided to me. I believe in keeping an open mind about everything. How can anyone, living moment to moment in time, actually know very much? I’ve learned this lesson over the years, and feel content in thinking, listening, learning, seeking wisdom with the perspective of a child, which, after all, is what we all are, no matter our respective age.
Please read my thoughts, ponder them, respond to them if you will, and help me to engage in a dialogue with the past (and the present)!
For religious reflection check out my Kindle book, God is Love: Reflections on the Psalms, which is an ecumenical, spiritual, meditative, historical reflection on the 150 Psalms of David. The book is meant to inspire reflection on the historical and existential purpose of the Psalms, an active search for and communication with God, a meditative dialogue with God’s words that links the meditative person with so many like seekers and thinkers over the centuries. The book can be purchased here:
Also, Science in the Ancient World: From Antiquity through the Middle Ages, which is a full narrative account of ancient thought. It can be purchased at Amazon at this link:
In 2015, I published a complete reappraisal of Captain John Smith, in which I examine Smith’s role as an explorer and ad hoc missionary: The Sea Mark: Captain John Smith’s Voyage to New England.
Published in June, 2018, a biography of the explorer and missionary Daniel Little, who repeatedly journeyed to the eastern Maine frontier before and after the American Revolution: Apostle of the East: The Life and Journeys of Daniel Little.
Several ambitious publications include a book juxtaposing Jesus of Nazareth with his time, 2000 years ago: Metamorphosis: How Jesus of Nazareth Vanquished the Legion of Fear.
Why does fear continue to overwhelm humans, even today, in the 21st century, with our many labor-saving, health-generating, information-gathering, and technological savvy devices? Why should not happiness and contentment be the dominant feelings rather than fear and foreboding?
Like so many today, I believe that ancient wisdom has something to say about this perplexing question. Ancient philosophy and religion provide so many answers to the questions that face us.
And yet … As I have spent many years studying Eastern and Western Scriptures and books—the Taoists, Buddhists, Hebrews, Platonists, Stoics, and Skeptics—I never really quite arrived at the answer.
Then I discovered, largely by happenstance, and unexpectedly, that one ancient source summarizes, even is based on, the knowledge and wisdom of the ancients: the New Testament and its great teacher, Jesus of Nazareth.
Seeking to understand how the New Testament and the teachings of Jesus reflect ancient thought, I wrote this book:
My argument is that the New Testament writers, following the life, teachings, and actions of Jesus, represent a culmination of ancient thought and provide a solution to vanquishing the legions of fear that still plague humanity today.
All of the blog posts found at this site are copyright Russell M. Lawson. If you use words and ideas from any post please site them accordingly.
American Catholics: An Encyclopedic History: Beginning with North America’s contact with three imperialist powers (Spain, France, and England), this narrative account tells the story of how Catholicism became and continues to be part of the basic religious and cultural fiber of North America. The book follows a narrative chronological and thematic format, focusing on people, events, practices, social and cultural phenomena, and institutions. People discussed include the well-known, such as Christopher Columbus and Junipero Serra, and the not-so-well-known, such as Juniper Berthiaume and Jean Louis Berlandier.
With 33 chapter divided into 7 parts and all drawing on primary sources, this book engages with topics such as the overwhelming violence against Indigenous people and the religion’s role in wars, politics, and modern-day culture.
