Yet this I want to do, it’s worth the effort and discomfort.  Rosenzweig was the skeptical Jew converted to his own people’s religion; Rosenstock the acculturated Jew who was baptized a Christian in his teens, and who eviscerated Rosenzweig’s sloppy thinking about reality, forcing him to dare to face God.

Right now I am working through Judaism Despite Christianity and find in Rosenstock’s letter to Cynthia Harris in 1943 many stunning comments making a unified argument that prayer is an absolute necessity–and his definition of prayer encompasses the entire life of a people.  Nineteenth-century biblical scholars did not represent Jewish history accurately or fairly.  The missed the “No” of the Jews to idols–Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and God’s three “No’s”:  the Fall, the Great Flood, and the Exodus.  “‘Revelation’ is a knowledge of God’s will, after his ‘No’ to our will has become known.” (181)  But the “No” was necessary if Israel was to recognize “herself as God’s servant, merely a man in the face of God’s majesty.”  (181)  This is not just strong stuff, it is the basic stuff.  It undergirds everything else Rosenstock wrote in the letter to Cynthia Harris in 1943.

One example will be enough:

The Germans all knew in 1918 that the World War had been lost deservedly.  Faith accepted the defeat.  But it takes faith in God to accept defeat fully.  If there be no divine will, then our will must reign supreme.  Naturally the whisperers came–those all-knowing ones who cannot be named but who are always being quoted–those who said, “It was a stab in the back,” “It was this or that,” “It was unnecessary,” etc.  The reaction was inevitable:  “We shall undo the defeat.”  Whispering is unauthorized speech.  The devil is any person who does not wish to be quoted; and so he never attains the rank of a person.  For a person accepts God’s judgement over what he has said or done.  Thus can he come to know the truth.  The devil never receives his verdict because he whispers only and never speaks truly and confidently.

. . . The people who had believed only in science, and who could not distinguish between spell-binding magic and prayer, now fell for the stump speakers.

Rosenstock summarizes the German history of persecution and repression against Lutherans (after 1825) and Catholics (certainly after 1871) and identifies Hitler as “the third attempt to free the German nation from any check on its nationalistic conscience.  This time, the triangle Luther-Rome-Israel is attacked foremost at the Jewish corner.  Also, the attack is far more violent than the two former.”  The furor Teutonicus runs a system of hatred, and there are other arguments to illustrate, but I will finish this statement with a few more of Rosenstock’s sentences:

Hitler hates everything started by the Jews, including democracy and the Freemasons.  Why?  They all know of the insertion of God’s “No” into history as a vital element.  But a spellbinder must be sure that his spell will work under all circumstances.  This prevents him from admitting God’s “No” to the fabric of history.

Hitler’s will and his god’s will are nauseatingly one.  The great art of speech has made Hitler crazy.  Since he has the privilege of speaking, of inflaming the masses, he spellbinds.  And so he hovers as a ghost from the abyss of paganism, a ghost of the days before God touched Israel’s lips with his fiery coal:  ”My will, O mortal, not thine, be done.”

The specific character of biblical prayer explains the uniqueness of the Bible.  We can’t forget the Bible because the divine “No” was created, in our speech, during those thousand years of Jewish prayer.  And all the other departments of our linguistic faculty rest on this clear distinction between prayer, on the one side, and science, poetry, fiction, and law, on the other.  If we do not pray with Israel, we cannot retain our Greek mathematics or our Roman law.  This will sound arbitrary or exaggerated at first reading.  But it is simple truth. (183)

Rosenstock goes on to illustrate examples that bind ancient and modern paganisms together while they show biblical prayer (faith, religion, core of revelation) to be absolutely distinct from them.  It is the distinction and emphasis that energized the philosophical, faithful thinking and dialogue that Rosenstock and Rosenzweig conducted over many years — theirs was an astonishing interchange between Christian and Jew; it started a century ago and lasted until Rosenzweig died.  Rosenstock lived to write voluminously on themes that grew out of scholarship as — I would like to say this —  a form of prayer.

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, letter to Cynthia Harris (in 1943 a freshman at Radcliffe College): “Hitler and Israel, or On Prayer,” first published in The Journal of Religion (University of Chicago Press, April 1945).  Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, ed., Judaism Despite Christianity:  The 1916 Wartime Correspondence between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig (with a new  foreword by Paul Mendes-Flohr, a new preface by Harold Stahmer, and a new chronology by Michael Gormann-Thelen (Chicago and London:  University of Chicago Press, 2011).

