The Wing-Beat

Yes, Barton is forceful.  He saws heavily on the “Judeo-Christian principles of our Founding Fathers,” and in that he is right, but less so because he ignores the equally, perhaps more important founding principles based in Enlightenment rationality and the then truly liberal economic and political principles (having no king is radical as is equality of all before the law) that undergird our Constitution.  And no, I do not discount but do recognize the strong influence of Christianity that helped to shape those principles, as for example in Puritanism–yes, Puritanism (John Locke was a Puritan, for one)!  And yes, Jefferson and Madison and other leading Fathers saw reality both through the Enlightenment rationalist lens that recognized either a Deistic God (Jefferson, Franklin) or the God of orthodox theism and trinitarianism (Washington may be there, for example, but he is truly hard to gauge as to his churchmanship). That is different from the contemporary lens through which many leaders, even some Christian leaders and scholars see reality, that is, through a modern, naturalistic lens, dismissive of the orthodox Judeo-Christian tradition. Thankfully, many do not. Most do not see sharply enough the implications of their own fuzzy thinking about the relationship between public life and policy and biblical faith.  Beyond that, to say that America is a Christian nation is a statement that always requires explanation:  does that mean cultural Christianity, or does it refer to a vibrant biblical, orthodox (that is “right teaching”) Christianity that dominates the thought life, moral and ethical way of life, and our relationships domestic and international?  How do most Americans live?  There’s quite a range, there!  I wonder whether Barton is to the point of admitting that despite the Judeo-Christian influences on our Constitution and civic life in the Revolutionary Period, the Founding Fathers decided it was best that our founding documents and government constitute a secular establishment and that the government would have no sway over religion in the nation.  That would be the citizens’ responsibility, individually and corporately, and initially that was left to the states.  The First Amendment religious liberty and free exercise clauses were the product of the citizens holding out for protection from the interference of government in religious matters.  I think knowing the distinction would help to solve confusion about whether America is a “Christian nation.”  If nation refers to the society, even there we have plenty of evidence to the contrary, and that kind of evidence has always been present to varying degrees (major instance–institutionalized slavery); if it refers to majority opinion or identification, then even there I have some questions–it seems that so many professing Christians do not understand their responsibilities and obligations actually to live as Christians; many actually live contrary to Christian principles and convictions.  Christianity is divorced from actual lifestyle and commitments. Perhaps our president is in that camp; uncomfortable as it is, there are many who profess Christianity whose values and political identification are indeed “liberal” in that sense–that is, modernist, naturalistic, pragmatic, anti-faith and unevenly tolerant in practice.

There is a Dear One who lives in Washington D.C. and who would move back to Texas but for a few things, two of them being “Texas has tornadoes” and “D.C. has lots to offer.”  True, very true.

Surely there are many delights for folk who live inside the Beltway.  But one of them, certainly, is simply that there are many delights Beyond the Beltway, in many most sociable and historic locales, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, just to start a list, one rather long as you know.

Far from the Beltway, perhaps far enough to gain treasured perspective about matters within and without the fabled, enchanted, fantastical Beltway, lies the Great State of Texas.  As Mr. Tubb used to sing, “There’s a Little Bit of Everything in Texas.”  Yes, more and more, I say, a little bit of everything for most everyone. Again, as Ernest Tubb put it, ” . . . and a little bit of Texas in me!”

And, yes, even tornadoes, twisters, cyclones, what have you.  But is there one for everyone?  I think not; no, not enough tornadoes for everyone.  Why, a fella or a gal might live to be ninety-nine in Texas and never see, or hear, a tornado, at least not “up close and personal” as some like to say.  It’s true most folk want to avoid that type of encounter.

The topic brings to memory a story about a Kansas girl swooshed up in a tornado to the land of Oz.  Oz was L. Frank Baum’s fantasiacal, allegorical double for the Good ‘Ol U.S.A., and the Emerald City for Washington, D.C., the enchanted capital where the Yellow Brick Road ended.  I refrain from recapitulating the adventures of Dorothy and her companions in Oz, and her disenchantment upon learning that the Wizard of Oz was just a man like any other.  Baum’s Wizard stood in for the Gilded Age American presidents, according to one interpretation.  I agree with it.

We have a love-hate relationship with our capital and the doings in the Capitol chambers, the presidential and congressional politics, and the profound weight of bureaucracy in service to our Republic.  Asked how much of the bureaucracy we would like to keep, we would have to admit that much of it seems to meet more than a few of our needs. And asked whether we would do away with our government, we might pause long enough to ask how we could replace it. We will settle for improvements.  And we will accept that our government is as humanly limited as any other institution, it’s just bigger.

