9/11 and god's sport

Cross Currents, Wntr, 2006 by Bill Moyers

To be in the company of so many friends, faculty, and students of Union--in the presence of so many kindred spirits--is to be reminded of the great conversation that has occurred at Union Theological Seminary for 170 years. I find it exhilarating and intimidating just to imagine the long train of witnesses who constitute this community of faith.

Just in my lifetime:

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was studying here when he decided to return to his native Germany and join the resistance against Hitler and the Nazis. The choice cost him his life, but Bonhoeffer knew the threat to the church and to civilization of "replacing simple action by ambivalent thought";

Henry Pitney Van Dusen taught here, challenging the faithful to beware of "Christian escapism" in the face of fascist aggression";

Paul Tillich taught here, reminding his students that "being religious means asking passionately the question of the meaning of our existence and being willing to receive answers, even if the answers hurt";

Reinhold Niebuhr taught here, always seeking to apply Christian morality to public issues even as he warned against the "ironic tendency of virtues to turn into vices when too complacently relied upon." It was his profound insight into human nature and the nature of politics that enabled so many of us to understand that "Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary";

John Bennett taught here--the first holder of the Niebuhr chair in social ethics that is now to be filled by Gary Dorrien. Bennett went on to become Union's president, pioneered in the ecumenical movement, and courageously spoke out against those who charged that John F. Kennedy should not be president because he was a Roman Catholic;

Larry Rasmussen taught here. I heard him give a lecture some years ago on the environment and I left charged by his conviction that a living faith and a living ecology issue from the wonder that is our universe;

James Washington taught here. And Phyllis Trible. And James Forbes. So many talented and devoted teachers and administrators have been part of this community. Beyond the more public figures are all those men and women who have carried Union's influence out across the country and down through time. This community between Broadway and the Hudson became a vital intersection of religion and public life where people of faith threw themselves into the struggle for civil rights, for an end to the Vietnam war, for sanity in the nuclear age, and for the personal dignity of every person under the Constitution, including--especially including--those different from everyone else.

Listen quietly on such an occasion as this and you can hear that chorus of voices--the legions who have passed this way--calling us back to prophetic witness.

They are saying, "Union, the spirit of truth is under assault. Stand for truth."

They are saying, "Union, democracy is in peril. Stand for democracy."

They are saying, "Union, religion has bowed again to power and privilege. Stand for justice--and the faith that liberates God from partisan agendas."

They are saying, "Union, America is not the country it can be. We're troubled by fear and governed by deceit. Remind us of America's promise--and stand for the courage to fulfill it."

At the Central Baptist Church in Marshall, Texas, where I was baptized in the faith, we believed in a free church in a free state. I still do.

My spiritual forbears did not take kindly to living under theocrats who embraced religious liberty for themselves but denied it to others. "Forced worship stinks in God's nostrils," thundered the dissenter Roger Williams as he was banished from Massachusetts for denying Puritan authority over his conscience. Baptists there were a "pitiful negligible minority" but they were agitators for freedom and therefore denounced as "incendiaries of the commonwealth" for holding to their belief in that great democracy of faith--the priesthood of all believers. For refusing to pay tribute to the state religion they were fined, flogged, and exiled. In 1651 the Baptist Obadiah Holmes was given thirty stripes with a three-corded whip after he violated the law and took forbidden communion with another Baptist in Lynn, Massachusetts. His friends offered to pay his fine for his release but he refused. They offered him strong drink to anesthetize the pain of the flogging. Again he refused. It is the love of liberty, he said, "that must free the soul."

Such revolutionary ideas made the new nation with its Constitution and Bill of Rights "a haven for the cause of conscience." No longer could magistrates order citizens to support churches they did not attend and recite creeds that they did not believe. No longer would "the loathsome combination of church and state"--as Thomas Jefferson described it--be the settled order. Unlike the Old World that had been wracked with religious wars and persecution, the government of America would take no sides in the religious free-for-all that liberty would make possible and politics would make inevitable. The First Amendment neither inculcates religion nor inoculates against it. Americans could be loyal to the Constitution without being hostile to God, or they could pay no heed to God without fear of being mugged by an official God Squad. It has been a remarkable arrangement that guaranteed "soul freedom."