Though as a Baptist I and my wife have enjoyed our wonderful visits to Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church in London and the New Road Baptist Church in Oxford during a sabbatical stay, All Souls Langham Place also attracted us.  But too late in his ministry, or off schedule, to hear John Stott, we nonetheless heard inspiring evangelical preaching by other staff pastors and enjoyed worshiping with a truly international congregation.  More recently the ministry of the Langham Partners International made a strong impression on me; I thought how positive, resolute and effective their mission sounded!

On at least two occasions my ETBU travel study students accompanied me to worship there at All Souls, once in March 2003, another in May 2006; that last time, on a Sunday morning, we walked the half mile or so from our hotel on Gower Street and entered that church just next to the BBC buildings. There the worshipers clearly recognized their congregation’s place in its own domestic society but displayed numerous, lively, and colorful connections with Christians around the world–and there were many visitors–the Africans dressed brightly, impressively for worship!  We enjoyed the tea and biscuits afterwards in the fellowship center, too, the opportunity to make new acquaintances, and to look at the books and tapes they offered.  It was a privilege to share just briefly in the vibrant experience of that missions and ministry-oriented urban church.  I am grateful to the Lord for all that, and for John Stott.

Those who spend a lot of time and money on books and videos speculating about the antichrist can devote themselves to more immediate concerns. As I have explained elsewhere repeatedly, key candidates for the job have been running the American economy the past 30 years with our unwitting assistance.

That’s Gary Moore, “Ayn Rand: Goddess of the Great Recession,” online at:  http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2010/september/2.36.html?start=1

Moore’s article is part of a current wave of awareness of the kinds of conservatism and libertarianism (well, yes, and liberalism!) that not only run against Judeo-Christian teachings and ethics, but against the general welfare.  These speak, too, about the varieties of spiritual and functional disabilities in the churches–the dark underbelly of popular Americanism combined with Biblical ignorance or disregard, hostility to God, and selfishness.  Selfishness with respect to the neighbor whether next door or next day in our globalized world.

I tried to read Atlas Shrugged and Ship of Fools too young, in the sixties, and am surprised now (or should I be) that Dad brought them home from his job at Vandenburg along with None Dare Call It Treason and some John Birch Society titles.  I never talked with Dad about his reading, and I’m not sure how it influenced him–maybe it was just reading to kill time, borrowed from a co-worker at Convair or GDI.  I could not get into those books, and maybe it is just as well.   Whatever their influence on Dad, I think he turned in several ways from the past when he entered full-time Christian ministry in his late thirties.  I’ll never know how completely he changed, but he and Mom paid too much into the lives of others in tiny inner-city and rural churches, sometimes rebuffed and ill-used, but the evident truth of servanthood, even at times in brokenness and bad judgment serves vindication.  They received a lot of good in turn, too, but doesn’t that show the virtue of lasting communities where real caring and sacrifice are normal?  I don’t think Rand would understand.

This past weekend our board president received, in absentia, a token, a totem of unity and patriotism, a gift in honor of his own military service, patriotism, and love of the United States and what our nation best represents, a ceremonial working/battle axe. It was also in honor of his sons, one of whom, a Marine lieutenant, still is recovering from burn injuries received in Iraq from a roadside bomb that killed most of his brothers-in-arms. Those injuries will force his retirement, which he must accept, though reluctantly, and earlier than he wished.

The giver? An elder representing the Citizen Pottawatomie tribe of Oklahoma. The recipient and his son? Members via Mexican ancestry, in part, of the Yaqui tribe. Yet all are citizens of the United States, heirs to a tradition of patriotism based not in what some consider a threatening militarism but in their convictions that they can best serve their country as members of a proud, distinguished service branch of the American Armed Forces. And these Marines have served well.

The United States includes many amazing people, humans whose backgrounds, convictions, and accomplishments can only evoke encouragement and admiration. I learned this past weekend about the long tradition of military service among the Cheyenne of the Middle and Northern Plains. Where in the social histories do we learn that the Indians are more than just a formerly oppressed group? Where do we learn that among them, always, have been individuals and groups who transcended the difficulties of accommodation and integration to the larger Anglo-European society, who came to share fully in it, yet who, paradoxically, retained their traditions as best they could? I am interested to learn more about the American Plains warriors whose love of country is a lesson for all Americans — not to glorify war, though some surely might, but to be reminded that in a world where wars will occur, there are patriots whose best response is to take part.