Theologian in Chief

On February 12, Americans and lovers of truth and liberty across the globe celebrate the 200th birthday of the man who must be considered the most beloved President in American history, Abraham Lincoln. Many historians have said in so many words that the rebellion of the mid-19th century was defeated less by General Grant’s artillery than by President Lincoln’s goodness.

Given one month before his death at the hands of an assassin, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address is the most theologically mature faith statement given in a political speech before or since. Consider the conclusion of what has been called Lincoln’s “Sermon on the Mount.”

Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us not judge, that we be not judged.

The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgements of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

After his murder on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, ministers across the nation made deifying comparisons between Lincoln and Christ. In the 14 decades since Lincoln’s death he has been claimed by nearly every stripe of nearly every religious body active on American soil.

But Lincoln himself affirmed that he was not a member of any “Christian church.” Though he occasionally attended services, and though he sought counseling from the pastor of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church at the death of his sons, there is no evidence of Abraham Lincoln ever making a public profession of faith.

It could be that Lincoln was not a “joiner,” and it could be that he held a faith in Christ but, like many of us today, was horrified by the fire-and-brimstone vocabulary of the fundamentalists that so misrepresent the sanctifying and redeeming God of the Bible.

Whatever his application of doctrinal faith in his personal life, it is clear that Lincoln the man held a high level of Biblical literacy and that Lincoln the President applied that literacy in the execution of his leadership of the nation. It is also clear that he eschewed the religious buzzwords of his time for the still small voice of God that spoke to his heart, and through that heart to the liberation of millions in his day and beyond.

If only each of us at the dawn of the 21st century would lay aside the cacophony of bumper-sticker theology and amplified populist proclamation to find that still small voice of God.

Soli Deo Gloria,
Bill