Interpreting Lincoln's Second Inaugural Sermon, Part 4

[We're continuing to analyze Lincoln's second Inaugural Address from a theological perspective. For the complete text of the speech, see here. The text of the address is in bold, followed by my comments.]

Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes.

1. Here, we come to the nub of things for Lincoln. It's a mystery to him how people who claimed to follow the Prince of Peace, Jesus, the Savior, witnessed to in the Bible, could have fallen into a war. Yet they did.

2. Mysterious to Lincoln, too, is how the South "should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces." As James Tackach points out, Lincoln's phrasing is rooted in God's words to Adam after he and his wife, Eve, had fallen into sin:

"By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return." [Genesis 3:19, New Revised Standard Version]

It was never God's plan for human work to be onerous or burdensome. In fact, in work, God invites us to be co-creators with Him, participating in the "Very good!" which He once pronounced over all that He had made. But once sin entered the human picture, work, along with all human activity, was burdened by our alienation from God. What once brought only joy, could now be marred by futility, drudgery, and injustice.

Here, Lincoln seems to be saying, the white slave-owners had arrogated to themselves the God-like right to force other human beings into their service. (Of course, anyone familiar with the God of the Bible knows that He isn't in the practice of forcing anybody to do anything, though He can be fiercely persuasive.) Lincoln seems to be saying that the slave-owners had committed the most basic sin, the one which is present in all our sinning: Pretending, like Adam and Eve had done, to "be like God."

3. Yet, Lincoln immediately takes the sting out of this indictment by quoting Jesus: "but let us judge not that we be not judged." Jesus says words like this in two different places: Matthew 7:1-3 and Luke 6:36-38.

In the Matthew text, we read:

“Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?"

It comes as part of that extended time of teaching, the Sermon on the Mount, that begins with the Beatitudes in Matthew, chapter 5. Here, Jesus warns Christians not to be so quick to see the fault in others while simultaneously avoiding acknowledgement of our own sins.

That Lincoln would, at that moment, have chosen to express forbearance and forgiveness toward his Southern enemies is amazing. But it clearly demonstrates that he sees both the North and himself as bearing responsibility for the Civil War. It also bespeaks his desire for national reconciliation.

If Lincoln was citing Jesus' words in the Luke passage, the implications could be slightly different:

"Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

“Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.”

Here, Jesus' emphasis is on the abundant blessings of God's grace and forgiveness that accrue to those who forego judgment and who embrace mercy.

In either case, irrespective of nuances, Lincoln's citation of the quote seems to make the same central point: As a repentant sinner guilty of the same sins, Lincoln refused to pass judgment on the sins of the South. Lincoln's humility is extraordinary and stands in marked contrast to that of his successor, Andrew Johnson, who wrecked any chance of having a Reconstruction program along the lines apparently envisioned by Lincoln because of his self-righteousness.

4. Lincoln concludes that the diametrically opposed prayer requests of North and South had not been answered. God, he says, has his own plans.

The most difficult petition of the Lord's Prayer which Jesus taught may be this one: Your will be done. Lincoln's words, "The Almighty has his own purposes" constitute a confession that God is God and that we mortals aren't. They're also a submission to the will of God. He goes on now to strive to understand God's will for the war's continuation.

5. One of the perennial mysteries for persons of faith is why God the Bible reveals to be both loving and all-powerful allows suffering, such as that experienced on a mass scale during the Civil War. Sometimes, the Bible asserts, evil befalls humanity as part of God's plan for us.

The last fourteen chapters of the Old Testament book of Genesis tells the saga of Joseph, the great-grandson of the patriarch Abraham. Sold into slavery by his brothers, Joseph's experiences an extended period of pain and suffering. Yet, after his life had followed plot twists and turns that would make Dickens proud, Joseph ended up functioning as prime minister of Egypt, with the power to get revenge on his brothers. Yet Joseph saw the blessing in the pain. His ascendancy to power enabled him to save the lives of many, including his own family. He was certain that this was what God had wanted to happen and that his agony along the way had been necessary to ensure that outcome. With magnanimity, Joseph tells his brothers, fearful of his vengeance, "Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today." (Genesis 50:20)

Sometimes, God allows suffering as a means of chastening us. In Second Corinthians 12, the apostle Paul talks about how God allowed him to suffer from some malady he refers to only as a "thorn in the flesh." God, in fact, had refused Paul's prayer requests for relief or healing three different times. Why? Paul says that it was to keep him from becoming too elated with spiritual ecstasies he'd experienced, to keep him relying not on himself, but on God. "So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong." (Second Corinthians 12:10)

Of course, both Paul and Joseph were believers who sought to follow God, yet suffered. But what happens when a nation deliberately, unrepentantly sins, as the United States did in preserving and perpetuating slavery? Lincoln concluded that the terrible war that had consumed the United States for the preceding four years was something God had allowed as part of the process of disgorging the evil of slavery from America's national life.

"Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!"

1. Here, Lincoln quotes Jesus directly. The words come from an incident recounted in Matthew 18:1-5 in which Jesus upbraids His disciples for trying to send little children away from Him. Jesus goes on to warn His disciples aginst being the agents by which others fall into sin.

Here, I think Tackach wildly misunderstands Lincoln. He writes:

Lincoln, patronizingly, had viewed the slaves as a meek, almost childlike people; to the slaves, Lincoln was Father Abraham. By offending enslaved people, the nation had failed to heed Christ's warning about offending "these little ones," and now the nation must pay for that offense.

But Lincoln makes no mention of "little ones." For Tackach's argument to make sense, the white population of the United States would have to be accused by Lincoln of causing the slaves to sin. He doesn't even imply this. Lincoln's interest in the passage is solely based on the culpability of those who sin, as he indicts the North, the South, and him for doing by maintaining or being complicit with slavery.

If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him?

1. In his maturity, the thing that once chased Lincoln away from faith in a personal, loving God is now the thing he accepts, intellectual difficulties nothwithstanding. As a younger man, the tragedy of his life caused him to doubt or disbelieve in the immanence of God, that is, the presence of God even in the midst of tragedy and the ambiguities of a sin-drenched world.

Lincoln could now contemplate the possibility that a God of love might countenance and even direct the coming of a great evil like the Civil War as the appropriate and cleansing outcome of a nation's sin. Lincoln might have pointed to the words of the prophet Daniel to buttress his view:

"Praise be to the name of God for ever and ever;
wisdom and power are his.

He changes times and seasons;
he sets up kings and deposes them.
He gives wisdom to the wise
and knowledge to the discerning.

He reveals deep and hidden things;
he knows what lies in darkness,
and light dwells with him. (Daniel 2:20-22, The New International Version)

God, in this view, is involved in human history and while He allows human beings to make evil choices, He will not allow evil to go on unchallenged. The problem, according to the Biblical view, is that we human beings confuse God's patience when we perpetrate evil as permission or license or as evidence of God's absence. In fact, God's patience is our opportunity for repentance. It was an opportunity repeatedly ignored in the past. Now, Lincoln concluded, the US was experiencing the terrible reckoning.

2. What are the attributes of God? As one of my seminary professors, Ron Hals, points out in his fabulous little book, Grace and Faith in the Old Testament, the primary attribute of God, according to both the Old and New Testaments, is God's grace. Grace describes God's acceptance of the repentant in spite of their sins or lack of merit. It was grace that caused God to make the doubting, powerless Hebrews His own chosen people and it was grace that caused God the Son, Jesus Christ, to come into our world offering new life to human beings who, because of their common condition of sin, were alienated from God.

But grace can be misunderstood. More on that in a later installment.