The Lawsons of the American Southern Hill Country: The Lawson family in America were often common people who made their way south and west in colonial America, many of whom in time dwelt in mountainous areas, such as the Appalachians and foothills as well as the small mountain chains of Arkansas, Missouri, and eastern Oklahoma that make up the Ozarks and Ouachitas. Before the twentieth century, they tended to be farmers, generally sufficiently poor not to own slaves in the South, hence relying on the common work of large families and strong kinship networks. Lawsons often lived by each other and often moved to new places, such as in Arkansas, together. They tended to be evangelical Protestants and believers in hard work and traditional family and community values. A history of some of the Lawsons over the past several centuries exemplifies what many American families experienced in the transitional period in American history from the eighteenth-century colonial period to the new nation of the nineteenth century and the onset of modernization from the mid-nineteenth century to today
Van Sorrels: The Woodcutting Musician: This is the story of a woodcutter who lived in Northwest Arkansas. Van Sorrels was a simple man. He could read and write but he had no formal schooling. Yet he was a thinker. He was a big man, stout, strong, blue-eyed, a firm gazer, an honest looker, a man whom others trusted, who kept his word, who believed firmly that the Lord watched him always, and knowing this, Van wished his actions to be pleasing to God. Van was a musician who made his own stringed instruments and taught his family how to play, forming a family orchestra. The time described in this book is the late 1800s, early 1900s. Van Sorrels, son of Deal and Sarah Sorrels, was married to Martha Tully, daughter of Wesley and Jerusha Tully. This man Van of Norman and English extraction with reddish-brown hair and hard muscles worked from dawn to dusk, most days, cutting trees in the forest, cutting off the limbs, dragging the large trunks to his workshop, hewing the wood into various shapes, squares and rectangles that could be used for fencing, barn and cabin framing, railroad ties, and such. During winter he spent much of his time cutting firewood for customers. Sometimes his work was more intricate: preparing wood for the delicate task of fashioning a stringed instrument. Some of this work took thought, some of it did not; he supplemented the routine actions with traditional songs and hymns, many of which he had memorized, others he had composed based off of the original, which he said or hummed, thinking that later in the day, after dusk, he would sit next to the fireplace strumming his guitar, or making the mandolin sing. And his wife and children would join in, their voices merging together, the mandolin, guitar, and fiddle combining together in joyous tunes of praise to the Lord, the land, and the past. The book is as well a genealogical study of Van’s forebears and his descendants, focusing especially on his grandparents, his granduncles and grandaunts, his parents, and aunts and uncles, his cousins and second cousins, and his children, their spouses, and their children.
The Memories of Lida Newcomb: Lida Newcomb’s life was never easy. Before her third birthday, her father died, and Lida watched her grieving mother sink into depression. The family soon traveled from California to Maine, where Lida spent her formative years. Through the struggles of life in turn of the 20th century New England, Lida found joy in the little things: family, children, and the beauty of Country Pond, her most beloved place in all the world. Though she passed away in 1941, her memories live on.
The Memories of Katie Perkins: The Story of the Perkins and Related Families of New England
This story of Katie Perkins and her family and friends is centered around hundreds of photographs portraying Victorian and Edwardian life in New England as well as hundreds of postcards with messages about family and friends covering the period from 1902 to 1922. Katie kept these photo albums and postcards, and they were passed down to the present by means of her brother Will Perkins and niece Florence Beatrice Brown Phillips. Along with the photos and postcards are diaries, letters, family documents, news clippings, and other such primary source documents from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These documents inform us of a variety of local and family affairs relating to the Perkins and related families: the Reynolds, Phillips, Brown, Cash, Follett, Tyler, Wilcox, Church, Tourgee, and Prosser families of New England and the Crawford and Lennox families of Scotland.
The Christmas Miracle: This novella is a fictional account of one person’s search for God, for love, as he arrives at the final moment of his life.Calvin is a middle aged husband and father dying of cancer. He is spending his last days in a hospice. The book examines his last day of life, Christmas Eve into Christmas Day. Amid the pain and suffering, Calvin experiences a recurring dream in which he is searching for truth, attempting to fill in a scroll with words of truth. In an imaginary dream town, he tries various means to uncover the truth, without success. Finally, in the late afternoon of Christmas Eve, he finds himself standing in line in an alley of the town. He converses with several people–a smoker, a knitter, a professor, and a little bald man. As they wait for the end of the line, they try to figure out what the line is for. Their conversation takes a religious turn, and the professor tries to convince everyone that Christianity is nonsense. He is skeptical and secular. The little bald man tries to counter the professor’s arguments, generally without success. As the line proceeds outside of town into a hilly environment, and as darkness falls and fog envelops them, they cease their conversations. Calvin is alone with his thoughts. He is not sure why he is in the line, where it is taking him. Eventually, at dawn, he comes to a hill on which is a ladder. Unsure why, for what purpose, he scales it anyway, and arrives at a long wooden horizontal post with a hammer and nails. There are notes hammered to the wood. Calvin reads them. They are confessions of error, pain, suffering, and sin–to whom is unclear. Meanwhile Calvin, in the hospice, goes in and out of sleep. He is experiencing horrible pain, and knows he is close to death. The dream intrigues him. As he grows closer and closer to the end, the dream reaches a culmination as well.
