Column on Lincoln religion, fatalism

 When I was a boy, we noted Lincoln’s birthday on the 12^th. We still use the words of the great man to try to buttress our beliefs. Lincoln would be amused at his being proclaimed as an orthodox religious believer. We seem determined to recruit a great person in the service of our beliefs.

Abraham Lincoln never formally joined a church. He did attend Presbyterian churches both in Springfield and in Washington, DC. He was accused of being anti-religious publically in the 1840s. In response, he wrote a carefully parsed notice. While admitting he did not join a church, he stood against holding religion in contempt. At the same time, he could not grasp how religious adherents could have the temerity to be certain of a belief that could not be proven. In other words, Lincoln was humble about the limitations of human power. He was even more humble in our capacity to try to grasp the workings of what he sometimes termed as providence.

While most Americans unthinkingly genuflect at the altar of the doctrine of free will. Lincoln seemed to have substituted the notion of a personal god for an impersonal force, along the lines of a determinism or fatalism. For instance, he thought that prayer was unavailing as nothing could change God’s working in divine necessity for events. The world is far too complex and inter-connected to assume that we are utterly free to make decision as if many forces do not impinge on our decisions. He was unwilling to speak of some sort of pure moral sensibility, as reflecting his Calvinist-Baptist upbringing in Indiana; our decisions are always involved in our own self-interest and prejudices.

When Lincoln quoted Scripture in the great second inaugural address, he echoed words spoken at the funeral of his son Willie by the Rev. Dr. Gurley of New York Ave. Presbyterian church. There the pastor spoke of terrible tragedy as within the hand of a god whose purposes we cannot fathom. “His kingdom ruleth over all. All those events which in anywise affect our condition and happiness are in his hands, and at his disposal. Disease and death are his messengers; they go forth at his bidding, and their fearful work is limited or .extended, according to the good pleasure of His will.” At Lincoln’s funeral again notice the language “ it is our Father in heaven… who permits us to be so suddenly and sorely smitten; and we know that His judgments are right, and that in faithfulness He has afflicted us. In the midst of our rejoicings we needed this stroke, this dealing, this discipline; and therefore He has sent it... Through and beyond all second causes let us look, and see the sovereign permissive agency of the great First Cause. It is His prerogative to bring light out of darkness and good out of evil. …in the light of a clearer day we may yet see that the wrath which planned and perpetuated the death of the President, was overruled by Him whose judgements are unsearchable, and His ways are past finding out.”

Still, Lincoln also saw us as instruments of some sort of divine purpose, and in that role, we apparently have some real power, albeit limited. Having lost two sons and seeing the deaths of thousands upon thousands of people, he seems to have relied on God, as he grasped God, to help assuage the relentless pressures on his heart and mind, his conscience. In some ways, Lincoln could be the patron saint of the spiritual but not religious set, but he clearly struggled long and hard over fundamental issues of ethics, even as he disdained inquiry about matters catechetical. With the theologian Paul Tillich, he exemplified the interplay of faith and probing its depth and edges.  Many of us prefer to be more measured and sedate in our approach to the gospel. Yet here is a hymn that calls forth a response of praise over and over again—twelve times in fact, even if you only sing it through once!

This outburst of praise is consistent with what the writer of Psalm 147 observed. Implied in the swirl of praise is the realization that God has created us and all that exists.