RAVI ZACHARIAS INTERNATIONAL MINISTRIES JUS TTHINKING · us, “But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the

THE QUARTERLY MAGAZINE OF RAVI ZACHARIAS INTERNATIONAL MINISTRIES

VOLUME 26.4

JUSTTHINKING

Just Thinking is a teaching resource of

Ravi Zacharias International Ministries and

exists to engender thoughtful engagement with

apologetics, Scripture, and the whole of life.

Danielle DuRant

Editor

Ravi Zacharias International Ministries

3755 Mansell Road

Alpharetta, Georgia 30022

770.449.6766

WWW.RZIM.ORG

HELPING THE THINKER BELIEVE.

HELP ING THE BEL IEVER TH INK .

TABLE of CONTENTSVOLUME 26.4

33THINK AGAINWhen We Remember“Knowing does not guaranteedoing,” Ravi Zachariasreminds us, yet nothingbrings harmony more thanremembering God’s love and embracing his will.

COVER: ©2018 [KEN ORVIDAS] C/O THEISPOT.COM

30HONEST MEMORIES“How do our lives enact thegreat narrative of salvationin our present day and thecovenant God made withhis people long ago?” asksMargaret Manning Shull.

03A NOTE FROM THE EDITORWords Long Ago

04THE ORIGINS OF FREEDOM“America, do you knowwhere your freedom camefrom?” asks Os Guinnessin an excerpt from his newbook, Last Call for Liberty(InterVarsity Press, 2018).

28LIFE REDIRECTEDStuart McAllister invitesus to discover anew thatthe ancient promises ofGod are sure.

RZIM seeks to engage audiences with the evangelistic message of the gospel at open forums and live events. Join us this fall as we livestream Ravi Zacharias andVince Vitale on October 5, 2018, speaking on “You Shall Know” (That I Am Lord) at Penn State University, and then on October 9, 2018, at the Zacharias Institutewhen John Lennox launches a new evening series called #TrendingQuestions. Artificial Intelligence will be his topic and, in addition to being livestreamed, the event will be available on Facebook Live.

For additional information on these and other events, please go to our website at www.rzim.org/events

RZIM Live!

OCTOBER 5, 2018

7PM - 9PM

PENN STATE UNIVERSITY

RAVI ZACHARIAS • VINCE VITALE

OCTOBER 9, 2018

7PM - 9PM

ZACHARIAS INSTITUTE

JOHN LENNOX

JUST THINKING • VOLUME 26.4 [3]

Danielle DuRantEditor

Words Long AgoISN’T IT amazing how words spoken longago can still be life-altering? In DeenaKastor’s inspiring new book, Let YourMind Run, she shares how onesimple phrase by her new coachtriggered a mindset and habitsthat transformed her runningcareer and continues to affectevery aspect of her life.

“Bring a good attitude,” Coach JoeVigil said to Deena in their first meetingand repeated often. Whether runningagainst stiff headwinds at altitude inColorado or against fellow Olympians insweltering Athens, she shares how beingmindful to bring a good attitude each stepof the way eventually brought not only victory but also freedom and joy.

I recall, too, one New England autumnafternoon many years ago. A seminary student at the time, I hastily read a theological essay in the school library andhurried home. I needed to lug two cords offirewood before dark from the driveway tothe deck and stack each log. My hands bledas I clutched the splintered wood, my pacefeverish, but my thoughts soared beyondmy work. The opening paragraph of theessay I had just rushed through had unexpectedly prompted me to reconsidermy relationship with God.

In “The Theologian’s Craft,” my professor David Wells observed,

[Our] understanding of God, of our-selves, of the world—comes so slowly,so painfully slowly, that [life’s] summerpasses and the winter arrives long

before this fruit is ripe to be picked.Or so it seems.… God, however… is nota quantity that can be “mastered”even though he can be known; and

though he has revealed himselfwith clarity, the depth of ourunderstanding of him is meas-

ured, not by the speed withwhich theological knowledge is

processed, but by the quality of ourdetermination to own his ownershipof us through Christ in thought,word, and deed.

I kept mulling over that last line: “toown his ownership of us through Christ inthought, word, and deed.” As a child I hadmemorized “You are not your own; youwere bought at a price” (1 Corinthians6:19-20). Yet somehow, I had never reallyconsidered what it meant to belong to God,to be a part of his covenant family. In theyears since, that line still informs myprayers, buoys my hopes, and encouragesme to ask, “Am I growing in my love andknowledge of God as his beloved child?”

The ancient words of Scripture remindus, “But you are a chosen people, a royalpriesthood, a holy nation, God’s specialpossession, that you may declare the praisesof him who called you out of darkness intohis wonderful light. Once you were not apeople, but now you are the people of God;once you had not received mercy, but nowyou have received mercy” (1 Peter 2:9-10).

If you are a child of God, you are a“special possession” and belong to a “holynation.” What a life-altering promise!

THE STORY IS told of the time whenWinston Churchill was being shownaround Colonial Williamsburg, and

the guide began to wax eloquent about thetown that was the cradle of “the revolutionagainst the English.”

“Revolution against the English!” the future Prime Minister snorted. “Nay, it was a reaffirmation of English rights.Englishmen battling a Hun king and hisHessian hirelings to protect their Englishbirthright.” Or as he said on a more formaloccasion, “The Declaration of Independenceis not only an American document. It follows on the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights as the third great title-deed inwhich the liberties of the English-speakingpeople are founded.”1

Churchill well knew that King GeorgeIII was English-born and spoke English,unlike his German father and grandfather.But he was referring towhat the colonists called“the ancient liberties of the English,” or what havemore recently been called the distinctive benefits ofthe English speaking worldor “Anglosphere.”2 The revolutionaries certainly portrayed themselves as oppressedand aggrieved (the “slaves of King George”),but they were actually fighting for freedom,from freedom, and as some of the freestpeople in the world of their times, and theybelieved that freedom was their birthrightas Englishmen. As John Adams put it,“The patriots of this province desire nothing new; they wish only to keep their old privileges.”3

What was Adams referring to? Evenbefore Magna Carta, there had been arobust tradition in common law that setout the liberties of Englishmen that noking or noble could transgress. Theseancient liberties included the commonlaw, the right of habeas corpus, trial by ajury of one’s peers, elected parliaments,taxation by consent, safeguards for proper-

ty, and above all the notion of governmentby consent (King Edward I: “What touchesall should be approved by all”). And theyexpressly stood against the statist trends intheir day, and especially the Renaissancerestoration of the Roman principle of lexregia, the idea that the will and pleasure ofthe king was law—which James I had givena Christian twist in his notion of the divineright of kings.

Not long before the sailing of theMayflower, Sir Edward Coke had beenforemost in championing these ancientliberties, as in his ringing declaration onbehalf of Parliament against James’s son,Charles I. The sovereign power, or thepower claimed by the sovereign, weak-ened the Magna Carta, he trumpeted.“Take heed what we yield unto; MagnaCarta is such a fellow that he will have no sovereign.”4

The “ancient liberties of the English”have been traced back to their origins inGerman forests and open-air clan meetings,their crossing the English Channel withthe Saxons, their repression under theNormans Conquest after 1066, and theirreemergence under the barons who faceddown King John at Runnymede. The linebetween the ancient Witan (council of the“wise men”) and modern Westminster isnot always clear and straight, but it neverdisappears and it grew stronger all thetime. Following the English Revolutionand the rise of the Whigs, these ancientliberties became a well-known feature ofthe English in Europe. (In Mozart’s operaThe Abduction from the Seraglio, one of thecharacters says with pride, “I am English,born of freedom.”)

©2018 [KEN ORVIDAS] C/O THEISPOT.COM

[4] JUST THINKING • RAVI ZACHARIAS INTERNATIONAL MINISTRIES


FREEDOMBy Os Guinness


This strong and ancient notion ofpersonal freedom crossed the Atlanticwith the American colonists, along withmany cherished symbols of freedom, suchas the liberty tree and liberty poles. InWilliam Penn’s words, “Every Free-bornsubject of England is heir by Birth-rightunto that unparalleled privilege of Libertyand Property, beyond all the Nations in theworld beside.”5 There is no question that,viewed together, these “ancient liberties”were crucial to the spirit and the demandsthat led to the Revolution, but by thatname they have little appeal today. Theywould be familiar to historians, lawyers,and devotees of Winston Churchill and

his vision of the English-speakingpeoples. But in the wider Americanculture they have been eclipsed.

Where then is the source ofAmerican freedom, and why doesthe story of freedom matter? Thefirst question therefore asks, do

Americans realize wheretheir freedom came from?The story of freedom isessential and foundationalto the sustaining of freedom. Scholars haverecently explored the contribution to freedom of the eleventh century

“Paleo-Indians” in the AmericanNorthwest, but their direct contributionsto American freedom and to 1776 arevague at best. Far more people assumequickly that “American democracy” mustobviously come from democratic Athensor perhaps from Roman civic virtue, butthat too would be wrong. For much as the founders tried to learn from classicalmodels of Greek and Roman governance,and to build Capitol Hill in honor of theirstyle, they were extremely wary of directdemocracy because of its short-lived histo-ry and its turbulent record. A different,surprising, and far more important pastdeserves to be remembered and brought

into the discussion today: the forgottencontribution of the Jews and Mt. Sinai, and the way in which it both built on anddecisively advanced the “ancient libertiesof the English.”

The Great Gift of the Jews“What makes this night unlike all othernights?” This famous two-thousand-year-old question from Second Temple timeshas always been asked by the youngestJewish child at a Seder. It was designed toprovoke an annual commemoration andretelling of the defining moment of Jewishhistory—the Passover night more thanthree thousand years ago that launchedthe exodus from Egypt, which formed thebirth of the Jewish nation. Like all tradi-tions, it has doubtless been reduced attimes to rite words in rote order, but it isone of the world’s oldest surviving rituals.It is also history’s most successful retellingof history and an indispensable key to themiraculous survival of the Jewish peopleacross the centuries and across the world,despite their persecution and their scat-tering. No other people can lay claim toany similar long-enduring celebration, butthe exodus stands as much more than aJewish parallel to the celebration of JulyFourth. As the oldest political vision in theWest, it is the direct ancestor of the Fourthof July, and it holds the missing key toAmerica’s independence, to America’sfreedom, to America’s history, and there-fore to the renewal of America’s freedomtoday—but in ways that few Americansnow appear to understand.

