Chastisement for the U.S.?

By Russell Shaw
Herald Columnist
(From the issue of 3/6/03)

There was a time when Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address was one of the most admired civic utterances ever produced by an American. Is it still? Probably most people today have never read it, and those who have probably find it—correctly—in dismaying conflict with current attitudes.

The document is profoundly religious. Lincoln was no orthodox Christian, but he had read his bible and thought long and hard about deep questions from a religious point of view. In the second inaugural, delivered March 4, 1865, his musings are darkly tinged by Calvinism.

Lincoln strongly suggests that the Civil War was God's chastisement of the nation for the sin of slavery. The heart of his thinking is a rhetorically and conceptually remarkable sentence asking whether, supposing this to be the case, it would represent a departure from "those divine attributes which believers in the living God always ascribe to Him." The answer clearly implied is: no.

Today people like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell are nearly the only ones who speak about God chastising anybody for anything, and they're universally condemned when they do. The preferred image of God is a kindly grandfather who never gets mad at the kids. President Bush's religious rhetoric is in that spirit, as in his State of the Union remark that, although we don't understand the ways of Providence, we are entitled to place confidence in "the loving God behind all of life and all of history."

On the whole, I prefer Bush's view to Lincoln's because it's closer to the truth. But, to be fair about it, Lincoln's version reflects a long tradition with roots in the Old Testament and even the New—for example, St. Paul's indignant rejection of the idea that God is "unjust to inflict wrath on us" (cf. Rom 3.5-6).

This way of thinking about the problem of evil—for that is the underlying issue—must be taken seriously. As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, points out, eliminating the idea of God's judgment and punishment implies that God doesn't care about evil; but "God combats evil, and for this reason, as judge, he must also punish to do justice."

The problem of evil presents itself to religious minds at a moment like this—a moment marked by the threat of war and nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and the shuttle disaster (to say nothing of things like scandal in the Church and the no less painful private crosses borne by individuals). Why does God permit such things? Is he punishing us? Should we be resigned or rebellious?

The best answer I've encountered is Salvifici Doloris ("On the Christian Meaning of Human Suffering"), a document published by Pope John Paul II in 1984, less than three years after he was shot by an assassin. John Paul resolves the problem of evil and suffering by raising it to a higher plane, where suffering is seen to be a way of collaborating with Jesus in redemption. "Each man, in his suffering, can also become a sharer in the redemptive suffering of Christ," he says.

We believe. But believing does not exhaust the mystery of evil and suffering. Lincoln may have been wrong about the Civil War, but he also may have been on to something important. Is there really nothing for which this nation deserves chastisement —not the atomic bombing of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the excesses of Vietnam, legalized abortion, widespread toleration of a variety of depravities? Lincoln's answer deserves pondering.

Shaw is a freelance writer from Washington, D.C.

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