The Nautilus: A Maritime Journal of Literature, History, and Culture, (The Nautilus VII (Spring 2016): 115-118: nautilus.maritime.edu/) published a review of my book: The Sea Mark: Captain John Smith’s Voyage to New England (University of New England Press, 2015): the review, reproduced by permission, follows:
The Sea Mark: Captain John Smith’s Voyage to New England. By Russell M. Lawson. 248 pp. Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 2015. $29.95 cloth; $24.99 ebook. ISBN 978-1-61168-516-9 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-61168-717-0 (ebook).
When Captain John Smith published his work A Description of New England (1616) after escaping from pirates with only his life and the manuscript detailing his 1614 voyage to America, several people contributed panegyric verses to their “worthy” and “respected” friend’s volume. A typical sentiment praised Smith’s accomplishments and chided the jealousy that seemed to follow the captain: “That which we call the subject of all Storie, / Is Truth: which in this Worke of thine gives glorie / To all that thou has done. Then scorne the spight / Of Envie; that doth no man’s merit right.” Smith certainly had a penchant for self-aggrandizement, declaring any and all of England’s successes in the American colonies “but pigs of my own sowe” (174). This self-perception did not endear him to many of his contemporaries nor to historians long after his death, who continued to question the trustworthiness of his accounts of his adventures as late as the close of the nineteenth century. As Russell Lawson argues in The Sea Mark, more recent historians, who, like their predecessors have had nothing but Smith’s own nine published works on which to evaluate him, have not only debunked the naysayers, but showed “he was sometimes too honest for his own good” (xiii). By the time Smith left London in March 1614 to explore the New England coast from Penobscot Bay to Cape Cod, he was in his mid-thirties and had already served as a soldier in the Netherlands and the Balkans; been captured and sold as a slave in Istanbul (securing his freedom by strangling his master and escaping); joined a French pirate ship; and taken part, as a leader, in the Jamestown expedition in Virginia from 1607 to 1609. Within the context of this rich and varied life, Pocahontas seems but a footnote. Captain Smith’s entire life presents itself as a series of perils, close calls, betrayals, captivities (he lost his freedom a second time, for some months, to pirates), and thwarted goals. Lawson seeks to engage in a “humanist history” of Smith, following Montaigne’s belief in uncovering the historical past by “building a dialogue” with the dead (18). Focusing on Capt. Smith’s expedition to New England with forty-five men in two barks, memorialized in Smith’s book A Description of New England, Lawson recounts not only Smith’s aspirations for colonization in the new England, but his thwarted hopes later in life when bad weather, pirates, lack of financial support, or a combination thereof at various times seemed to conspire to defeat him. The expedition to New England, with a base of operations on Monhegan Island off the coast of Maine, was meant to be “a brief voyage of discovery by which to establish more solid plans for a plantation, a self-sustaining fishing colony that would be a successful vanguard of the English” (135). Unlike explorers who were intent on discovering precious metals, Smith’s dreams were of fish—and the bounty they could afford to the common man. In this land, Smith saw the opportunity for a man, in Lawson’s words, “to find a place to work, build, sweat, breathe, eat the product of one’s labor, live in the results of one’s work, [and] glory in the unprepossessing enjoyment of a simple life” denied to him in England (117). Having already explored the Chesapeake and its tributaries, Smith now intended to map the New England coast and find both good harbors and rich fishing grounds. His explorations proved the existence of the abundant sea life he had suspected: “He is a very bad fisher [who] cannot kill in one day with his hooke and line, one, two, or three hundred Cods” (119). With some initiative, “Here every man may be master and owner of his own labor and land; or the greatest part in a small time. If he have nothing but his hands, he may set up this trade; and by industry quickly grow rich; spending but half that time well, which in England we abuse in idleness, worse or as ill” (157). The majority of the book’s chapters trace Smith’s voyage along the New England coast, beginning with the expedition’s base on Monhegan Island, where a majority of the men remained to fish, while Smith and eight others travelled by shallop, first north to the Penobscot Bay area, then south to the Sagadahoc [Kennebec], Smith’s Isles [Isles of Shoals], Cape Tragabigzanda [Cape Ann], Massachusetts and Plymouth bays, and Cape James [Cape Cod]. The expedition can be deemed a success: Smith “explored the 44th to 41st degrees north latitude,” saw “at least 40 . . . habitations” on the seacoast, communicated with the Algonquian peoples he met on route, and “sounded about 25 excellent Harbours” (136, 137). The expedition ended on a sour note, however, when, Smith claims, one of the men, Capt. Thomas Hunt, attempted to abscond with Smith’s maps and notes “and so to leave me alone in a desolate Ile” (144). This same Hunt later kidnapped Tisquantum, who had served as Smith’s interpreter and guide and who would later escape and befriend the Pilgrims, who knew him as