Daniel Elazar, Michael Walzer, RabbiJonathan Sacks, and others have all arguedthat the book of Exodus is the master storyof Western freedom and the ultimateregime change in history. Savonarola, thereforming monk, cited it in his celebrated“bonfire of the vanities” in Florence. John Calvin expounded it in Geneva, andZwingli in Zurich. John Knox thundered

Taken from Last Call forLiberty by Os Guinness.©2018 by Os Guinness.Used by permission ofInterVarsity Press, P.O.Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL, 60515-1426.


its lessons in Edinburgh. Oliver Cromwelldeclared that it was “the only parallel ofGod’s dealing with us that I know” as heand his fellow Puritans led the EnglishRevolution. William Bradford sailed theMayflower under its inspiration; JohnWinthrop cited it in his famous sermon “A Modell of Christian Charity” on boardthe Arbella, both Benjamin Franklin andThomas Jefferson proposed to use itsthemes in the Great Seal of the UnitedStates, the African American slaves use it to express their longings for freedom in their immortal spirituals (“Go down,

Moses”), and Martin Luther King Jr.preached from the story in his last sermonthe night before he was assassinated inApril 1968. To anyone who knows the storyand the lessons of Exodus, there is no situ-ation so bad that need stay as it is. There isalways the possibility of another way and abetter situation. There is always the possi-bility of liberation. There is always thehope of freedom.

In a Thanksgiving sermon in 1799,Abiel Abbot spoke for many Americans ofhis generation when he said, “It has oftenbeen remarked that the people of theUnited States come nearer to a parallelwith ancient Israel, than any other nation

upon the globe.”6 Years later, the poetHeinrich Heine widened the same point,“Since the Exodus, freedom has alwaysspoken with a Hebrew accent.”7

To be sure, 1776 was soon counteredby 1789. Later, Friedrich Nietzscheattacked exodus as the event that subvert-ed the freedom that he advocated. In hisfirst essay in The Genealogy of Morals,he argued that Israel’s liberation fromPharaoh was simply the beginning of a two-thousand year “slave revolt inmorals,” the tragic moment when resent-ment won and the elevation of the herd

overturned the rightful placeof the hero.8 Unable to fightthe strong with strength,Jews and Christians gainedtheir revenge by a reversal ofvalues, making the strongbad and the weak good. Thusthe strength of the strongwas turned into weakness,and the weakness of theweak into strength. Thisignominy, Nietzsche held,was started by the Jews andcontinued by Christians, andit needed to be redressed bythe rise of the Superman. Forthe same reason, it is plainthat the exodus theme does

not resonate through the revolutions of1789, 1917, and 1949. Exodus for the leadersof those revolutions was a step backwards,and their revolutions had no time for theBible, its ideals, and its ways of promotingchange. Clearly, the Russian and Chineserevolutions were all for 1789 and not 1776.

Sinai Before AthensExodus was clearly central to the AmericanRevolution and American revolutionaries.It was important as far more than a one-off precedent, far more than a template for personal salvation, and far more thanmerely a matter of heart-stirring rhetoric

A different, surprising, and farmore important past deserves to be remembered and broughtinto the discussion today: theforgotten contribution of theJews and Mt. Sinai, and the way in which it both built on and decisively advanced the“ancient liberties of the English.”


(“Let my people go!” “Proclaim libertythroughout the land” [Ex 5:1; Lev 25:10]).For at the heart of the exodus story is atemplate for society, for human person-hood, for freedom, for justice, and forsocial change that shaped the AmericanRevolution in highly practical ways. Somuch so that it has been truly said thatExodus and its influence on freedom longpreceded Athens, has far outlasted Athens,and has strongly surpassed Athens inshaping some of the most important fea-tures of modern freedom in the eighteenthcentury and today. As Rabbi Sacks claims,“Ancient Israel was where the idea of free-dom was born, and in many respects itremains a surer guide to liberty than theshort-lived democracy of Athens.”9

Liberty as more than liberation, therule of law, the consent of the governed,the responsibility of rights, the separationof powers, the notion of prophetic critiqueand social criticism, transformative ser-vant leadership, the ethics of responsibili-ty, the primacy of the personal over thepolitical—all of these ideals and more arethe legacy of Exodus, and their effect wasto provide a massive boost for the ancientliberties of the English. Most importantly,the Sinai covenant at the heart of the exo-dus story came to America with theEnglish and put its stamp on American

history through its decisive contributionto the US Constitution and the notion ofconstitutionalism. For as Elazar, Walzer,and other scholars have demonstrated, theclassical categories of monarchy, aristocra-cy, and democracy are not the only way toclassify societies. A different and helpfulperspective emerges if societies are classi-fied according to their founding, ratherthan their types of government.

When classified according to theirfounding, four major types of society areprominent. First, there are organic societies,societies that are linked by blood, kinship,ancestral ties, and intimate acquaintance,often appearing to go back into the mistsof time—for example, Scottish clans andAfrican tribes. In such societies the indi-

vidual tends to be regarded merelyas part of the whole. Second, thereare hierarchical societies, societiesthat are linked by force and con-quest, such as kingdoms andempires—for example, the RomanEmpire, the Prussian monarchy,and Chinese communism today(Voltaire described Prussia as “anarmy transformed into a state.”)Divisions, classes, and castes areusually a feature of such societies.Third, there are contractual soci-eties, societies based on a series of legal contracts that serve theinterests of the citizens and allow

for a politics that promotes the pursuit of self-interest. And fourth, there arecovenantal societies, societies that arelinked by choice and binding agreement,such as ancient Israel after the Sinaicovenant, Switzerland after the birth of the Helvetic Confederation in 1291, and the United States after rejecting the Articles of Confederacy and passing the US Constitution in 1787.

The Reformation’s application ofcovenantalism to politics, and its impacton the rise of constitutionalism, long preceded the work of Thomas Hobbes,

The Sinai covenant at theheart of the exodus storycame to America with theEnglish and put its stamp onAmerican history throughits decisive contribution tothe US Constitution and thenotion of constitutionalism.


John Locke, and the notion of social con-tract, let alone the Enlightenment. And its rediscovery in the 1950s has been hailed as “a truly seminal concept in Western civilization” and “the jewel in the crown ofthe new science of politics of the modernepoch.”10 If Lincoln, Elazar, and Walzer areright, Americans are not simply an “almostchosen people.” They live in an “almostcovenanted polity” and they were the heirsof the Jewish “almost democracy.”11

Unique and InfluentialTo be sure, there were covenants outsidethe Bible, such as the Hittite suzeraintytreaties, the Celtic oath societies, andAlexander the Great’s Corinthian League,by which he tried to provide bonding forhis vast Hellenic empire. (“We havedeclared in our treaty that all Greeks shallbind themselves by oath to the mutualdefense of their freedom and autonomy.”)12

There were also earlier covenants in theBible: with Noah on behalf of humanityafter the great flood, and with Abraham asfather of his family. But Israel’s covenantat Mt. Sinai was unique.

First, God himself was a partner tothe covenant, even though he was the sov-ereign king in relation to the subordinateking, the people of Israel.

Second, the covenant included all thepeople of Israel—men, women, children,and both the born and the yet to be born.(“Speak to the entire assembly of Israel,and say to them . . .” [Lev 19:1-2 NIV].) InMichael Walzer’s words, “The agreementis wholesale; all the people accept all thelaws,”13 and the result is an “almostdemocracy.” This principle, as I said,stands in strong contrast to most of theother suzerainty treaties, which are usuallyagreements between two individuals, asovereign king and a subordinate king. It is also in complete contrast to the hierarchical and top-down governments of the rulers of Babylon and Egypt, and

in strong contrast to Athenian governmenttoo, whether by aristocrats or democrats.

Even Athenian democracy was strik-ingly different from the covenant at Mt.Sinai. While it differed from the earlierGreek oligarchy, it still included only men,and then only some men—those with theproper pedigree who had undergone military training, who were never morethan 20 percent of the population. Itexcluded other men, such farmers, labor-ers, mechanics, and resident aliens, and it excluded women, children, and slaves.Behind this democratic view was theGreek notion of hierarchy that was theequivalent of the Hindu caste system. As Plato expressed it, some people weregolden, some silver, and some merelybronze and baser metals.14 Or more simply,in Aristotle’s terms, some are born to berulers and others to be ruled—these peopleare slaves by nature. Through the notion of the born and the unborn, the Sinaicovenant also stands in marked contrast to America’s exaggerated generationalism.Far from marking off each generation asabsolutely unique and radically differentfrom the generation before and the gener-ation after, it builds the Jewish people intoan intergenerational community. It thusbinds together the past, the present, and the future to form a live tradition thatlinks the generations. No individual life,Rabbi Heschel writes, is a purely privateconcern. Each “is a movement in the symphony of ages.”15

Third, the articles of the Sinaicovenant covered the whole of life, so thatfreedom was not just a moment of liberationbut a people’s way of life for generations. Itincluded what they wore, how they workedand rested, how they farmed, how they rantheir businesses, how they treated the poorand the stranger, how they understoodtime and history, and it was all aimed atcreating a just, free, and good society thatwas decisively different from the paganempires the Jews had been freed from.


In sum, all the people and all of lifewere included in the terms of the covenant,so that it has been said that Israel was qui-etly democratized long before fifth-centuryAthens, and quietly made egalitarian longbefore the American and French revolu-tions. But what mattered supremely, andwhat shaped the later course of covenants,constitutionalism, and republican free-dom, were the three central features of thecovenant at Mt. Sinai.

The Great Precedent and PatternFirst, the covenant was a matter of freelychosen consent. Three separate times theJewish people were asked for their response,and they answered, “All that the Lord hasspoken we will do,” and they answered“with one voice” (Ex 19:8; 24:3, 7). Inother words, they ratified the covenantvoluntarily. Jonathan Sacks underscoresthe profundity of this fact. “A far-reachingprinciple is here articulated for the firsttime: There is no legitimate governmentwithout the consent of the governed, evenif the governor is creator of heaven andearth. . . . God is not a transcendentalequivalent of a Pharaoh. The common-wealth he invites the Israelites to joinhim in creating is not one where powerrules, even the power of heaven itself.”16

Jewish commentators also point outthat, though the Torah contains 613 specificcommands, there is no Hebrew word forobey. The nearest is the old English termshearken, heed, or pay attention, which putthe emphasis on the freedom and respon-sibility to listen, to deliberate, to decide for oneself, and then to act accordingly.There is no sense of blind obedience in theMuslim sense of Islam as “submission.” TheJews were indeed bound by the covenant,but as Walzer underscores, they were“freely bound.”17 Their assent to thecovenant was not simply a matter of power

and obedience, as the Hittite vassal treatieswere. Their assent and adherence was athreefold blend of obedience, gratitude fortheir liberation, and admiration—therecognition of the wisdom of the laws theywere accepting. (“What great nation isthere that has the statutes and judgmentsas righteous as this whole law that I amsetting before you this day?” [Deut 4:8].)

Importantly, the result is a nomocracy,the freely chosen rule of law, rather than atheocracy, the direct rule of God. The latterterm was chosen fatefully by the Jewishwriter Josephus, but ignored the key placeof the people’s consent. Importantly too,this incident is the earliest and weightiestexample of the notion that is vital to freesocieties—“the consent of the governed.”

Second, the covenant was a matter ofa morally binding pledge. It is this moraldimension that makes a covenant differentfrom a contract, a political covenantstronger than a social contract, and acovenant of marriage before God deeperand more lasting than a civil marriage.(The Old English term wedlock was farfrom what it sounds like—a relationshipthat is a form of locked-up captivity andthe butt of countless wedding jokes.Wedlock is a compound of the word wed,or pledge, and the word lac, or gift, so thatmarriage was the freely given pledge of love.)

