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The blood, toil and sacrifice of radical Christians |
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Policy on use of information on League website Newspaper column for the Good News Connection July 2004 edition by Michael S. Heath, Executive Director of the Christian Civic League of Maine.
The month of Independence.
July brings with it a grass prickled evening staring skyward at
brilliant bursts of explosive powder in the night sky. This ritual,
reminder of a day over two centuries old, is made possible by the
mingling of church and state. That's right, you heard me correctly.
July fourth may not have happened were it not for the explosive pulpits
of early America. Founding generation Americans declared their
Independence on a hot day in July. They won their Independence with
blood, toil and sacrifice in the years that followed.
The man who led them on the
battlefield was George Washington. The tall prayerful Virginian said,
'"There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue
it steadily." The freedom of individual Americans was a high priority
for Washington. His mature view of political and martial power guided
America through her tumultuous early decades. He could have been
President until he died. Americans in his day expected it. He,
however, knew better. He knew that the durability of individual freedom
in the American republic would be directly related to the humility of
her leadership -- the capacity of the government to change hands as a
result of the desires and convictions of her people. Or, in his case,
the willingness of a powerful person to surrender that power for the
good of a maturing nation.
Washington said that the
steady pursuit of truth is the only straight course. Jesus said that he
is the way, the TRUTH and the life. While the founding generation was
careful not to make Christianity the state religion for fear of
establishing a theocracy -- or even worse, a situation like the one many
of them fled in Europe -- they did feel that Christianity was
indispensable to the formation of character in individual Americans.
That is why many of them supported taxpayer funding of Bible printing
and distribution, and they attended Christian church services on Sunday
in state and national capitols.
The America of 2004 is far
removed from that fateful day in 1776. As nations go two hundred years
is the blink of an eye. As ideas go those two hundred years, in
geological terms, have witnessed the shifting of tectonic plates. We
have "matured" from a time when the local clergyman was the most honored
leader in the village to a time when people wonder whether it is
possible for a preacher to remain sexually pure. Some people are
redefining the nature of sexual relationships, even within the Christian
church, to the point where I think even pagan mother nature must blush
in wonder.
Times have changed
for Americans. Francis Schaeffer said, "The
Christian is the real radical of our generation, for he stands against
the monolithic, modern concept of truth as relative. But too often,
instead of being the radical, standing against the shifting sands of
relativism, he subsides into merely maintaining the status quo.
If it is true that evil is evil, that God hates it to the point of the
cross, and that there is a moral law fixed in what God is in Himself,
then Christians should be the first into the field against what is wrong
-- including man's inhumanity to man."
Where the radical Christian of George
Washington's day stood in battle to preserve liberty and create a
nation, the radical Christian of our day fights to preserve the idea
that truth exists, and that it is knowable. Founding generation
Americans agreed that their unalienable rights came from the creator.
And that creator, unnamed in the Declaration of Independence, was the
God of the Bible. He was Jesus. That is the truth. It was the truth
for them. It is the truth still.
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