Squanto. While Smith’s return voyage to England was uneventful, his luck would reach a nadir in the ensuing years, and he never returned to America to establish the fishing colony he envisioned. It seemed in 1615 that Smith’s dream would be realized, when two ships set sail from Plymouth, England to found a fishing colony, but the vessels encountered pirates three times before crossing the Atlantic: First, the ships were beset by the pirate Fry off the coast of Devon; while that encounter ended “amiably,” a second encounter, with two French pirate ships off the Azores, required a dramatic escape; finally, the pirates of the French ship Don de Dieu, with the encouragement of duplicitous members of Smith’s expedition, took Smith prisoner, while letting the others proceed on their voyage to America. Held for months on the Don de Dieu while it plundered vessels off the Azores, Smith managed to write A Description of New England with quill, ink, and paper supplied by the corsairs. This “journal, human history, natural history, promotional tract for self and England, geographical essay, and apology for colonization” (156) only made it to print by virtue of Smith’s intrepidity: Passed from one pirate to another, he finally took his chances and escaped—with nothing but his clothes and his manuscript—in a small boat in the middle of a storm. All of Smith’s further attempts to return to America came to naught. Until his death in 1631, Smith continued to write of his explorations and to lament his inability to carry out his colonizing dreams. While sometimes “neare ridden to death in a ring of despaire” (xv), Smith remained confident in his own capabilities. In A Description of New England, he had written that “it is not the worke for every one, to manage such an affaire as makes discoveries and plants a Colony. It requires all the best parts of Art, Judgement, Courage, Honesty, Constancy, Diligence, and Industrie, to do but neere well” (97-8). At the end of his life, Smith reiterated his commitment and connection to the new England, claiming “by that acquaintance I have with them [New England and Virginia], I may call them my children; for they have bin my wife, my hawks, my hounds, my cards, my dice, and in total my best content” (174). Champlain, Gosnold, Cabot, Verrazanno, Hakluyt, Frobisher. Smith believed he belonged in this pantheon, and surely he does. The Sea Mark reminds us of the intrepidity of these men—this man—who if not fearlessly, then boldly crossed the sea to explore distant shores and imagine what the New World could be. Kathryn Mudgett is Editor of The Nautilus.
This initial question yields the many questions that follow because Christianity is an old religion, entering into its third millennium, based on an even older religion, that of the Hebrews, which began several millennia before that of Christianity. From the beginning two thousand years ago Christianity has been splintered into many sects with different beliefs. During two thousand years of change, growth, and decline, various expressions of Christianity have mirrored the prevailing culture, society, and politics of the time and place. Some expressions have come and gone while others have peaked and entered a slow decline. Still others have continued a stable influence upon millions of people, some dramatic, different from the norm, others with slight, subtle differences that set them apart from the mainstream. Christianity remains the dominant world religion with the most adherents spreading throughout six continents on Earth. The Roman Catholic expression of Christianity is the largest denomination, indeed has always been so since the onset of Christianity among Jesus’s disciples after his Resurrection and Ascension. From this main source of Christian expression scores of variations have developed. During the first several centuries after the death of Christ, the early church assumed a structure led by bishops of cities in the Western and Eastern Roman Empire; a generally-agreed upon canon of Scripture, accepted as genuine, that is, inspired by the Holy Spirit, developed. The sacraments of the church also came together, focusing in particular on Baptism and the Eucharist. The growing orthodoxy of the church centered on bishops was directed by early statements of faith, the Apostle’s Creed and Nicaean Creed. Splinter groups, called heresies by the dominant orthodoxy, included Gnosticism, Donatism, Marcionism, Pelagianism, and Arianism. Gnosticism, for example, inspired by theologians such as Valentinus, merged the developing Christian theology with the ancient Greek search for gnosis; Gnosticism was an internal search for Christ, who was present in spiritual form within the believer’s soul. Gnostics denied the physicality of Christ, seeing Him as a spiritual presence only. Marcionism during the second century rejected Old Testament allegorical interpretations that foretold the coming of Christ as well as the New Testament assertion of the Virgin Birth. Donatism in the early fourth century featured North African purists attempting to reject Sacraments that were administered by sinful/apostate Catholic priests and bishops. Arianism, the expression of Christianity by Arius (d. 336) and his followers, argued that the Son is created, not the same substance as the Father. Pelagianism, the expression of Pelagius, a British cleric (ca 400), and his followers, denied original sin and the human need for grace. From these early heresies many other derivations from Christian Orthodoxy over the past fifteen hundred years.
