It’s election season, so some readers might be wondering: how can Christians faithfully pair their identities as members of the universal church and citizens of a particular nation? While many contemporary commentators have engaged that question thoughtfully, the past may hold fruitful examples, too.
Take President Abraham Lincoln’s address at his second inauguration. When attendees gathered to hear him on March 4, 1865, the Civil War was not yet over. Given the context – four years of horrifying slaughter–one might have expected the re-elected president to indulge in some chest-thumping. Instead, attendees heard a profound exercise in public theology.
Lincoln opened with a recap of the prior four years, and he didn’t pull any punches. He recalled attempts to undermine the Union from within and noted that the Confederate South had chosen to “make war rather than let the nation survive.” He spoke plainly regarding the Confederacy’s project to “strengthen, perpetuate, and extend” the institution of slavery.
But as he progressed, Lincoln rejected any simple morality tale that would glorify noble Northerners and, instead, turned his focus to the matter of God’s providence and justice. Though parties on both sides prayed to “the same God,” he noted ruefully, the “prayers of both could not be answered,” and “neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.”
Everyone should yearn, he continued, for the war to end quickly. But then came words that surely startled his audience:“Yet, if God wills that [war] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”
In the 21st century, we are probably a bit too quick to use the adjective “prophetic.” To be sure, many people aspire to the status of a modern prophet, as they hope to goad the unrighteous – however they define that concept – to repentance. But their statements often have about them an air of “God, I thank you that I am not like other people” (Luke 11:18). Whatever social or political issue they wish to solve, they tend to locate the problem elsewhere: in the other party, the other church, the other region.
As the Christian scholar Christopher Watkin has noted, however, a true prophet “does not exempt himself or herself” from condemnation. This very quality distinguished Lincoln’s second inaugural, for the “judgments of the Lord” he referenced were not merely for Southerners. Rather, they were “give[n] to both North and South . . . as the woe due to those by whom the offense came.”
Lincoln believed no party to the war, including himself, was blameless. “The war came” because the nation had fallen short of the temporal justice mandated by its founding principles and the eternal justice commanded by the living God.
Deep in his core, Lincoln understood what the Soviet dissident and Nobel Prizewinner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would articulate so memorably a century later in The Gulag Archipelago: “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”
In his speech’s conclusion, Lincoln elaborated the response this sort of theology required. “With malice toward none, with charity for all” he began in what became the speech’s most identifiable phrase, his listeners should strive “to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wound . . . to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
A worthwhile ambition still! As we consider what it means to be both citizens and disciples, we would do well to remember President Lincoln’s example: assess ourselves humbly, submit to God’s providence willingly, care for each other graciously.