A covenant is based on the founda-tional moral act of one person making asolemn promise to another person or tomany others. This promise is both anexpression of freedom and an assumptionof responsibility. The freedom that is theheart of consent to the covenant carrieswithin it the responsibility that is theheart of the obligation to the covenant.Thus people who covenant, whether inmarriage or in nation building, make amorally informed and morally bindingmutual pledge to each other that createstrust. The trust created by this mutualpledge is all-important because it replacesthe need for force and regulation in rela-

©2018 [KEN ORVIDAS] C/O THEISPOT.COM

Ancient Israel was wherethe idea of freedom wasborn, and in many respectsit remains a surer guide toliberty than the short-liveddemocracy of Athens.


tionships. It acts as the glue that binds aswell as the oil that smooths.

Here is the significance of the Pledgeof Allegiance and of standing during thenational anthem that America needs torecapture, and that those who “take aknee” need to remember. Both are asolemn commitment to the Americanrepublic’s obligation on behalf of “libertyand justice for all.” At least two considera-tions are at stake. First, the freedom ofconscience includes the right to the free-dom of dissent, but dissent from thepledge and disrespect for the anthem arefar more than dissent over party or politi-cal policy. They are a tacit rejection of thecovenant/constitution itself. Second, dis-sent from them in the name of justice iscontradictory and self-defeating, for itundermines the very standard and theobligation through which justice inAmerica is to be achieved.

Needless to say, both these pointsonly carry weight if 1776 and the Americanrepublic are to continue as they havealways been understood. For Americanswho still believe in the American republic,the better way is to take the Pledge ofAllegiance and the national anthem out ofthe realm of the platitudinous, and expandits obligations to any who are currentlyexcluded—Dr. Martin Luther King’s“promissory note” once again. But ofcourse, this point is null and void if takinga knee is in fact a stand on behalf of 1789and a different concept of freedom andrevolution from that of 1776.

Those who make a covenantal/con-stitutional pledge voluntarily shoulder aresponsibility and become partners in anongoing project that none of them couldundertake alone. They freely mortgagethemselves, and put themselves under anobligation to their fellow-citizen covenan-ters and to the future. They are promisemakers and covenant partners, so they arepromise keepers who have pledged to keeptheir word. The trust-creating reliability of

the covenant partners over time is a key tothe strength of the promise and thereforethe success of the covenant.

Covenantal (and constitutional)societies therefore require a seriousresponsibility from their members (andcitizens), which neither kings nor dictatorsrequire. Indeed, the personal and interper-sonal takes priority over the political,responsibilities precede rights, and rightsonly grow out of responsibilities and haveno meaning by themselves. The history ofcovenantal (or constitutional) societiescan therefore be read as a commentary onthe durability of the love and loyalty of thepeople and their leaders to the covenantpartnership. This is surely a provocativereminder to America today. It is theantithesis of contemporary American rela-tionships demonstrated in, say, thehookup culture of the sexual revolution,but the point is becoming ever clearer:Freedoms that frustrate the deepest long-ings of the human heart will always disap-point and prove to be a betrayal.

A covenant is broader and a contractis narrower, the one being emphaticallymoral and the other being purely legal.When the covenant is also “with God,” or aconstitution is “under God,” the bindingpledge is given the force of the ultimatestandard of accountability (and in thatsense the final “check and balance”). Bothcovenant and contract are completely dif-ferent, of course, from modern “freedomof choice.” We live in a day when consumerchoice has become more noncommittaland nonbinding. Indeed, it has to be so ifthere is to be a constant turnover of sales.Which modern person in their right mindwould make a choice that mortgages theirfuture and rules out a thousand new possi-bilities of the latest and greatest (andcheaper, faster, fresher, and more power-ful) that will soon be on offer, whether anew smartphone, a new car, a new house,or a new husband, wife, or partner? Hencethe growing preference for renting over


owning, cohabitation over marriage, andthe rise of such fast-growing businesses asUber, Lyft, and Airbnb. And hence theunderlying contradiction between the attitudes of market-based consumer societies and the ethos of spiritual, moral,and political faithfulness. To be sure,advertising works to build brand loyalty,even though the essence of consumerismundercuts it, but brand loyalty is a paleshadow of covenantal-love loyalty.

All for One and One for AllThird, the covenant was a matter of recip-rocal responsibility of all for all. Longbefore the celebrated maxim of the ThreeMusketeers, “All for one and one for all,”the Jewish covenant embedded the pledgeof responsibility to God and all other Jews.It included the profound new ethic, “Youshall love your neighbor as yourself,” and itreached out in care for the widow, theorphan, and even the stranger. (“Love thestranger, for you were strangers in the landof Egypt” [Deut 10:19 NKJV].) Indeed, asthe rabbis pointed out, the celebratedcommand to love of the neighbor comesonly once in the Torah, whereas the farmore unlikely command to the love of thestranger, and so to resist tribalism, ethno-centrism, and xenophobia, comes no fewerthan thirty-six times. In Walzer’s words,“We are responsible for our fellows—all ofus for all of us.”18

Remarkably, the reciprocal responsi-bility even included the rights of the future,for its terms covered not only the born butthe unborn and yet to be born. (“The Lorddid not make this covenant with our fathers,but with us, with all those of us alive heretoday” [Deut 5:3].) There was equality ofdignity for each individual before thecovenant, and there was also equality ofresponsibility for all for all others who werewithin the covenant. By definition, the“stranger,” the “foreigner,” the “outsider,”and “the other” are not “people like us,” to

use Aristotle’s term. But while none of themare in our image and “people like us,” theyare all in God’s image, and as such they mustbe treated with dignity and compassion.

This ethic of responsibility laterbecame the Jewish principle that “AllIsraelites are responsible for one another.”It meant, one rabbi said, that there was not one covenant at Sinai but 600,000covenants, as all the Israelite men signedonto the covenant’s pledge. No, said anoth-er rabbi, there were really 600,000 times600,000 covenants as everyone made acovenant not only with God, but with alltheir fellow Israelites.19 When the cele-brated Rabbi Hillel was asked if he couldexplain the essence of Judaism whilestanding on one leg, he replied that noth-ing could be simpler: “Do unto other asyou will have others do unto you. The restis commentary.”

In our own day, Rabbi Sacks under-scores the simple but profound result: “Acovenant is a pledge between two or morepartners, each of whom respects the free-dom and integrity of the other, to be loyalto one another and to do together whatneither can do alone.”20 Excessive depend-ency is a problem in any society, and soalso is excessive autonomy. But such is thecovenantal responsibility of each person,and the responsibility of each for eachother, and all for all, that a covenantalcommunity becomes a community with apartnership and a project at its core. Ourconcern here is the decisive influence ofcovenantalism on politics, but it has majorimplications for other areas of life too. In a later chapter we will look at the notionof the civil public square as a form ofcovenantal pluralism, and its resolution ofthe problem of living with our deepest dif-ferences. Covenantalism has been appliedto business too, as in the new economics ofmutuality, pioneered by Bruno Roche andJay Jakub, and set out in their ComplementingCapitalism, and by Michael Schluter andDavid John Lee in Relational Manager.


The Tragedy of the CommonsCan it be said today that all Americans areresponsible for all Americans? Or hasAmerican individualism shattered thebonds of solidarity and mutual responsi-bility beyond repair? The covenantal basisfor both individuality and solidarity isquite clear, captured in the famous rab-binic saying “If I am not for myself, whowill be? And if I am only for myself, whatam I?” In the same vein, Elazar suggestedthat, just as the French saluted each otheras “citizen” and the Russians and Chineseas “comrade” in the heyday of their respec-tive revolutions, Americans should saluteeach other as “partner.” For every Americanshould look at all other Americans andknow that together they are partners inthe American experiment, the Americanfreedom project, and the American way oflife. “We the people” have come togetherto form a partnership nation on behalf offreedom that creates a just and peacefulcommunity of free people.

This means that the measure of thereciprocal responsibility of all Americansfor all Americans is the yardstick of thehealth of the republic. The Pledge ofAllegiance is therefore no idle recitation. Itshould be unthinkable that any Americanleader should regard other Americans as“deplorables” or as anything other thanfellow Americans and partners in the greatcause of human freedom and justice for all.It is a mark of great leaders, not just thattheir followers have faith in them but thatthey have faith in their followers and caninspire them to live up to their ideals.

Today, America shows signs of twoclear contrasts to this solidarity ofcovenantal partnership. The first is politi-cization, the idolatry of politics that trustspolitics to do more than politics can do,and therefore turns all issues into politicalissues. The result is to prioritize the political

at the expense of the personal. This prioritygrows from the Greek view that the polis,or city, is the highest form of allegiance, sothat politics as service to the polis is thehighest calling. From the covenantal per-spective, by contrast, politics is importantbut is limited and kept in its place (“Howsmall, of all that human hearts endure, /that part which laws or kings can cure”).Also, because power is the currency of politics, politics is especially prone to cor-ruption and the abuse of power (“All powertends to corrupt”). Wisely understood,politics is downstream from the more cre-ative and culture-shaping spheres of society,and it is always vital to remember the oldmaxim “The first thing to say about poli-tics is that politics is not the first thing.”

The second contrast to covenantalsolidarity is what is now known as thetragedy of the commons. In a highly indi-vidualistic society, each person takes backa little of their public commitment, think-ing that their part is so small that no onewill notice. Rabbi Sacks tells an old Hasidicstory that captures the problem of suchtiny acts of selfishness. There was aEuropean village where it was decided thateach villager should donate an amount ofwine to fill a vat to present to the king onthe occasion of his visit to the village.Secretly at night over the next few weeks,however, each villager took some of thewine, rationalizing the theft with thethought that such a small amount wouldnot be missed. Each one then added waterto the vat, so that the vat remained full tothe top. When the king arrived, the vil-lagers presented the vat to him, and hedrank from it, but was disgusted. “It is justplain water!”21

The point is clear. The responsibilityfor a covenantal (or constitutional) societylies with each citizen, and it begins andends with each one doing their part—insolidarity with other covenant partners. InElazar’s words, “In all its forms, the keyfocus of covenant is on relationships. A


covenant is the constitution of relation-ships.”22 Such a covenantal (constitutional)republic can die, not just because of badgovernment but death through a milliontiny acts of selfishness. Americans shouldstop to ponder this point. Under theimpact of radical individualism, Americahas become the land of the autonomousand unencumbered self, and the tragedy ofthe commons is far advanced in America.

George Bernard Shaw summed upthe nihilism and irresponsibility of theEuropean way of life in his own time whenhe said, “The golden rule today is thatthere is no golden rule.” Oswald Spenglerblamed such selfish attitudes for the “failure of nerve” of the West at large, andsuch practical results as demographicchildlessness that followed it: “It is all thesame whether the case against children isthe American lady who would not miss aseason for anything, the Parisienne whofears that her lover would leave her, or theIbsen heroine who belongs to herself—theyall belong to themselves and they are allunfruitful.”23 With the exception ofSwitzerland, Europe is not committed tocovenantal arrangements, whereasAmerica ostensibly still is. Yet the reality is now hard to see in America. The irre-sponsible society and the irresponsiblegeneration think only of themselves. Theytake no thought for others, including thewider world and those as yet unborn.