But what was the generally orthodoxy, which became in time the Roman Catholic doctrine, from which these heresies departed from?
Orthodox Christianity, which unites most Christians in the past and present, as well as Protestants, Roman Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox Christians in the past and present, was based on several sources. The Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) is a collection of writings (narratives, chronologies, poems, prophecies, wisdom literature) that describe the experiences, knowledge, teachings, and theology of the Hebrew Semites during the second and first millennia B.C. (ante christos). In the Old Testament, we find the declaration of a sole God called Yahweh: this was the Hebrew God introduced to Moses in the Book of Exodus as “I am who I am.” In the first chapter of Genesis is described Creation: God is the creator of all things, the world, the heavens, and all forms of life, including humans. God makes humans, Adam (literally “man”) and Eve, formed from Adam’s rib. Genesis chapters one and two have different descriptions of the creation of humans. In chapter one, God proclaims His creation of all things, including humans, Good. In chapter two, however, Original Sin is described, developed from the human response to the search for knowledge: the serpent beguiles Eve, who convinces Adam that they should disobey God and eat from the tree of knowledge. All humans henceforth are condemned by God’s judgment against Adam and Eve.
Genesis describes God’s people, the Hebrews/Israelites, who were Semites who migrated from Mesopotamia to Palestine during the 2nd millennium B.C. Israel was, historically, the name for Abraham’s grandson Jacob. The Old Testament also features covenants formed between God and humans: the Covenant of Abraham, which is the foundation of God’s relationship with the Hebrews, the Chosen People, which was formed initially with and by Abraham, the founder of the Hebrews. This was a covenant of circumcision. The Covenant of Moses: Moses was the Hebrew who led the Egyptians from bondage in Egypt. He was introduced to Yahweh at Mt. Sinai. After leading the Egyptians out of Egypt, Moses received from God the Ten Commandments, which form the basis of the Law, which forms the basis of the Hebrew Torah and books such as Leviticus and Deuteronomy.
The Old Testament is a book that describes God’s providential direction of human affairs, focusing on the Hebrews and their enemies. After a period of time of leadership by Moses and his followers, the Hebrews crowned a king, Saul, who was overthrown by David, with whom God formed a new covenant. David the shepherd boy was the anointed of God who drove the Philistines out of Palestine and established a unified kingdom that his son, Solomon, inherited.
Much of the Old Testament is a history of the various, almost endless, ways that the Hebrews broke the covenant with God by recurrent disobedience. During these centuries of disobedience and punishment some remarkable poetic writing emerged from particularly gifted Hebrews, notably the Psalms. There are 150 Psalms, largely written by David, which form a core of wisdom literature that includes the Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job, and the Song of Solomon. The Psalms formed in early modern Europe and America the Psalter, and became an important basis for American hymns. There are also books of prophecy. The prophets, such as Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Ezekiel, were inspired by God to proclaim God’s future works of redemption and punishment. The prophet Isaiah proclaimed the coming of the Messiah, the anointed one, called by the Greeks Christos, who was predicted by Hebrew prophets to be a king who would liberate the Jews from their oppressors and, like Moses, return them to glory and the promised land of Canaan.
Besides the Old Testament, Christians believe that the New Testament, the story of Jesus and His followers during the first century, A. D. (anno domini, in the year of our Lord), is inspired by God, the Holy Spirit, and is the most important foundation for Christian belief. The books of the New Testament began with the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, which provide brief biographical narratives that describe the life, work, and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called the Synoptic Gospels because of their many similarities.
The Gospel of Matthew was written (traditionally) circa 70 A.D. by a former tax collector and disciple of Christ. Written for Jewish Christians, it shows Jesus as the Hebrew Messiah, fulfilling Hebrew prophecy. The Gospel of Mark, written circa 65 A.D. by John Mark, Peter’s friend and Paul’s associate, is perhaps the earliest Gospel written. It is the partial basis for Luke and Matthew along with other oral traditions (nicknamed Q). Mark presents Jesus as the shadowy Son of Man; it is written for a Jewish and Gentile audience. Third is the Gospel of Luke, written circa 70 A.D. by the physician Luke, Paul’s friend, for Gentile Christians. Luke is the most full biographical account of Christ’s life. The last Gospel is the Gospel of John, written circa 95 A.D. by the disciple whom Jesus loved. Presents Jesus as the logos. The most mystical of the Gospels, it is heavily influenced by Greek philosophy. John was written for Jewish Christians.
