Sermon Library
On Two Wings: Humble Faith & Common Sense by Michael Novak
Rev. Dr. Gregg R. Anderson
July 06, 2008
Service Theme: Pentecost VIII - 2008
Pentecost VIII-2008 July 6, 2008
On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense by Michael Novak
The Torah and the Gospel
The heart of the Hebrew Bible is called the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. Essentially the word Torah means “instruction” or “law.” When we hear the word law and the Torah we think of the Ten Commandments. There are many other laws and instructions as well. The heart of the Greek Bible is called the Gospel. Gospel means good news. The Torah and the Gospel both summarize, “You shall love the Lord your God and your neighbor as yourself.” Another essential theme of the Bible is where to practice this law. For the Jews it was the promise land, the land of milk and honey, the land of Canaan and the city of Jerusalem. For Jesus it was the kingdom of God on earth. One could say that the summation of the Bible is to love God, your neighbor as yourself, and have a place to live this out. The Apostle Paul spread this news to other places from Athens to Rome.
St. Augustine
St. Augustine was born in 354 AD in the Roman providence of Numidia which is now North Africa. He became the Bishop of Hippo in 395. His primary and most classic writing is called the City of God. Augustine is often considered the most influential Christian thinker after St. Paul. His book City of God is a vast synthesis of religious and secular knowledge. It began as a reply to the charge that Christian other-worldliness was causing the decline of the Roman Empire. Augustine produced a wealth of evidence to prove that paganism bore within itself the seeds of its destruction. Then he proceeded to his larger theme, a cosmic interpretation of history in terms of the struggle between good and evil; the City of God in conflict with the Earthly city. This, the first serious attempt at a philosophy of history, was to have incalculable influence informing the Western mind on the relations of Church and State and on the Christian’s place in the temporal order. The City of God, generally speaking, is about creating the city of God. It was instrumental in the demise of Roman aristocratic authority and planting the seeds of Judeo-Christian compassion, egalitarianism and even democracy. I read this book by St. Augustine during my first year at St. Olaf College. It made an impression on me.
Moses and Augustine
Just as Moses led the Israelites back to freedom and to their home in Jerusalem and Augustine desired to create a new city of Christian freedom in Rome, so too, was the motivation of the Pilgrims and Puritans to find a new freedom, a religious freedom in the new colonies of America. This is the premise of Michael Novak’s book entitled On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding.
Michael Novak
Theologian, author, and former U.S. ambassador, Michael Novak currently holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., where he is Director of Social and Political Studies. Michael Novak received the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion in 1994, and delivered the Templeton address in Westminster Abbey. He has also received the Anthony Fisher Prize for The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism presented by Margaret Thatcher, and numerous other awards from many other books.
Two Wings
His first sentence in On Two Wings is profound and disturbing. The book opens, “In one key respect, the way the story of the United States has been told for the past one hundred years is wrong. It has cut off one of the two wings by which the American eagle flies, her compact with the God of the Jews – the God of Israel championed by the nation’s first Protestants – the God Who prefers the humble and weak things of this world, the small tribe of Israel being one of them; Who brings down the mighty and lifts up the poor; and Who has done so all through history, and will do so till the end of time. Believe that there is such a God or not – the founding generation did, and relied upon this belief. Their faith is an ‘indispensable’ part of their story.”
“By contrast, to read most philosophers and historians of the American polity today is to learn that America is an historical embodiment of secular philosophy, the Enlightenment. Virtually all schools of politics and law today diminish the power of religion in American thought – the conservative as much as the progressive school, the traditionalists as well as the civic republicans. Religion was deliberately subordinated to secular purposes.”
Novak contends that “a purely secular interpretation of the founding runs aground on massive evidence. He begins with several factual events that draw attention to the second wing by which the American eagle took flight. Again, he means by the second wing a Biblical metaphysics, such as the Jewish vision of the world outlined in the Jewish or Old Testament.”
“Practically all American Christians erected their main arguments about political life from materials in this Testament.” The early American Protestants were motivated by the Jewish pilgrimage from Slavery to the Promise land. They named their children born in this new land Abraham, Moses, Jeremiah, Amos and David. “This image of ‘God’s American Israel’ made available fresh perspectives, brought to intense focus by the Americans in a new and historically original way. It gave them a narrative of purpose and progress.”
The Kingdom of God
“For Jews and Christians history is heading somewhere new: toward the New Kingdom of God, a kingdom of justice and love and peace, a new city on a hill. Hebrew metaphysics held that everything in creation in all its workings and purposes is intelligible – suffused with reason in the eyes of a divine and loving Creator. Cherishing humble and weak things most of all, the Creator made at least two creatures to know Him, to love Him, and in total freedom to walk with Him – male and female, He made them. The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time.” Jefferson wrote, summarizing the Biblical metaphysic. “Liberty is the human condition established by the Bible, nearly every chapter of which turns upon the exercise of that freedom, as a wheel upon its axis. What will Adam, King David, Peter, Saul do next? Liberty is the axis of the universe, the ground of the possibility of love, human and divine.” Thus John Adams wrote: “Let us see delineated before us the true map of man. Let us hear the dignity of his nature, and the noble rank he holds among the works of God and that God Almighty has promulgated from heaven, liberty, peace, and good-will to man.”
Michael Novak states, “Without this metaphysical background, the founding generation of Americans would have had little heart for the War of Independence. They would have had no ground for believing that their seemingly unlawful rebellion actually fulfilled the will of God – and suited the laws of nature and nature’s God. When they signed the Declaration, they were committing treason in the King’s eyes. If their frail efforts failed, their flagrant betrayal of the solemn oaths of loyalty they had sworn to their King doomed them to a public hanging. To still their trembling, they pled their case before a greater and wholly undeceivable Judge, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of their intentions.” Benjamin Franklin penned, “rebellion to Tyrants is obedience to God.” It was the depth of this metaphysical background which gave the founders the unusual moral strength to do what they did.