From the founding of our republic, indeed before that, presidents, congressmen, civil servants, students, interns and others have come to the point in life’s journey when they know it is time to “go home,” to “come home.”  Their work is done, able to do no more, they leave what is yet to be done to others.

Dorothy, once delivered to OZ by tornado, finds her way home (after having helped others out in her sweet, Kansasy-American way) by clicking her silver shoes together (in Baum’s reference to the Silver Crusade of the late 180os).  In the cinematic version, her heart’s deepest desire does the real work while she clicks the heels of her ruby red slippers together; no balloon ride for her!  She wakens as from a dream and finds herself at home, among her loved ones.

Such is the allure of the Emerald City, but no match for the allure of home.  It cannot replace the thousands of other places that Americans call “home.” Yes, Dear One, Jen, there’s no place like home.  Home is where one’s “people” are.  That being so, the real question becomes who one’s people are, and the where can become secondary.  That’s more the truth among us Americans wherever we land in the world.  Or, as is the case, wherever  the peoples of the world land among us!  At the end of it all, we are all sojourners in far countries.  We may not actually be far from home, for even our home can be for someone else a foreign land, a far country.

In reflection on Jim and Cathy’s experiences lately, I have been reminded that our own communities hold and keep great distances between individuals.  Economic status, religious groupings, social identity, ethnicity, in-group traditions and settled attitudes make it seem as though our neighbors live great distances apart from us, and we from them.  There are all kinds of distances. Some of them we should be impatient to do away with; it should not be that way among all us locals.  These kinds of things make it hard to feel right at home.  What could be more important than that?

Traditional Chinese philosophy/religion assumes a continuity between the world and the above-world, between nature and the supernatural, between earth and heaven.  This appears in Confucianism and Daoism, especially in their blending.  That Chinese tradition is “secular” as we would say yet there is a difference:  the object is to achieve or accept harmony between heaven and earth, “nature” as the fundamental order of things and the conduct of life, governance and relationships in collective society.  The Chinese tradition carries insights into basic ethical and moral rules familiar in various ways in all the major historical complex societies and their traditions.  Throughout the human past we also find exceptions or violations of those general standards agreed on during an axial period about 2,500 years ago.

Before that period a sizable group of Hebrews had become Israel in a sustained revelatory experience.  God gave the Covenant amid a growing and distinctive relationship.  The Covenant was the mode and the result of the continuing revelation, yet undergirding the Covenant was, and is, the God who revealed himself in it.  Even at that point, if I hear Hans Boersma correctly in his writing on “heavenly participation,” the Christ of God himself took full part in that Covenant (yes, and came to fulfill it) just as he always has been in relationship to the Creation.  Trinitarian teaching demands that conclusion; the Scriptures are shot through with references to the presence of God, with emphasis on his presence and availability or his presence even when he is hidden.

The Chinese cosmology entertained the presence of ancestors and exalted leading ancestors to a type of godhood–the Yellow Emperor is an example.  From the Zhou period forward, kings and then emperors carried the title tianzi or Son of Heaven.  They were expected to be sage–knowledgeable and wise; virtuous; beyond reproach; and committed to the proper ordering of things, to the Ordinances of Heaven, by which authority they sat on heaven’s throne.  Starting with the first emperor Qinshihuangdi, it was earth’s throne, the throne of the “Middle Kingdom,” Zhongguo.  My understanding of the system stops not far beyond this point.

Chinese tradition leaves no room in itself for Christology; the Old Testament does, and the New Testament tells us so.  The hunger of God for relationship (not out of any deficiency of fellowship in the Trinity) shows through and in all of the Creation, even if the general revelation stops at a certain point as in the Chinese tradition.  Yet I find that the human hunger for both transcendent and immediate relationships (and security, relief, protection) is expressed in that tradition.  And that tradition allows that people are predisposed to respond appropriately to authority, even more so the authority that can come right down among the people, to share in their hunger for purpose and relationship, and to fulfill it.  Not through the ancestors, not through the emperor, but in a renewed family that we sometimes thoughtlessly call the “family of God.”  We are right to say it, but we must also take its importance more to heart.

It is no wonder that so many Chinese are following Christ.  They, too recognize in Christ the satisfactions intended for them in the hunger of God.  Again, it is not that God needs more fellowship than the Trinitarian perfection in Himself, it is that he yearns to expand that fellowship among his family, those he created in his own image and ordained to enjoy the fellowship as He does–as well, as deeply, as joyfully, and as long as time beyond time–on earth as in Heaven.