There is an elemental lesson herethat Americans must not miss. The termrepublic was coined by Cicero in the firstcentury BC, but its meaning “publicthings” or “the property of the public” wasanchored by the Sinai covenant centuriesearlier. Democracy as a notion has next tono moral content and absolutely no socialcontent whatsoever, whereas covenantal (or constitutional) republicanism is moralat its heart and it creates a society before itcreates a state. It therefore puts responsiblerelationships and the common good at theheart of life and society. Covenantal (or

constitutional) republicanism rises andfalls on the moral integrity and the socialresponsibility of the relationships of thecitizens and on the condition of the com-mon good. The implications for Americacould not be plainer and more challenging.Vital though presidents and governmentsare, relationships matter more to freedomthan regimes. The personal and the inter-personal precede the political. Both theAmerican family and the American repub-lic were once rooted in covenants, so thereis an iron link between the health of mar-riage, the health of families, the health ofschools, the health of the common good,and the health of America, and to loosenone is to loosen the others. Improved gunlaws may or may not help to curb thedestructive ugliness of America’s socialviolence, but there is no question thatgood relationships will always do morethan the best of gun laws.

Thus the importance of the conditionof American society, its marriages, its fam-ilies, its schools, its voluntary associations,its civic education, and its handing downfrom generation to generation—all thesethings will always determine the state of the union more than the character ofthe president, the nature of the state, thesize of the military, or the condition ofAmerica’s roads, railways, bridges, andtunnels. America’s obsession with presidents and presidential elections isexpensive, diverting, and foolish.

The notion of democracy is designedto answer the question, Who rules?(Though as we shall see, even its answer to that question is weaker and less clearthan many people think.) But covenantalrepublicanism answers a far deeper ques-tion, How are the democratic citizens whorule to relate to each other in ways thatensure a just, free, open, and caring socie-ty? Americans today celebrate democracyand downplay republicanism, when forthose who prize freedom the priorityshould be the other way around.


Rediscovery at the ReformationThe impact of the covenant and the notionof covenantalism can be seen in three peri-ods in history. First, and most obviously,the Sinai covenant constituted the Jewishpeople and formed the Jewish nation. It isnotable that the covenant constituted theJewish way of life and the Jewish politicalarrangements centuries before Israelchose a Jewish king hundreds of yearslater. And the covenant continued to bethe decisive factor in the way they livedlong after the catastrophic disasters of AD70 and AD 133. The Jews had lost theirtemple, their monarchy, their capital city,their priests, their prophets, their home-land, their independence, and almost theirwill to survive. (At the climax of the perse-cution under the Emperor Hadrian, therewere rabbis who said that “by rights weshould issue a decree that Jews should notmarry and have children, so that the seedof Abraham comes to an end of its ownaccord.”)24 In other words, in the blackestnight of Jewish experience the covenantwas the key to Jewish survival. It was notonly a framework for life but an anchorand a lifeline in the storms of evil that theJewish people suffered.

The basic lesson of Jewish covenan-talism is unmistakable. Relationships mat-ter more than regimes, the character ofsociety preceded the character of the state,and the law came into being before theentry into the land. This central concernfor the quality of a community means thatthe character of the state follows the quali-ty of the relationships of the people whocomprise it. As the community and thesociety goes, starting with the family andthe school, so goes the state, and not theother way around.

Second, the precedent and pattern ofthe Sinai covenant was rediscovered anddeveloped by the Reformation. Along with

the truths of calling and conscience, itbecame one of the three most decisive giftsof the Reformation that shaped the rise ofthe modern world. Switzerland, theNetherlands, Scotland, England, and theUnited States—each was powerfully shapedby the Reformation and in its turn helpedto shape the modern world, the last two inparticular because of their influence insecular history. The Sinai covenant wasespecially important to the Reformed wingof the Reformation and the thinking thatspread out from Calvin’s Geneva andZwingli’s Zurich. The Jews had famouslysaid, “Our people is a people only invirtue of its Torah,” and an old Calvinistadage made the same point: “Where the Reformed are, there will be thecovenant.” The Jews were constituted by the Torah, and the Reformers wereconstituted by the covenant, and withoutthem neither would have been anything.In the words of William Perkins, the greatCambridge teacher of countless Puritans,“We are by nature covenant creatures,bound together by covenants innumerableand together bound by covenant to ourGod. . . . Blessed be the ties that bind us.”25

From the Mayflower to the Arbella, andfrom Plymouth Rock to the MassachusettsBay and beyond, the notion of covenantwas applied to churches and marriages,and then to townships and common-wealths. It became the characteristic andunmistakable form of governance in sev-enteenth- and eighteenth-century NewEngland. The Massachusetts Constitutionof 1780, for example, is the oldest survivingwritten constitution in the modern world,and John Adams drafted it expressly incovenantal terms. (“It is a social compact,by which the whole people covenants withthe each citizen, and each citizen with thewhole people, that all shall be governed bycertain laws for the common good.”)26

As if to doff his cap to what he knew wasthe wellspring of constitutionalism, John Adams wrote, “I will insist that the ©

2018 [KEN ORVIDAS] C/O THEISPOT.COM

The basic lesson ofJewish covenantalism is unmistakable.Relationships mattermore than regimes.


Hebrews have done more to civilize menthan any other nation.”27

The third period of influence is themost recent. In the eighteenth century, thecovenant tradition merged with the newscience of politics and flowered into thenotion of constitutionalism, and in thatform it has influenced many countriesacross the world ever since. Yet manyAmericans today still fail to appreciate thefundamental point. The US Constitution,which has been the pacesetter documentfor so many other countries and constitu-tions, is in essence a form of national andsomewhat secularized covenant—and anotion that goes back to Mt. Sinai. As such,it has all the strengths and weaknesses ofthe covenantal form of government, but itrepresents a direct and comprehensivecontrast to the alternative of organic, hier-archical, and purely contractual forms ofgovernment. In Lord Acton’s estimate,covenantal federalism in America (theterm federal comes foedus, the Latin forcovenant) “has produced a communitymore powerful, more prosperous, moreintelligent, and more free than any otherwhich the world has seen.”28

Promise Makers, Promise BreakersIt is important to say that there are weak-nesses in covenantal politics, as in allforms of human politics, and these shouldbe understood clearly—two above all. Thefirst weakness is that covenantalismrequires promise keeping, but we humansdo not keep promises well. We make andbreak promises, both as individuals and asgroups and nations. Making promises isthe natural expression of human freedom.

However, making promises andkeeping promises are two different things,and the Bible itself candidly exposes thisweakness in promise keeping. The problemis writ large in the cycle of degeneration

and renewal in the book of Judges, whichcomes not long after Exodus, and later inthe checkered story of the Jewish kings.There is a cycle of nature (spring, summer,autumn, and winter), and there is a cycleof human failure (corruption, oppression,capitulation, redemption, and corruptionagain). They each require festivals toaddress the significance of their differences,but the first cycle is inevitable, whereasthe second is preventable. Strikingly, thegreatest, wisest, and richest of all theHebrew kings, Solomon, demonstrates thecorruption the most clearly. He so glorifieshimself and his building ventures that heturns his entire people back into a slavelabor force and turns himself into “anotherPharaoh” and Israel into a “second Egypt.”

This candidly acknowledged failurecreates the impetus for the characteristi-cally Jewish notion of the Messiah andmessianism. Whether the longed forMessiah is true or false, religious (as in the desired Son of David) or secular (as inthe nineteenth-century visions of RabbiMarx), the messianic longing is for a second liberation to fulfill the first. It is aradical and visionary response that springsfrom the assumption that the exodus ofthe first liberation has proved cruciallyincomplete or has failed. The messianichope is pregnant with meaning for theJewish and Christian sense of history. Butit is also crucial for the revolutionary secu-lar Left, because secular messianism isessentially an expression of the failure ofsecular liberationism. With no divineMessiah in view, secular messianismbecomes a dream politics of the Left. It iscalled on whenever history’s progressiveshave not progressed as promised, whenthe “long march” has gone through theinstitutions and got nowhere, and whenthe Babel project has foundered yet again.

To counter the dynamics of this spir-itual and moral entropy, the Bible constantlywarns against the danger of idolatry andself-glorification. It demonstrates the cru-


cial importance of the prophetic correctiveand teaches the requirement of faithfultransmission of covenantal commitments—from leaders to their people, from par-ents to children, and from generation togeneration, and it underscores the necessi-ty of renewing the covenant when it is for-gotten or broken. Yet in spite of all this, therecord of covenant keeping will never beperfect. It will often be broken, and themessianic hope will burn brightly in con-trast. Moses, the first liberator, and thecoming Messiah, the second liberator, arethe Bible’s two bookends for holdingtogether freedom and hope. Thus the freeperson’s task in any age is to live responsi-bly in the roller-coaster interim, alwayslooking to the past with gratitude andhumility, but always working toward thefuture with hope and energy. Life lived thisway calls for engagement with hope andhumility. Where we are going givesstrength to what we are doing, and whatwe are doing becomes a sign of where weare going.

Many people have recognized thiscore problem of promise keeping andresponded to it in different ways. Oneresponse was to see the flaw and exploit itcynically. In the Renaissance, for instance,Machiavelli turned the weakness into avirtue when he openly called for the princeto break his word whenever he needed toas a matter of statecraft. “The promisegiven was a necessity of the past: the wordbroken is a necessity of the present.” Sincepolitics has no relation to ethics, “A wiseruler ought never to keep faith when bydoing so it would be against his interests.”29

Power, not trust, is the coin of the realmfor Machiavelli’s prince—a philosophy andan attitude that is common again underthe terms of postmodernism.

Another response was to rue the flawand then use it to reject the notion ofcovenantalism itself. Philosopher DavidHume, for example, writing fromcovenanting Scotland, raised the simple

question, “Why are we bound to keep ourpromises?”30 He argued that promise mak-ing is “the most mysterious and incompre-hensible operation that can possibly beimagined.” Famously, he demonstrated inhis own life that he had no intention ofupholding what he considered impossibleand unnecessary. Once, after he had falleninto a bog near Edinburgh, he called forhelp and said he was willing to recite theLord’s Prayer to induce a rescuer to helphim, only to mock the woman once he wason back on terra firma. If Paris was worth amass for Henry IV, reciting the Lord’s Prayerwas an easy price for Hume to pay for hisrescue. What was one more false and fickleoath if all oaths were false and fickle?

Yet another response was to face the flaw realistically and then attempt tostrengthen promise keeping by safeguard-ing the place of truth, trust, oaths, vows,and loyalty. (“So help me, God.”) That concern was the reason why John Lockeadvised against respecting freedom of conscience for atheists. The problem wasnot that he was prejudiced, that his much-vaunted “tolerance” stopped short of tolerating atheists, or that he was inconsis-tent and hypocritical, as he is oftenaccused of being. It was rather that sinceatheists did not believe in God, Locke didnot think they had a standard by which tomake oaths that were needed if the bondsof social trust were to be maintained.