Two Wings: Plain Reason and Humble Faith
“On two wings the American eagle rose into the sky: On plain reason and humble faith. And for the founding fathers of this country, faith and reason went hand in hand. Reason was faith and faith was reason.” “There is no country in the world,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, ‘in which the boldest political theories of the eighteenth-century philosophers are put so effectively into practice as in America. For the Americans the ideas of Christianity and liberty are so completely mingled that it is almost impossible to get them to conceive of the one without the other.”
“In his days as president, the largest church service in the United States took place every Sunday in the Capitol Building, and Thomas Jefferson thought it his duty to attend. One clergyman who lived close by did not hesitate even on the street to chide Mr. Jefferson about his lack of orthodoxy, as is recorded in the Reverend’s handwritten diary, now in the possession of the Library of Congress.” It reads, “President Jefferson was on his way to church on a Sunday morning with his large red prayer book under his arm when a friend querying him after their mutual good morning said which way are you walking Mr. Jefferson. To which he replied, ‘To church Sir.’ ‘You are going to church Mr. Jefferson. You do not believe a word in it.’ ‘Sir,’ said Mr. Jefferson, ‘no nation has ever yet existed or been governed without religion, nor can be. The Christian religion is the best religion that has been given to man and I as Chief Magistrate of this nation am bound to give it the sanction of my example. Good morning Sir.’” This is a note from the handwritten diary of the then Rev. Ethan Allen.
Jefferson on Jesus
Thomas Jefferson also stated, “The philosophy of Jesus is the most sublime and benevolent code of morals ever offered to man. A more beautiful or precious morsel of ethics I have never seen.” John Adams exhorted clergyman to lead the way toward freedom. “Let the pulpit resound with the doctrine and sentiments of religious liberty. Let us hear of the dignity of man’s nature, and the noble rank he holds among the works of God. Let it be known that British liberties are not the grants of princes and parliaments. To the Pulpit, the Puritan Pulpit, we owe the moral force which won our independence.” In America, religion favored the cause of liberty, and political statesmen favored religion. No other institution in America was so responsible for inspiring and motivating the American War of Independence as the Protestant churches – and the few thousand Jews and Catholics of the land along with them.” (p. 34)
Noah Webster
Noah Webster said (and do not overlook the fact that his last name is English and his first name is Jewish) “Never cease then to give to religion, to its institutions, and to its ministers, your strenuous support. Those who destroy the influence and authority of the Christian religion, sap the foundations of public order, of liberty, and of republican government.”
Michael Novak provides an abundance of direct examples and first person quotes which reaffirms the original intentions of the founding of this country. The two wings of the eagle are simply faith and reason. Novak adds, “Humble faith and common sense.” The dynamic duo of faith and reason are the essence of all realms of understanding and meaning.
Michael Novak Summarizes
Michael Novak concludes half of his book with these words. “In summary, to say nothing of otherworldly benefits, faith adds to reason seven worldly strengths: (1) a cosmic stage for the drama of liberty; (2) a watchful conscience; (3) restraint of vice and gains in social peace; (4) fixed, stable, and general ideas about the dynamics of life; (5) a check on the downward bias of the principle of equality and the materialism toward which it gravitates; (6) a new conception of morality as a personal relation with our Creator, and thus a motive for acting well even when no one is looking; and (7) through the high honor paid to the marriage bond, the quiet regulation of mores in marriage and in the home.”
“Faith not only teaches examination of all things in the light of conscience. It also
teaches love for the larger community, regard for the public good, and identification of personal good with the good of all.” In another sermon by Israel Evans of the colonies, again a name chosen with an English and Jewish influence writes, “Religious liberty is a divine right, immediately derived from the Supreme Being, without the intervention of any created authority. It is the natural privilege of worshipping God in that manner which, according to the judgment of men, is most agreeable and pleasing to the divine character. As the conscience of man is the image and representative of God in the human soul; so to him alone is it responsible.”
“In six years after the writing of the Constitution, seventeen years after the Declaration of Independence, Christian America was still exulting in the lift given by faith to this nation’s great experiment in liberty. ‘May we not consider these as the dawn of brighter days, of a brighter sun than ever blessed the world before; as a commencement of the golden age, that introduces a better system of religion that enforces moral obligations, not a religion that relaxes them; a religion of peace and charity, not of strive and party rage?” ( pg 45) This again is a quote from Tocqueville who concludes, “In America, Christians and Jews believe that God created men to be free, and that world of politics is a sphere intended by the Creator for the free play of intelligence.” This is the very establishment of the new America. They have begun and succeeded. Can they continue?”
The Star Spangled Banner and Harley Davidsons
So the question this morning from de Tocqueville, “Can they continue?” I am going to leave this question with you. Here is a thought. At the beginning of our crazy Fourth of July Parade, the announcer at the Hotel Jerome played the Star Spangled Banner sung by a wonderful singer. Everyone became quiet, stood at attention, took their hats off, placed their hand on their heart and was most respectful. It was a very special moment in the midst of a lot of people, noise and energy just before the parade begins. But this sacred moment of allegiance was interrupted before it concluded with the loud roar of a couple hundred Harley Davidsons and their riders. I wondered at the time if this could be a metaphor. I leave the thought with you. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Gregg R. Anderson
Aspen Chapel
0077 Meadowood Dr.
Aspen, CO 81611
http://www.aspenchapel.org