After the Gospels is the Acts of the Apostle, which is the story of the spread of the Gospel by the first disciples and apostles. It was authored by the Gospel writer Luke. After Acts are various Epistles, mostly by Paul (?-67 A.D.), the former Pharisee, later fearless Apostle, who spread the Gospel to Asia Minor, Greece, Italy, perhaps Spain. Paul’s Epistles (to the Romans, Corinthians, Colossians, Thessalonians, Ephesians, Timothy, Titus, and Philemon) focus on the resurrected Christ overcoming the limitations of the Law. Other Epistles by Peter, James, Jude, John are letters of the disciples. Peter (?-67 A.D.?) was the first disciple, the rock of the Church. John (?-100A.D.) was the disciple whom Jesus loved, author of Fourth Gospel, Epistles, and perhaps Revelation, a mystical chapter of eschatological writings. John was teacher of many second century apostles, such as Papias, Polycarp, and Ignatius.
The New Testament presents a unique, fascinating, and captivating theology centered upon the life and teachings of Jesus. The books are centered upon the mystical Incarnation, the miracle of God becoming man, taking on flesh, in Mary’s womb. The Incarnation is the central event in human history by which Christians measure their own lives. The assumption of the Incarnation is based on several mystical assumptions, one of which is the Annunciation by the Angel Gabriel to the young virgin Mary that she would bear the Son of God by means of the actions of the Holy Spirit. One interpretation of Mary by the Catholic Church is that she was without sin, a teaching known as the Immaculate Conception. Most expressions of Christianity teach the concept of the Trinity, which is the Christian conception of the tripartite God: God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit, all of the same substance yet with different identities. Further, the Apostle John in his Gospel presents Jesus as the Logos, which in Greek philosophy is the Word, the expression of truth that exists in the universe. Christian writers, influenced by the Greeks, conceived of the Logos as Jesus the Christ. Jesus himself, in the Gospels, declares himself the Son of Man, a mysterious phrase by which Jesus identified himself in the Gospels. Christians argue that after many hidden years Jesus became a proselyte for God and His own role as the Son of God. After several years of teaching he was arrested and crucified, which Christians interpret as the Pascal sacrifice by which Jesus saved the sins of all humankind. The Romans typically crucified criminals and evil-doers. Jesus was crucified at the order of Pontius Pilate, Procurator of Judaea, at the request of Jewish leaders of the Sanhedrin. But on the third day after the crucifixion, the Resurrection occurred–the return to life of Jesus after crucifixion and burial in a tomb. Afterwards the Ascension occurred, which is the departure of Jesus into Heaven several days after His resurrection. Then, after fifty days occurred Pentecost: in which the Holy Spirit comes to the Apostles in tongues of fire and infuses hope, power, and knowledge. An important part of Jesus’s teaching to the disciples is the Great Commission, in which Jesus gave the Twelve disciples (and hence all apostles) a commission to go into the world and spread the Gospel. This involves bringing the Good News to Gentiles: the non-Jews of the ancient world, the uncircumcised. The Apostles of the first and second century A. D. formed the Church (ecclesia). The structure and leadership of the Church during the first centuries involved small communities of persecuted believers, led by Deacons, Presbyters, and Bishops. By the end of the second century, the New Testament canon was formed. Also during the second century, Apostolic authority was assumed by leaders of the emerging Church.
September 1, 1939, Marian Piotr Opala was an eighteen-year-old student living with his parents in Lodz, Poland, when he heard the news that the Germans had invaded his homeland and were headed toward Lodz from the west.
Marian, a law student, discovered a resourcefulness and a will to live that took him through the years of the Nazi occupation of Poland. These characteristics served Marian Opala just as well in later years when he served as a justice on the Oklahoma Supreme Court from 1978 to 2010.