Accountable? Who Says?The second major weakness of covenan-talism is closely related to the first. Anyrejection of the standard, before which thecovenantal pledge was made, means anautomatic relaxing of accountability, andwithout accountability, covenantalism andconstitutionalism weaken and fall apart.For the Jews at Sinai, the covenant was“with God,” for most of American history,the covenant was genuinely “under God,”but now it has become a constitution


“without God.” The recent determinationto remove both the term and the truth of“One nation under God” raises the ques-tion of accountability again. Kingdoms,empires, dictatorships, totalitarian gov-ernments, and authoritarian religionsrequire no consent other than submission,blind, grudging, and sullen if necessary.But covenantal faiths and constitutionalsocieties are nothing without the free anduncoerced promise making and promisekeeping of their adherents and their citi-zens. Tether-free societies simply do notlast. Hence the importance of the Pledge ofAllegiance and civic education again, notas a formality but a reality.

Needless to say, the alternative topromise keeping is a resort to force, andtherefore to the state as the only agentstrong enough to hold citizens accountableand to provide the common super stan-dard of accountability. Statism and thecreation of Leviathan was Thomas Hobbesalternative to covenantalism. Despite hisformal nod to God and his multiple refer-ences to the Bible (far more than to theGreeks and the Romans), Hobbes had noreal place for God in his “new science ofpolitics.” It was to be a secularized form ofcontractual, not covenantal, governance.But he was candid enough to spell out theprice that people would have to pay—andthat Americans will have to pay today—ifthey reject God as the final standard ofaccountability. If the government was todo what Hobbes needed the governmentto do, and to help people escape the brutalstate of nature, the state that wouldreplace God would have to become god—orin Hobbes’s own words, Leviathan wouldhave to be a “mortal god.”

The new government, Hobbes wrote,would be “made by covenant of every manwith every man,” as everyone would say toeveryone else, I give up my right to governmyself, and I authorize the ruler, on thecondition that you too give over your rightto the ruler, and support all his actions.When this happens, he argued, the united

people are “called a COMMONWEALTH. . . .This is the generation of that greatLEVIATHAN, or rather to speak more reverently, of that mortal god, to which weowe under the immortal God, our peaceand defense.”31 You can escape the brutalstate of nature, Hobbes promises. Peace,order, and stability can all be yours, but theprice is steep. You may escape the “war ofall against all” on one side, and you maystep away from your dislike of any bindingagreement with God on the other side. But your only option is to surrender to the “mortal god” of the all-powerful state,which as it grows will claim absolute arbi-trary power over everyone and everything.

Make no mistake: The logical outcomeof those who reject covenantalism (or constitutionalism) today is state control.There is undoubtedly a danger in what LeoStrauss called reductio ad Hitlerum—mak-ing Hitler the essence of all evil, and usinghim as the final argument to win arguments.But there have been too many politicalreligions and too many semi-divine stateson both the left and the right to ignore theproblem of statism, or what used to becalled statolatry. “Man . . . must veneratethe state as a secular deity,” Hegel said.32

“To be a nation . . . is the religion of ourtime,” Ernst Arndt, the German nationalistdeclared.33 Abolish God, Chesterton commented on such claims, “and theGovernment becomes God. That fact iswritten all across human history.”34

Supporters of 1789 and Left/liberalismshould take careful note. The invasion ofthe private sphere, Christopher Dawsonwrote, is “the original sin of every totalitar-ian system.”35 For all the fancy Left/ liberalblather about diversity, unity without Godsoon becomes enforced unity, which isanother name for coercion and uniformityand the totalitarian suppression of realdiversity. Thanks to political correctness,the process is well underway in America,and there is no greater need than the needto defend and expand the remainingspheres of freedom.


The Real Breaking of the CovenantFar more than fussiness over history is atstake in these issues. If the notions ofcovenant and constitution are central tothe founding of the American republic,then the health or sickness of their condi-tion must be central any assessment ofthe state of the union, for quite literallythey constitute America. A founding cre-ates a nation’s DNA and establishes thelines along which it will develop until andunless it is defeated or taken in a com-pletely different direction. No one canhope to make America great again in anydirection without understanding whatmade America great in the first place.America can neither be understood rightnor led well unless the covenantal andconstitutional character of American free-dom is taken into account. Covenantalismand the essential responsibility it requiresof citizens provide the missing key torestoring American freedom today—unlessit is taken a quite different direction.

When Abraham Lincoln traveled toWashington to begin his presidency inFebruary 1861, the storm clouds of war weredarkening. He stopped in Philadelphia topay his respects to Independence Hall andthe two great documents that had beendebated and framed there, the first beingnothing less than America’s “birth certifi-cate.” Citing Psalm 137, he solemnly madehis own covenantal pledge: “I have neverasked anything that does not breathe fromthose walls. All my political warfare hasbeen in favor of the teachings coming forthfrom that sacred hall. May my right handforget its cunning and my tongue cleave tothe roof of my mouth if I ever prove falseto those teachings.”36 Lincoln’s parallelwith the Hebrew psalm and its undyingdevotion to Jerusalem is stunning, and itshows up the chasm between him andmany American leaders today. No people

in all history have had a love for their citylike the Jews for Jerusalem, even whenthey were separated from it for nearly twothousand years, yet Lincoln takes thatsupreme attachment as the standard forhis love for the principles enshrined inAmerica’s founding documents.

Few American leaders today havesuch an understanding of where the greatness of America came from. Such aninaugural trip to Philadelphia now wouldbe little more than “optics” or tourism atbest and hypocrisy at worst, for both thefounders and their ideas are now under a cloud. There are four main waysAmericans dismiss their covenantal pastand weaken the role of the founders andthe Constitution today. Indeed, it was thefateful convergence of these dismissals inthe 1960s that created the cultural chasmbetween 1776 and 1789 that dividesAmerica now.

First and foremost, many Americanshave rejected the founders because of theirfailure to address “America’s originalsin”—the evil of slavery and their treat-ment of women and Native Americans,and the rank hypocrisy that was the result.Many people outside the United States hadpointed to this hypocrisy—most famouslythe English writer Samuel Johnson: “Howis it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”37

Unquestionably, then, the founders’ silenceover slavery was not unwitting. It was thebargain made by the supporters of the USConstitution in 1787. Many of them per-sonally opposed slavery, but they remainedsilent at the convention because if theyhad insisted on tackling the problem, asSamuel Hopkins and others urged, theSouthern states would never have signedthe Constitution. This devilish agreementcarried over an egregious evil and createda blatant hypocrisy, the gap between theAmerican genius for freedom and the real-ity of slavery, and thus between America’sideals and self-image as the “land of thefree” and the sordid realities of the long


degradation of the African slaves and thenof African Americans. Plastering over thisblatant hypocrisy left the evil unaddressed,and the contradiction festered like an openwound until the stench could be disguisedno longer. The hypocrisy was then rippedopen by the civil rights movement toexpose the ugly gangrene of racism forwhat it was.

The same was true of other inconsis-tencies and distortions from the founders’America—supremely the treatment ofwomen, of Native Americans, and thetreatment of other nations throughAmerica’s sense of manifest destiny andexceptionalism. One after another, differ-ent sixties movements such as thewomen’s movement, the sexual revolution,and the antiwar movement echoed thecivil rights movement, called the statusquo into question, and sent shockwavesthrough the complacency and triumphal-ism of postwar America. What happenednext is what matters today and whatshaped the present polarizations:American liberalism lurched sharply to theleft in the sixties and became the Left/liber-alism of today. Since then, Left/liberalismhas been characterized by liberal shame, adiscomfort with the founders, a decisivedistancing from the American past, anunease with white dominance, an openanimosity toward religion, a tendency toview ethics in public rather than personalterms, a proneness to disrespect the flag,and—fatefully—an openness to ideas andtrends that owe more to 1789 than to 1776.

With hindsight, it is now clear thatthis lurch leftward was the real brokencovenant. The critical shift led in its turnto the celebrated Rudi Dutschkestyle,Left/liberal “long march through the insti-tutions” in the decades after the sixties.The outcome was that Left/liberalism hascaptured the three main centers ofAmerican ideas and educated opinion thatshape American culture: the universities,the press and media, and the world ofentertainment. In the process, the triumph

of Left/liberalism has turned Americanhistory into a museum of evils, inflamedthe culture wars, and bred the disagree-ments that have created the present bitterdivisions between ordinary Americans andthe educated American elites—and calledinto question the great experiment itself.Theodore Roszak wrote famously of “themaking of the counter-culture” in the1960s. It took much longer than he thought,but fifty years later its success is close eventhough many of the original revolutionar-ies did not live to see their triumph.

Among the many consequences ofthe great lurch left, the change in America’sway of addressing evil is titanic. Despitetheir tragic blind spots, the founders weregenerally realistic about the potential forcorruption and the abuse of power.Equally, both the Jewish and Christianfaiths, though frank about evil and injustice,emphasize the necessity for repentanceand the possibility of forgiveness whenaddressing wrongs. Only through a separa-tion of powers can abuse be prevented, andonly through repentance and forgivenesscan wrongs be addressed as wrongs, thepast be left behind as the past, and thefuture be opened as the arena of the gen-uine second chance. From Samuel Hopkinsto Abraham Lincoln to Frederick Douglassto Martin Luther King Jr., those whoaddressed the evils and hypocrisies of theirtimes did so within the double frameworkof the biblical faiths and America’s found-ing declarations (Lincoln’s “new birth” of freedom, for example, and King’s“promissory note” of the Declaration).

No excoriation of slavery is moresearing than Frederick Douglass’s 1852speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth ofJuly?” Even today, it brings tears to theeyes, anger to the heart, and a stunnedsense of wonder that such awful thingscould ever be countenanced in the “land ofthe free.” Distancing himself from thefounders, he repeatedly calls them “yourfathers,” and he then passionately attacksboth the barbarism of slavery and the


multiple hypocrisies of the “nation’sinconsistencies” over slavery. Yet Douglassstill finishes his magisterial speech withunshaken confidence in the Constitution—“interpreted as it ought to be interpreted,the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBER-TY DOCUMENT. Read its preamble, con-sider its purposes. Is slavery among them?Is it at the gateway? It is neither.”38

Many sixties radicals, and Left/liber-als later, part company with FrederickDouglass, Booker T. Washington, andMartin Luther King Jr. at that point. Theyreject that recourse emphatically, and indoing so they wittingly or unwittinglybreak with the American covenant deci-sively. Such was the depth of the evilsexposed that they rejected the Bible, thefounders, and the American founding alto-gether. Traditional America, they charged,had been shown up as inherently, founda-tionally, and chronically “racist,” “sexist,”“militarist,” and the like. And in theprocess of this dire shift in diagnosis, twofateful things happened. First, much ofAmerican liberalism itself lurched left andchanged—from the classical and “capitalL” liberalism of the founders and theirheirs to the Left/liberalism of the radicalmovements that from then on have viewedAmerica in a harsh and less flattering light.There could be no turning back to theAmerica of the founders or to any serioustalk of a “promissory note.”

