I write commentaries on law and civil government because I don’t want others to be taken captive as I once was by the empty traditions and philosophies of men that govern those spheres. One tradition I find captivating was on display during Monday’s inauguration, which, on a larger scale, was like the three gubernatorial inaugurations I participated in from 1995 to 2002 as a state Senator, namely, What are Christians to make of all the God talk at such times?
President Trump’s inauguration, like the aforesaid gubernatorial inaugurations in Tennessee, began with a church service in which prayers were offered. In each instance a ceremony followed. It consisted of the executive taking the oath of office on a Bible, an inauguration speech, and a few prayers thrown in before and afterward for good measure.
The prayers at the President’s inauguration asked God to provide him wisdom, and friends who spoke at various points in the day said they hoped the same thing for him. Those for our governor did as well.
Many get excited about that, and at one point I did too. But now I struggle with the traditional references to and invocations of “God” in relation to wisdom. Let me allude to the nature of the struggle I have with “God” in the next paragraph, and then I will expound on it.
Which God?
I believe the Triune God, in his very being, is wise and His wisdom is infinite, pure, and holy. I also believe we are wholly dependent creatures— “in Him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 7:28, KJV). Therefore, I believe the Triune God is the only source of wisdom that human beings, as individuals and as a humanity, can have. More specifically, Jesus, as the Son of God, is the one who enlightens every created human being (John 1:4, 9).
Now let me expound on what I alluded to in the way I referenced God, i.e., as triune. For that purpose, I will let the Apostle Paul and his letter to the Colossians be my expositor.
Where the wisdom we pray for is to be found
Paul writes that he is being “conflicted” on behalf of the Christians in Colossae and Laodicea, and his inner conflict is over the disruption to unity and love among them arising out of their struggle over what constitutes wisdom. His heart aches for them to “attain to a full assurance regarding all the riches” that are to be had in their “acknowledgement of the mystery of God, and of the Father, and of Christ” (Colossians 2:2, KJV).
And the reason is two-fold. First, he wants them to understand that, in Christ, are “hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” that are available to them (Col 2:3, KJV). Second, this knowledge and its riches will protect them from those who would “beguile” them “with enticing words” (Col 2:4, KJV).
“Beware,” he later says, of those who would “spoil” you of those riches “through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world” that are “not after Christ,” that is, that are in accord with the knowledge of God’s mystery that we now have in Christ (Col 2:8, KJV).
Why Simply “God” Won’t Do: The Times Have Changed
I juxtapose the inaugural references to “God” and prayers made in the name of “God” to the “Triune God” and to Jesus Christ for a reason: the times have changed and Christian leaders seem to have changed with them. I will explain using the insights in The Heavenly City of the 18th Century Philosophers, written in the 1930s by Carl Becker, an influential American historian and card-carrying atheist.
In his book, Becker wrote that Enlightenment thinking from the 1600’s forward “retain[ed] God, or some plausible substitute, as a kind of dialectical guarantee that all was well in the most comfortable of common-sense worlds. But, obviously, the Creator as a mere first premise no longer needed those rich and all too human qualities of God the Father.”
By the 19th century, evangelical leaders, in the face of the new scientific method of inductive reasoning applied to nature, embraced reason and natural religion as a crutch to prop a faith that once had been implicitly held, and that soon supplanted supernatural faith.
In sum, wrote Becker in the 20th century, it “has taken eight centuries to replace the conception of existence as a divinely composed and purposeful drama by the conception of existence as a blindly running full of disintegrating energy.” The eight centuries I think he had in mind were those from the Investiture Struggle (Papal Revolution) of the 11th century to the the late 19th and early 20th.
Becker added that in his time “there are signs that the substitution is now fully accomplished.” Indeed.
The Sign of our Times: Public Prayers
I find a sign that this “replacement” has been accomplished in the public prayers for wisdom by ostensibly Christian clergy that do not invoke Jesus Christ. He still is, after all, the one “in whom all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” are hid and still the light of every man.
In these pablum prayers to a generic God, I’m reminded of what Dutch politician and historian Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer wrote in 1847 in his book, Unbelief and Revolution. He addressed himself to those who made “a general statement of ‘Christian principles’” in opposition to the spread across Europe of the revolutionary ideas of France. It is, he wrote, “vague enough to evoke no substantial opposition” and “involves little risk of being accused or suspected of narrow-mindedness so long as one abstains from specifying what he is referring to.”
Today, praying to “God” is safe. Praying to God the Father through our only mediator, Jesus Christ, is not.
I wonder how Jesus, the great high priest and king over all, will respond to prayers to “God” that by-pass the mediatory offices given Him by the Father for His glory?
I suspect there is not much wisdom in those prayers.
