Providence, Divine Law, and the Transfer of Power

on January 22, 2009

James Tonkowich
January 22, 2009

 

The following originally appeared in a recent IRD Weekly e-newsletter.  If you would like to receive our weekly e-newsletter, click here and select “IRD Weekly.”

 

It is a beautiful thing. Once again the presidency—the center of power not only for the nation, but for most of the free world—has been transferred from one man to another and from one party to another peacefully.

We take this for granted. Having experimented with secession over the election of a president back in the 1860s, we found it to be a very, very costly failure. And so on Tuesday we watched once again a triumph of the rule of law.

In spite of endless talk about the need to separate church and state, it is precisely because Americans are incapable of such a separation that we can take that rule of law for granted.

Chuck Colson, commenting on the inauguration, writes, “The ceremony is a perfect example of why the separation of church and state is an elite fiction that bears little resemblance to how democracy really works.”

He goes on:

Americans are a religious people. And it’s only fitting that this quality be reflected in the ceremony that marks the orderly transfer of political power. Our prayers and oaths are an acknowledgment that, however imperfect, we are a “nation under God”—that we’re under His judgment and protection. They’re an attempt to connect the profane work of governance to a sacred, transcendent order.

This was evident in the prayers offered. First and foremost, it is significant that there were prayers—numerous and various. While the hard left railed against the selection of Rick Warren who supported California’s Proposition 8, no one seriously suggested that prayer be expunged from the government-sponsored inaugural program.

Second, despite vast theological differences those who prayed reflected a belief in the providence of God and in God’s transcendent moral law. These beliefs are as consistently American as the orderly transfer of presidential power.

Regarding the providence of God, Episcopalian Gene Robinson prayed for the president, “…we implore you, O good and great God, to keep him safe. Hold him in the palm of your hand….” Southern Baptist Rick Warren began his prayer, “Almighty God, our father, everything we see and everything we can’t see exists because of you alone. It all comes from you, it all belongs to you. It all exists for your glory.” And United Methodist Joseph Lowery affirmed, “…we know you got the whole world in your hands.”

Regarding the moral law, Robinson, Warren, and Lowery would, no doubt, disagree on what the moral law is and how it applies. At the same time, the three affirmed a transcendent moral law, that individuals and governments are subject to that law, and that God is the lawgiver and judge from whom we must seek forgiveness.

Robinson asked that the nation be blessed with compassion and generosity, “remembering that every religion’s God judges us by the way we care for the most vulnerable in the human community….” Warren prayed:

When we focus on ourselves, when we fight each other, when we forget you, forgive us. When we presume that our greatness and our prosperity is ours alone, forgive us. When we fail to treat our fellow human beings and all the Earth with the respect that they deserve, forgive us.

Lowery said:

And while we have sown the seeds of greed — the wind of greed and corruption, and even as we reap the whirlwind of social and economic disruption, we seek forgiveness and we come in a spirit of unity and solidarity to commit our support to our president by our willingness to make sacrifices, to respect your creation, to turn to each other and not on each other.

Their words echo George Washington’s Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1789:

And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations, and beseech Him to pardon our national and other transgressions; to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually; to render our National Government a blessing to all the people by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed.

Some will quickly object that “the devil is in the details.” Of course. Politics is the ongoing battle where those details are hammered out. Yet as Chuck Colson notes:

Our leaders, whether they share our beliefs or not, still benefit from these quasi-religious rituals. The government of the United States seeks a kind of moral legitimacy, even as it upholds the so-called separation of church and state. Invoking God’s blessing and placing itself under His judgment, if only for a day, furthers that purpose.

One of the fruits of such “quasi-religious rituals” is the blessing of the rule of law operating in a very imperfect, but peaceful Washington, DC.

 

 

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