Also in rejecting both the foundersand the Jewish and Christian perspectivethat underlay them, the radicals alsoturned from the biblical vision of justice toa secular view of justice as all-out, power-based confrontation. Whereas the formerrequires repentance, which requires anacknowledgment of both wrongs andresponsibility, and then works for recon-ciliation and restoration, the latter aimsonly for redress and reparation that can belittle more than revenge. The result of thisshift is turning America into the land ofvengeance. Victims seeking vengeance fora lengthening list of past sins produce more

victims, who in turn seek fiercer vengeancethat produces even more victims. And so itgoes, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, murderfor murder, and massacre for massacre.

Where will it end? Oddly, these bravenew radicals do not realize how they areprone to violence because they areRousseau’s children and utopians ratherthan heirs of the realism of Madison andthe Bible. Yet it is actually their utopi-anism that drives them to violence. Withutopian visions dancing before their eyes,they believe that only a clean sweep of thepast can usher in a world of justice andfreedom. Thus baby, bath water, Bible—and now statuary, memorials, and all—have to be flung out of the window if thereis to be a fresh start. As always the utopi-ans’ fresh start has to begin with a cleanslate, and as always it takes violence towipe the slate completely clean. Once againthe violent echoes of 1789 are drowningout the cautionary realism of 1776.

Second, there are Americans, such ashistorian Charles Beard and his progres-sive school, and many recent thinkers andhistorians, such as Howard Zinn, whoclaim that they have “seen through” thefounders’ real agenda and exposed themfor the economic interests that lay behindtheir thinking and their policies. Later his-torians have dismissed this charge as“quasi-Marxist nonsense,” but suchcharges gained their appeal because theydebunked the mythical view of thefounders, and they fit the postmodernanalysis that everything can be reduced toits power equations.39 Far from disinter-ested statesmen and heroes, the foundershad rigged the system to thwart truedemocracy, Beard and the postmodernistsargue. They were “hard-fisted conserva-tives” out to “protect their own interestsand those of their class.”40

Third, there are other Americans,such as progressive leaders from WoodrowWilson and John Dewey to Barack Obama,who have praised the founders for theircontribution in their day, but insist that


their work, however brilliant in their time,is now outdated and needs to be revised forthe changing needs of today’s generation.There are in fact inherent problems insuch progressivism and its dismissal of thepast. Above all, it stands or falls by theEnlightenment belief in continuousadvance, whether through the state (forthose on the left), the market (for those onthe right), or science and technology (foreveryone, but the elites above all). TheEnlightenment’s continuous advance hassimply stalled, at least for the moment,and it did nothing to prevent the horrorsof the Holocaust, the world wars, and thegenocides in the twentieth century.Whether the progress hoped for was forhuman advance in general or theAmerican Dream of economic bettermentin particular, the evident frustration andcynicism in the younger generation stemsfrom its bitter conclusion: For mostAmericans, the promised future may notbe better than the past.

Behind this practical weakness therewere always theoretical flaws in progres-sivism. For a start, it was a parasite on thebiblical view of time and hope, and it pro-vided no standard by which to judge theprogress that it claimed. Aside from thepositive connotations of the word progress,the term progressivism could as easily beregressivism, for some of its “achieve-ments,” such as the expanded state, are astep backwards for personal freedom, notforward. G. K. Chesterton noted thisinherent problem when he remarked,“progress is simply a comparative of whichwe have not settled the superlative.”41

T. S. Eliot remarked similarly on “an agewhich advances progressively backwards.”42

More importantly, progressivismrequires certain assumptions for it to succeed. Many of its advocates do not holdthese assumptions, and their philosophieshave no right to them. Progressives oftenquote Martin Luther King Jr., who wasquoting Theodore Parker from the nine-teenth century: “The arc of the moral

universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”But in the very speech when King used thisphrase, in his sermon from the Torah atTemple Israel of Hollywood in February1965, he pointed out that many people donot have either the assumptions or the ideology to be able to undergird such aconfident view of progress. Their idea ofprogress was no better than the notion Kingattacked, citing Thoreau, as “improvedmeans to an unimproved end.”43 Whenprogressives breezily claim to be on the“right side of history” and consign theiropponents to “the dustbin of history,” theysimply cannot justify their claims. Indeed,they have no more credibility than NikitaKhrushchev when he angrily pounded thepodium at the United Nations with hisshoe, and shouted, “Whether you like it ornot, history is on our side. We will bury you!”

Such is the power of hope, of course,that in good times the appeal of the pro-gressive attitude will always be strongerthan its rationale. And what affects politicsis the progressive attitude, and in particularthe overspill from its disdain for the past,in this case the past of the founders. Justbefore he retired as Secretary of State,Dean Acheson was speaking to a promi-nent European. “Looking back,” he said,“the gravest problem I had to deal withwas how to steer, in this atomic age, theforeign policy of a world power saddledwith the constitution of a small, eighteenth-century farmers’ republic.”44

Fourth, there are still others, perhapsnow the majority of Americans, who havesimply forgotten the founders. They havegrown hazier and hazier in their under-standing of the founders and the genius oftheir contribution—beyond some scantreferences on July Fourth. For all practicalpurposes many Americans have simplyforgotten the founders, and in the processhave also lost touch with the founders’view of covenant, and the Constitution andits requirements. For John Winthrop, in1630, covenant was at the heart of theirpurpose incoming to America (“We are


entered into Covenant with him for thiswork, we have taken out a Commission.”)45

But by the time of Lyndon Johnson’s inau-guration in 1965, the terms of the covenanthad changed in a marked way, and thecovenant was with the land and not witheach other, let alone God (“They camehere—the exile and the stranger, brave but frightened—to find a place where aman could be his own man. They made acovenant with this land.”)46 More recently,apart from a brief and ineffectual mentionby President Clinton in his early days, thenotion of covenant has disappeared almostcompletely.

These four dismissals are different,but their combined effect has been tosever America’s covenantal roots, banishthe founders, distance the past, and stretchthe elasticity of the Constitution to thebreaking point. Now, under the fig leaf ofthe mantra “constitutional” and “uncon-stitutional,” the declining prestige of theConstitution can pressed into the serviceof any person or group that can grasp thelevers of government power and presstheir own agenda. The irony is that in itsassault on the past, contemporary Americais becoming all the more captive to thepast. Imagining itself free, it shows itselfbound more than ever and unable to makereal progress.

This is not the place for a compre-hensive description of Left/liberalism andits links to 1789. My concern is the differ-ence between 1776 and 1789 and its impli-cations for freedom, which will unfold aswe proceed. I am certainly not arguing thateveryone on the American Left mimics theJacobins and the sansculottes, works for afull-blown Marxist revival, or subscribes towhat Roger Scruton calls the “stunning‘nonsense machine’” of the foggy thoughtand impenetrable language of many post-modern European writers.47 But the unde-niable links and clear resemblancesbetween 1789 and the American Left arewhat matters. The former struggled for lib-erté and egalité, the latter for “liberation”

and “social justice.” The former wonthrough violent revolution, whereas thelatter seeks to win through a cultural revo-lution, after which the elite imposes itswill through administrative and bureau-cratic procedures (regulative bodies andthe law courts). And both are character-ized by their reliance on the state, theiropen hostility toward religion, their radi-cal separation of religion and public life,their attempt to control language in orderto control reality (French and Soviet“Newspeak,” “doublespeak,” and American“political correctness”), their unashamedespousal of power, their egalitarian appealto envy rather than liberty, and their naiveutopianism that the removal of repressionwill mean the fulfillment of freedom.

No one should fail to see how theseresemblances between Left/liberalism and1789 add up to a triple tragedy afterAmerica’s triumph over the Soviet Unionin 1989. America has not only rejected its covenantal/constitutional heritage offreedom but wasted the rare and historicopportunity of its “unipolar moment,” and is now in danger of surrendering tothe way of thinking that led to the collapseof its former enemy.

For the purposes of this chapter,however, the question is: Has the Left/liberal exposure of hypocrisy in the sixtieshelped America move beyond the evils andhypocrisies of the past? On the contrary.Within the worldview of Left/liberal secu-larism there was no repentance requiredand no forgiveness to be offered, in con-trast to Lincoln and King. So the effect ofthe harping on the evils of America’sracism, sexism, and militarism has been tomake America’s evils irredeemable.Pounding on the “sins of the fathers,” andassaulting the “structures of domination,”a brigade of angry activists has forged aculture of grievance, resentment, anger,and victim playing turned power mongering.But they have stoked the problems, notsolved them. Instead of remedying theevils and reconciling the parties, the Left/


liberal activists have refought the battlesof the past, widening the wounds to thepresent generation, and spreading the devastation far beyond their original victims. And they have done so in a waythat poisons American life and Americanpolitics from top to bottom.

The result is an American past thatcan never be atoned, an American debt thatcan never be repaid, an American apologythat will never be accepted, anAmerican hope that will foreverbe dashed, and an American credibility that is increasinglythreadbare to America’s own youth,let alone to the watching world. If this Left/ liberal view prevailsfinally, the American project offreedom is tainted forever and finished.

From a covenantal perspective, theultimate challenge is to see what happensto America when Americans finally renderthe Constitution ineffectual—what happenswhen Americans lose the sense of purpose-ful history that came with covenant andclose down their horizons to the endlesscurrents, eddies, swings, counterswings,graphs, statistics, pie charts, and punditryof modern political science, what happenswhen the “parchment barriers” prove tooflimsy and even the “flexible constitution”becomes too elastic and there is effectivelyno constitutional framework at all. Whathappens when freely chosen consent isonly a charade, and there is no morallybinding pledge, no reciprocal responsibili-ty of all for all, no checks and balances, noinsistence that no one is above the law, andevery American and American movementdoes what is right in their own eyes? WillYeats’s celebrated “center” still hold? Willthe American falcon, “turning and turningin the widening gyre,” be able to hear thefalconer? The overwhelming evidence ofhistory would suggest that if such a daywere to come, there would be only onepossible outcome for the republic when“mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

Richard Niebuhr captured the gravityof the earlier American view of covenant,

and in a way that makes contemporary citizenship appear lightweight and casualby contrast.

Covenant was the binding togetherin one body politic of persons whoassumed through unlimited promiseresponsibility to and for each other,and for the common laws, underGod. It was government of the people, for the people, by the

people, but always under God,and it was not natural birth into

natural society that made one a complete member of the people, but always the moral act of takingupon oneself, through promise, the responsibility of a citizenshipthat bound itself in the very act ofexercising its freedom. For in thecovenant conception the essence offreedom does not lie in the liberty of choice among goods, but in theability to commit oneself for thefuture to a cause and in the terribleliberty of being able to become abreaker of the promise, a traitor to the cause.48

Will it be said that freedom was toohard a challenge for Americans to overcome?Here, then, is the first question on the checklist that Americans must answer constructively: Do you remember where your freedom came from?