After the German occupation of Lodz, Marian and his family awaited English action to liberate Poland, which never occurred. Antony Opala, Marian’s father, thought that the Germans would not be as brutal as they turned out to be. Realizing that the Germans were trying to eradicate the Polish element in what had been western Poland, he reluctantly allowed his family to leave Lodz for Warsaw in January 1941. The Opala family departed surreptitiously and walked the distance to Warsaw, living for a time with Marian’s uncle in an apartment. Marian witnessed violence, oppression, and arbitrary arrests.
In Warsaw, the Polish Home Army, also known as the Polish Underground, a highly organized defensive and offensive organization operating by subterfuge to resist the Germans, conscripted nineteen-year-old Marian Opala. Working with the British, the Polish developed an organization in which most members knew very little of general operations. Marian received orders from people in disguise, and he never knew who his compatriots were. He lived at home, pretended to be a normal citizen, and never told anyone, even his parents, about his resistance activities. If he had, they and he would have faced death.
The Underground used Marian mostly as a translator. He was one of the few Poles who was fluent in English. He was given messages to translate from Polish to English, which were sent on to the British forces. On other occasions, he saw direct action committing violence against the Germany occupiers. Two occasions he was involved in assassinating German officials. The whole time he was, he recalled in an interview almost seventy years later, “scared to death each inch of the way. Absolutely scared to death.”
Eventually the Polish underground sent Marian Opala to join the British in Istanbul. He stayed with the British for several years, seeing action in Italy, Ethiopia, and Egypt. Eventually in 1944, soon after the D-Day invasion, Marian parachuted back into Nazi-occupied Poland. He was captured, and sent to Flossenburg, a concentration camp near the Czech border. Marian recalled it as “a plain murder camp.” He survived, however, and was liberated by the invading American army.
Marian, very ill, was taken to a British camp in Germany, where he recovered. An army captain from Oklahoma, Gene Warr, agreed to sponsor him in obtaining a visa to go to America. Marian ended up in Oklahoma City in 1947. There he studied law, was admitted to the Oklahoma Bar, served as a lawyer and judge, then in 1978 became a justice in the Oklahoma Supreme Court.
Living through utter fear and tragedy helped Marian Opala, during the war and afterwards in America, to develop a moral compass of right and wrong, based on pain and suffering, experiencing the oppression of one against another.
Justice Marian Opala’s resistance of Nazi repression during World War II resulted, later in life in America, in a fight against the oppression of government in any form, as signified by his embrasure of the cause of First Amendment rights in Oklahoma.
According to Psalm 139 of the Old Testament, “O Lord, Thou hast proved me, and known me.” This psalm is a wonderful source of essential knowingness, a source of truthfulness, a source in which a person knows God and knows that God made him/her, makes the individual human self.
Ironically, it was written by King David, a warrior, murderer, adulterer, and conqueror who was also a poet and singer of extraordinary talent and sensitivity. He composed verse and hymns to express piety and love, fear, the search for redemption, the need for deliverance. He knew that God knew. His awareness of God’s awareness is most profoundly stated in this psalm. “Thou knowest my downsitting and mine up-rising: Thou understandest my thoughts from afar.”
God’s love and will are the same. God loves David, and knows David’s actions and thoughts, and witnesses whether David’s actions and thoughts conform to God’s will, and God blesses accordingly. If God does this for David, he does it for every human. “Thou hast traced my path . . . , and hast foreseen all my ways.”
God is with David always–whether awake or asleep, He is part of him, as He is part of all the Creation. David was exceptional only in that he had such a profound awareness of God’s presence in every moment of his life. “O Lord, Thou hast known all things, the last and the first.”
God does not form the word on the tongue, but God nevertheless knows. Such awareness allows David the insight to be able to speak and act in a way that is apt to conform to God’s will. God is present in the past and future, before and after, in the previous step and the forthcoming step. Awareness of this is a sure guide in taking the multifarious steps of life.
“The knowledge of Thee is too wonderful for me; it is very difficult, I cannot attain to it.” The greatest counter to hubris, David knew, was the realization of the supremacy of God’s knowledge and the overwhelming gulf separating David from God. He could not come close to God or His knowledge. Rather, he must wait upon God. “O Whither shall I go from Thy Spirit?” David imagines the ways a being could escape from Being, and it is impossible. One cannot hide from God. If I imagine that I can hide in the dark, the dark is but light to God, who sees all.
“For Thou, O Lord, hast possessed my reins; Thou hast helped me from my mother’s womb.” God has been with David always, even from the womb, and has held onto his path, directed him, as David ran along through life. “Thine eyes saw my unwrought substance, and all men shall be written in Thy book.” God formed the flesh and bones and spirit, brought David out of the depths into the light, and composed the record of his life in the book of life.