Does the difference between republi-canism and democracy still matter? Whatis the significance of the clash betweensupporters of the original constitution andsupporters of an ever-changing living con-stitution? What is the state of the ethics ofresponsibility today? And if the notion ofcovenant is in the DNA of America, whathappens if it is abandoned, deliberately orunwittingly? The challenge for Americanstoday, while they are still powerful andprosperous, is to remember the long roadto freedom they have traveled, and to payattention to its lessons while there is timefor renewal.


Os Guinness is an author, a social critic,and member of the RZIM speaking team.

1Winston Churchill, quoted in James C. Humes, TheWit and Wisdom of Winston Churchill (New York:HarperCollins, 1994), 183.2See Daniel Hannan, Inventing Freedom: How theEnglish-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World(New York: HarperCollins, 2013).

3John Adams, The Political Writings of John Adams(New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1954), 68.

4J. R. Tanner, English Constitutional Conflicts of theSeventeenth Century (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1962), 63.

5William Penn, quoted in Hannan, Inventing Freedom, 127.

6Abiel Abbot, quoted in Jonathan Sacks, TheJonathan Sacks Haggadah (New Milford, CT:Maggid, 2003), 77

7Heinrich Heine, quoted in ibid., 76.8Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals,tran. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1996), 20.

9Sacks, Jonathan Sacks Haggadah, 9.10Daniel J. Elazar, Covenant and Polity in Biblical

Israel (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers,1995), xiii; and Daniel J. Elazar, Covenant andConstitutionalism: The Great Frontier and the Matrixof Federal Democracy (New Brunswick, NJ:Transaction Publishers, 1998), xi.

11Elazar, Covenant and Constitutionalism, 15; andMichael Walzer, In God’s Shadow: Politics in theHebrew Bible (New Haven, CT: Yale UniversityPress, 2012), cited in ibid., 200.

12Elazar, Covenant and Commonwealth, 22.13Walzer, In God’s Shadow, 5.14Plato, The Republic, Book 3:415, translated by

G. M. A. Grube, revised by C.D.C. Reeve(Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett PublishingCompany, Inc., 1992), 91.

15Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: APhilosophy of Judaism (New York: Farrar, Strauss &Giroux, 1955), 423.

16Jonathan Sacks, To Heal a Fractured World: The Ethicsof Responsibility (New York: Schocken, 2005), 154.

17Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution(New York: Basic Books, 1985), 97.

18Walzer, In God’s Shadow, 210.19Ibid., 4.20Jonathan Sacks, Covenant and Conversation: Exodus,

the Book of Redemption (New Milford, CT: Maggid,2010), 14.

21Jonathan Sacks, Essays on Ethics: A Weekly Reading ofthe Jewish Bible (New Milford, CT: Maggid, 2016), 133.

22Elazar, Covenant and Polity in Biblical Israel, 24.23Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans.

Charles Atkinson (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1928),3:105; emphasis added.

24Jonathan Sacks, Ceremony and Celebration:Introduction to the Holidays (New York: Maggid,2017), 56.

25William Perkins, quoted in Elazar, Covenant andCommonwealth, 239.

26John Adams, The Political Writings of John Adams(Indianapolis: Liberal Arts Press,1954), 95.

27John Adams, quoted in Jonathan Sacks, RadicalThen, Radical Now: On Being Jewish (London:Bloomsbury, 2000), 3.

28Roland Hill, Lord Acton (New Haven, CT: YaleUniversity Press, 2000), 65.

29Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, bk. 18, trans.George Bull (London: Penguin, 1999), 73-77.

30David Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, bk. 3, sc. 4.31Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Harmondsworth,

UK: Penguin, 1986), 132.32G. W. F. Hegel, quoted in Benjamin Wiker,

Worshipping the State: How Liberalism Became OurState Religion (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2013), 212.

33Ernst Arndt, quoted in ibid., 212.34G.K. Chesterton, quoted ibid., 32735Christopher Dawson, Beyond Politics (New York:

Sheed & Ward, 1939), 18.36Abraham Lincoln, Collected Works, ed. Roy P. Basler

(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,1953), 4:239.

37Samuel Johnson quoted in Anne Midgley, “How Is Itthat We Hear the Loudest Yelps for Liberty Among theDrivers of Negroes?,” Saber and Scroll, 2016, vol. 5,issue 3, article 10, https://digitalcommons.apus.edu/saberandscroll/vol5/iss3/10.

38Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is theFourth of July? (1852),” in The Portable FrederickDouglass, John Stauffer and Henry Louis Gates Jr.,eds. (New York: Penguin Random House, 2016), 195.

39Joseph J. Ellis, The Quartet: Orchestrating theSecond American Revolution (New York: VintageBooks, 2016), 141.

40Martin Diamond, As Far as Republican PrinciplesWill Admit, ed. William A. Schambra (Washington,DC: AEI Press, 1992), 71.

41G.K. Chesterton, Heretics (Mineola, NY: Dover,2006), 14.

42T.S. Eliot, The Rock (London: Faber & Faber, 1934), 51.43Martin Luther King Jr., sermon at Temple Israel of

Hollywood, February 26, 1965.44Dean Acheson, quoted in Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn,

The Intelligent American’s Guide to Europe (NewRochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1979), 407.

45John Winthrop, “A Modell of Christian Charity,” inThe American Puritans, ed. Perry Miller (GardenCity, NY: Doubleday, 1956), 82.

46Lyndon B. Johnson, “The President’s InauguralAddress,” January 20, 1965, online by GerhardPeters and John T. Woolley, The AmericanPresidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=26985.

47Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrand: Thinkersof the New Left (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 1.

48H. Richard Niebuhr, “The Idea of Covenant andAmerican Democracy,” Church History 23 (June1954),133.

“THE WAY TO the futureruns through the past,”mused one author. 1 In ourcontemporary ears, thismay not ring true. We seemto live with a suffocatingsense of immediacy, wheredemands and events comeat a fast and furious pace,and where the “past” formany of us means two days ago.

Within such a senseof time, the historicalemphasis of the churchmay seem obsolete, irra-

tional even. Growing up in Scotland in ahome that was not focused on religious orspiritual things, I had little sense of timeholding much weight beyond the momentor any sort of transcendent continuity.Time simply came and went. There were,of course, special times loosely connectedto an earlier age, such as Christmas andEaster. But these came to primarily sym-bolize time off from school, special food,and presents. If they were tied to any bigger or wider story or meaning, my attitude was: Who cares?

After moving to Austria, I recall avery different scenario. I had by thenbecome a Christian and noticed that whatthe church calls “holy week” was takenmuch more seriously there. The sense ofreverence, of something special, of conse-crated time, all made an impact on me.Holy week was mentioned on the nationalnews; preparations for the Easter servicein the national cathedral were highlighted.

Something was in the air. This was alsoseen in people’s behavior. I was struck thatevents so long in the past, centered on theancient Jesus of Nazareth and his death,were seen to have lasting and importantimpact on modern life in a modern nation.

Here in America, there is less of anational focus. We, of course, know of holyweek and many churches walk toward thevast and important events of Gethsemane,the upper room, and Golgotha. But outsidethe church, even inside some churches, itis simply one more thing in a list of occur-rences. Sadly, as a nation, we are progres-sively abandoning the metanarratives—the larger story—that for centuries servedto define and give shape to our society andindividual lives, namely the understandingof God’s covenant with his people.

The prophet Habakkuk lived in atime of spiritual and moral decline, whichled to the economic, social, and politicaltragedies of his people. Like the people towhom he preached, Habakkuk came froma storied nation. His life was informed bythe knowledge of God and his work amonghis people: the Exodus, the tabernacle, thelaw, and the land. Habakkuk knew that allof Israel’s blessings were rooted in thecovenantal faithfulness of God to his chosenpeople. They had come a long way sincerejoicing over the miracle at the Red Seaand the completion of Solomon’s temple.

Yet Israel was established with thenecessity of living in the three dimensionsof time: past, present, and future. Theywere commanded to remember God’swords and mighty acts in history. Theywere called to see life as a present blessing,with faith and justice as a response to theGod who gave it. And they were to live withhope in God’s good hands, such that neitherdeath nor the future was a threat.

But Israel forgot. Neglecting theirheritage, the people walked away. Theypursued other loves and became enamoredwith the nations around them. Israel forgottheir high calling, and the consequenceswere tragic.

By Stuart McAllister


REDIRECTED

LIFE

The prophet Habakkuk was under-standably grieved. Unable to understandwhat was happening to his community, theprophet walked through stages of depres-sion, anger, acceptance, and faith. Thechapters of his book move from asking“Why?” to expressing hopelessness orexclaiming anger, and finally, amazingly, tosinging: “Though the fig tree should notblossom, nor fruit be on the vines … yet Iwill rejoice in the Lord; I will take joy in theGod of my salvation” (Habakkuk 3:17-18).

Time Interrupted I believe there are times in life when weare on a similar journey. Though we mayfind ourselves stuck in one stage or another,we are invited to remember God’s involve-ment in our past, present, and future.Between the pages where Habakkuk criesout for God’s answer and where he ends ina mixture of fear and faith, we learn some-thing of the ambiguity, tension, and strug-gle that is ours until the journey ends.

Moreover, as we turn to the pages ofthe gospel, we encounter this unflinchingdeclaration and hope: “The Word becameflesh and made his dwelling among us. Wehave seen his glory, the glory of the oneand only Son, who came from the Father,full of grace and truth” (John 1: 14). Jesuscame to accomplish the Father’s work ofrestoration, and his face was set like a flintto see that work accomplished. The Wordof God became flesh and dwelt among us—in real space and time. God was on a missionand it culminated in the life, death, andresurrection of Jesus Christ.

In each of the gospel narratives, thepassion of Christ, his wrestling inGethsemane, his trial and torture, are amajor portion of the narratives themselves.The gospel is simply not the gospel with-out this focused portion of history—thedeath of Christ and all that surrounded it.It was a significant death, a voluntarydeath, a purpose-filled death. God was inChrist reconciling the world to Himself.

If this is true, if this really happened,if indeed normal time was interrupted byan invasion of the healing, forgiving, loving,and self-giving God, then time itself wasaltered, history changed, life redirected.

Surely, if such is the case, then someserious and dedicated time and space shouldbe given to remembering God’s work inhistory and our lives. In a fast-paced,moment-central world, this is the counter-cultural message of the church for the world.Scripture reminds us that the crucifixionof Jesus took place in real space and time,and therefore all of time—past, present,and future—is both important and impacted.And thus, our acts of remembrance, wor-ship, penitence, and hope are also holymoments, moments that invite an eternalGod to overshadow the immediacy of lifeand other lesser stories of time. Great thingsare indeed available: the love of God, thesacrificial death of Christ for the world, theforgiveness of sins, and the offer of new life.

The events recorded in Scripturefrom Genesis to Revelation actually hap-pened. They are not stories designed tomake us feel good or guilty and guide themorals of culture and society. They areeach part of God’s redemptive initiative toheal the broken heart, strike the heart ofevil, conquer death and sorrow, and open away to a new kind of life—a life redirected—and the restoration of all things.

The way to the future does indeedrun through the past. As people of God, we are invited to discover anew that theancient promises of God are sure. Mightwe remember what He has done, celebratehis grace today, and rejoice knowing thatone day, in the words of the prophetHabakkuk, “The earth will be filled withthe knowledge of the glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea” (2:14).

Stuart McAllister is Global Support Specialistat Ravi Zacharias International Ministries. 1 Robert Webber, Ancient-Future Worship:

Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative(Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 20.



Many years ago, my brother and I went ona backpacking trip in Washington State.My brother had done many such trips, butthis would be my first. I was living inTennessee at the time and had joined ahiking club that made frequent excursionsinto the Smoky Mountains. I practiced formy backpacking trip by carrying a schoolbackpack filled with water and snacks. Ibelieved I was ready for the more arduoushiking in the North Cascades. But I couldnot begin to be ready for the thirty-poundpack and the relentless switchbacks climb-ing a thousand feet or more up the back-country peaks.

Often the act of remembering orrevisiting a memory takes us back into thedistant past. We remember people, events,cherished locales and details from dayslong gone. Of course, not all memories arepleasant, and traveling toward the distantpast can also resemble something morelike a nightmare than a nostalgic trip downMemory Lane.

Nostalgia is one such way of revisit-ing these times. Nostalgia can be definedas that bittersweet yearning for things inthe past. The hunger it creates in us toreturn to another time and place lures usaway from living in the realities of thepresent. Nostalgia wears a shade of rose-colored glasses as it envisions days thatwere always sweeter, richer, and betterthan the present day.

The writer Frederick Buechner sug-

gests, “There are two ways of remembering.One way is to make an excursion from theliving present back into the dead past….The other way is to summon the dead pastback into the living present.”1

In either case, nostalgic rememberingremoves us from the present and temptsus to dwell in the unlivable past. Withoutfinding ways to remember forward—tobring the past as the good, the bad, and theugly into the present in a way that informswho we are and how we will live here andnow—all we are left with is nostalgia.

It is far from a sense of nostalgia thatdrives Asaph, the writer of Psalm 78, tobegin with these words:

Give ear, O my people, to my teaching;incline your ears to the words of my mouth!

I will open my mouth in a parable;I will utter dark sayings from of old,

things that we have heard and known,that our fathers have told us.

(verses 1-3)

The psalmist recalls the history ofIsrael as a means of remembering forward,of bringing the full reality of the past intoa place of honest remembrance —and notjust for the present generation but alsofor the sake of generations to come.Asaph exhorts the people to listen, toincline their ears to the stories of theircollective history: the Exodus, the wilder-

HONEST MEMORIESBy Margaret Manning Shull


ness wanderings, and the entry into theland of promise in which they currentlydwell. He says,

We will not hide them from their children,but tell to the coming generation

the glorious deeds of the Lord, and his might,

and the wonders that he has done.He established a testimony in Jacob

and appointed a law in Israel,which he commanded our fathers

to teach to their children,that the next generation might know them,

the children yet unborn,and arise and tell them to their children,so that they should set their hope in Godand not forget the works of God,

but keep his commandments. (verses 4-7)

Despite bearing witness to the workof God among them, the people of Israelforgot these crucial aspects of their his-torical narrative. In so doing, they did notkeep the covenant God made with them,and they began to live in ways that wentcontrary to all that defined them. Theyforgot the deeds and miraculous signsthat bore witness to God’s presence.Moreover, they lost faith and did not trustin God’s salvation. The psalmist acknowl-edges that they all “grieved him in thedesert” and “did not remember his poweror the day when he redeemed them fromthe foe” (verses 40 and 42).

There are no rose-colored remem-brances here, no bittersweet yearnings towhich they can return. Rather, the darkerparts of their story are remembered evenas praise is offered up for God’s long-suf-fering and lovingkindness. The psalmisturges the people to think about this God inthe midst of their present circumstances.What had God done among them in thepast in spite of their own failings? And howmight they now live in light of that past?

Perhaps it is this collective remem-bering Jesus has in mind when he instructsthose closest to him to remember. Jesus

tells his disciples during that last suppertogether, “This is my body, which is givenfor you; do this in remembrance of me”(Luke 22:19).

He is not calling them to bittersweetyearnings or simply to remember eventslived long ago. Rather, he calls them toremember in a way that would shape theirliving in the present—and for the future.Surely these intimate friends of Jesuscould not have understood fully all that wasimplied in his call to remember him. Yet,they became his witnesses “in Jerusalem,and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and untothe uttermost part of the earth” (Acts 1:8).Remembering the death and resurrectionof Jesus was not just a fact they rehearsed;rather, it was a lived reality that gave con-tour and context for their generation andfor generations to come.

In the face of an uncertain future orperhaps a painful present, we might betempted to dwell in nostalgic remember-ing. We might wish for the comfort ofselective memories. Yet, for those whowant to follow Jesus, we have the oppor-tunity to ask ourselves, “Am I seeking tolive in a place of honest remembrance?”

Are we remembering forward?What stories do our lives tell? How do ourlives enact the great narrative of salvationin our present day and the covenant Godmade with his people long ago?

As we think about the kind ofremembrance that enlivens our presentand gives hope for the future, we can joinin the song of praise with the psalmist ofold: “But we your people, the sheep ofyour pasture, will give thanks to you forever; from generation to generation wewill recount your praise” (Psalm 79:13).

Margaret Manning Shull is an adjunctmember of the speaking and writing team at RZIM.

1Frederick Buechner, Beyond Words: DailyReadings on the ABCs of Faith (Harper: San Francisco, 2004), 252.


LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THEPURSUIT OF FREEDOM

The roots of our current self-destruction are deeper than many realize. Os Guinness argues that we face a fundamental crisis of freedom, as America’sgenius for freedom has become her Achilles’ heel. Once again America has become a house divided, and Americans must make up their minds as to whichfreedom to follow. Will the constitutional republic be restored or replaced?

Available for purchase online at rzim.christianbook.com

RZIM Resources


By Ravi Zacharias

THINKAGAIN

YOU MAY HAVE heard me tell the storyabout the one-time heavyweight boxingchampion Muhammad Ali. Ali was flyingto one of his engagements and during theflight, the aircraft ran into foul weather.Moderate turbulence began to toss theplane about. Of course, all nervous flierswell know that when a pilot signals “mod-erate turbulence,” he or she is implying, “If you have any religious beliefs, it is timeto start expressing them.”

The passengers were instructed tofasten their seatbelts immediately, and allcomplied but Ali. So the flight attendantapproached him and requested that heobserve the captain’s order, only to hearAli audaciously respond, “Superman don’tneed no seatbelt.”

The flight attendant, however, didnot miss a beat but quickly fired in reply,“Superman don’t need no airplane either!”

Recently, another humorous storymade the rounds about two of the mostprominent football (soccer) players of ourtime: Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi.Somebody joked that Ronaldo made thecomment that God had sent him into theworld to show the world how to play foot-ball. A reporter told that story to Messi and

followed up with the question, “What doyou think of that?” Messi paused and said,“Honestly, I don’t remember sending him.”

Anyone who knows Messi woulddoubt that he would say anything like that.But it made for a great story.

Humor aside, that’s the way thatoften those in highly competitive sportssee themselves. The best this, the greatestthat, or the finest ever.

I draw attention to those storiesbecause I would like to consider the largercontext in which many of us find ourselves.Some of us will be granted access to thebest education, others offered an array ofpossibilities for achievement. Many of uswork diligently to position ourselves forextraordinary success in a rapidly-changingworld. In any of these possible triumphs, asense of invincibility can be engendered—regardless of what measure of turbulencemay lie ahead.

Yet unfortunately, academic or mate-rial advancement does not necessarily con-fer wisdom. As someone rightly quipped,“It may be a smart phone, but it is not awise phone.” How foolish it would be forus to take what generations preceding ushave valued in coping with life’s turbu-

GARY S. CHAPMAN

When We Remember


lence and cast it all aside because we are“modern.” Now, of course, even modern isnot good enough; we are postmodern. Wesound more and more like a product: “super”“ultra,” “ultra plus,” and so on. In the processof so-called advances, we unwittingly forgetwhat is needed to preserve any gain. Thosevalues are cast in stone.

G.K. Chesterton aptly advised hisgeneration that before pulling down anyfences, they should always pause longenough to find out why they were putthere in the first place. Removing “ancientmarkers” or boundaries is a risky endeavor.It is a valuable day in life when we realizethat laws are in place not just for another’sbenefit but for ours as well.

As I look at our world, I see a soberingreality. Governments seem to falter alongtwo extremes. There are demagogues whothink they alone matter. There are so-calleddemocracies where people think freedomalone matters. Both commit the blunder offorgetting there is a law above our laws—and ultimately a moral law giver, God. Thereare values by which we must be governed.

In other words, we need wisdom aswe process and distill all knowledge. Butwhere does one find it? The irony of thecall to wisdom in the Bible is that the onewho spoke most about it—Solomon—kept it all in the realm of writing great one-liners but did not apply that wisdomin living. He forgot the covenant God graciously made with him and his heritage—or conveniently chose to ignore it. This is a painful reminder that knowing doesnot guarantee doing. Doing engages thewill and a preset commitment.

In one of his proverbs, King Solomonwrites, “Blessed are those who find wisdom,those who gain understanding, for she ismore profitable than silver and yields betterreturns than gold. She is more preciousthan rubies; nothing you desire can com-pare with her” (Proverbs 3:13-15). Fromthis same king we are told, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”(Proverbs 1:7, 9:10; cf. Psalm 111:10).

Reverence for God is where wisdomstarts, with a recognition that there is agiver of knowledge and wisdom. We beginwith reverence for our creator and translatethat into reverence for his creation and hiscall upon our lives.

The God of the Scriptures is the giverof life itself. What a gift to be enjoyed.What a treasure to guard! God gives to us alove that we do not deserve. We do notmerit it.

Not only is the love of God unmerited,it is also a love that grows and is sustainedby relationship. Remarkably, God even uttersa wedding vow to his people, pledging hiscovenant love and faithfulness: “I willbetroth you to me forever; I will betrothyou in righteousness and justice, in loveand compassion. I will betroth you infaithfulness, and you will acknowledge theLord” (Hosea 2:19-20).

In exchange, we receive the will ofGod by which to live and find delight.Nothing brings harmony more thanremembering God’s love and embracinghis will. Nothing brings fragmentationmore than turning away. Our greatestweakness is not an enemy from withoutbut one from within in our refusal toentrust our hearts to God.

On days when we are tempted bythoughts of invincibility, might we remem-ber that falsely posing as a superman willonly ensure a crash landing. There’s “kryp-tonite” at every turn in places where weare overwhelmed by turbulent forces andweakening attacks upon inner strength.We can only reach our potential strengthwhen we remember who is all powerfuland humbly bow before Him. I pray wewill humbly seek wisdom and follow it toits source so that He will lift us to gloriousheights for his honor and our purpose.

Warm Regards,

Ravi

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