“I awake, and am still with Thee.” It is not a dream, this utter connection with the Lord. Though the knowledge of the relationship is intuitive, found deep within the self, in the innermost being, nevertheless daily, upon awakening, Being is among us.
“Prove me, O God, and know my heart; examine me, and know my paths.” David has proven his devotion to God by the point of his sword; the blood dripping from his enemies is his testament to his faith in God. And he asks God, “See if there is any way of iniquity in me, and lead me in an everlasting way.” Bloodshed on behalf of God to David is not iniquity, but such are the king and warrior’s way. As the Hebrews came to know God more fully, and as the descendants of David grew to accept God’s will and ways, to accept defeat as well as victory, no longer was the sword needed. And Jesus counseled His disciples: put away the sword.
Karl Marx was a German intellectual, philosopher, journalist, and atheist Jew who wrote anti-government publications and radical pamphlets and dense analyses of economic, political, and social philosophy. After being exiled from France, he lived in Britain. His collaborator in his most famous and approachable work, Communist Manifesto, was Friedrich Engels. Marx was a utopian thinker who thought he had the solution for the plagues of humankind: oppression, poverty, conflict, war. It was Communism.
Marx argued that the history of humankind involves social and economic conflict between the rich (lords, aristocrats, nobles, business owners, factory managers) and the poor (slaves, serfs, peasants, laborer, factory worker/wage earners). He argued that by his time of the 1800s, class division was highlighted by the conflict between the business owners/factory managers and the laborers/factory workers. The former he called the bourgeoisie, and the latter he called the proletariat. The former were owners, managers, bankers, lawyers, doctors, professors, government leaders; all who owned or controlled the superstructure of society: education, government, hospitals, transportation, communication, military. They were the minority of the population but possessed the majority of the power. The Proletariat on the other hand were the propertyless: the majority of people; they don’t own anything, they live according to the work of their hands and the wages they received as a consequence. The worker who became too old or became disabled–tough luck, there were no government institutions to help.
The Bourgeoisie exploits the proletariat, because the proletariat does all the work but has no wealth, no power, no decision-making, no security. Marx called for revolution, the revolution of the proletariat, where they would rise up, take control of superstructure of society, the money, the power; the bourgeoisie would have to accommodate the proletariat or die. The Proletariat will create a dictatorship; they will assume complete control over everything. The Bourgeoisie destroyed, a classless society will result. Without classes, without division of money and property, conflict will come to an end. War will come to an end, because war is caused by different countries attempting to control the resources of other countries. With only one class there will be no nations, no states, but the entire world will be united. Marx’s ideas required world communism.
The plan as he outlined it was this: destroy industrial capitalism via revolution, which results in a world dictatorship: Socialism—but this is temporary. Under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the government will work itself out of existence, and this results in Communism.
Government only exists because of class differences; government solves disputes between the rich and poor. If there no longer are the rich and poor, there will be no reason for government.
Classes have always been based on private property. Private property, private ownership will come to an end. All will be shared by all people. No reason anymore for money.
The needs of all will be equally met. Humans will be the same.
Government before it dissolves itself will change how humans think, it will change human nature. The crux of Marx’s philosophy is education, which is the basis to change human nature. All babies born will be raised alike together and educated together. Same clothing. Same hairstyle. Same name. No presents. No ownership. No toys. This will eliminate the desire for private possessions, which is the bane of society, and the cause of class conflict.
Marx ultimately argued that human nature will change, and a communist society will be the result.
These steps are clearly outlined in the Communist Manifesto. Those who read the pamphlet and believed it knew what they were in for: the terror and murder of the Soviet Union and Communist China, for example.
Marx’s most dangerous idea was this: “Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views and conceptions, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life?”
Hitherto, most philosophers would argue that what makes each human different was a sense of self, a sense of individual consciousness that was God given: this is what makes humans unique, different, specific individuals. A most profound statement of this philosophy is found in Psalm 139 in the Old Testament: God know everything, everyone, and there is no place an individual can hide from God, because God is the creator of the human self.
But Marx argued the atheistic point of view that human consciousness or the human self is based on the material conditions of life. Materialism: this is Marx’s philosophy. Change the environment, change the human.
It is almost impossible to be a Marxist and a Theist. The ideas are so completely contradictory.
The American Plutarch 