“Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they
will be called children of God.”
Matthew 5:9
“War is essentially
the denial of everything Christ stood for.”
Harry Emerson Fosdick
One of our summer traditions is going to the Patten Library
book sale. The books sale is part of “Bath Heritage Days,” a festive occasion
of craft fares, displays and sales. A few years ago I found a wonderful little
book of sermons by Harry Emerson Fosdick called, “A Great Time to Be Alive.”
Fosdick looks better and better to me as the years go by.
When I was in seminary, I thought he was a theological and intellectual
lightweight. In my estimation, opposing Fundamentalism was obvious. And didn’t
he spend his whole career at Riverside
Church
Fosdick’s liberal theology, which seemed so pale and
lifeless when I was in seminary, now looks both profound and prophetic.
Truthfully, I held those negative opinions based almost entirely on what other
people had said or written. My opinion changed as I began to read Fosdick for
myself.
Still, I was put off by the title of the book. I assumed
that “A Great Time to Be Alive” would be a sugary recitation of happy insights
from the 1950’s. Optimism pretending to be faith. A mid-twentieth century
version of Joel Osteen. I bought it because I have a small collection of
Fosdick books, but I did not expect much.
I was surprised to find a prophetic and remarkably hopeful collection
of sermons written and preached during the Second World War. Fosdick’s hope
takes account of the stark reality of war, but also looks ahead to the
possibilities beyond the war.
The book was published in the summer of 1944, shortly after
the Normandy invasion, when the outcome of the war was not yet certain. He
believed it was “A Great Time to Be Alive” because so much was at stake for the
future of humanity and every decision mattered existentially and spiritually.
Fosdick had the courage, in that perilous time, to declare
that war is always at odds with Christian teaching. It may be necessary, but it
is never good.
“Whether one thinks of what our enemies have done to us—of Warsaw, Lidice, Rotterdam, Coventry—or what we have done to them—‘We literally drop liquid fire on these cities,’ says one expert in air warfare, ‘and literally roast the populations to death.’”
He assumes that we will win the war. Hitler will be defeated
and Imperial Japan will be
vanquished, but the real challenge will be to win the peace,
to create a world which is worthy of the human lives lost in war. “Many
Americans,” he writes, “would love to save the world if only they could save it
without changing their isolationism, without changing their ideas of absolute
national sovereignty, without changing their racial prejudices and their
economic ideas to fit the new interdependent world.” Sadly, those words are
still relevant. We still want to save the world without giving up anything.
In many ways, we did “win the peace.” The Marshall Plan was
an incredible effort to rebuild the nations we had defeated, and it led to
decades of post-war prosperity. Although we still have a long way to go, we
have made great strides in race relations. And the United Nations, for all its
shortcomings, is still at the center of maintaining peace in the world. In
other ways, we are still struggling to recognize the ties that bind us together
and embrace the interdependence of God’s world.
Today, on the anniversary of dropping the first atomic bomb
on Hiroshima, as we contemplate a chaotic foreign policy and as American
Christianity seems to be in increasing danger of losing its soul, Fosdick’s vision
is particularly relevant.
In 2009 the Boston Globe described the Hiroshima bombing
this way:
Targeted for military reasons and for its terrain (flat for easier assessment of the aftermath), Hiroshima was home to approximately 250,000 people at the time of the bombing. The U.S. B-29 Superfortress bomber "Enola Gay" took off from Tinian Island very early on the morning of August 6th, carrying a single 4,000 kg (8,900 lb) uranium bomb codenamed "Little Boy". At 8:15 am, Little Boy was dropped from 9,400 m (31,000 ft) above the city, freefalling for 57 seconds while a complicated series of fuse triggers looked for a target height of 600 m (2,000 ft) above the ground. At the moment of detonation, a small explosive initiated a super-critical mass in 64 kg (141 lbs) of uranium. Of that 64 kg, only .7 kg (1.5 lbs) underwent fission, and of that mass, only 600 milligrams was converted into energy - an explosive energy that seared everything within a few miles, flattened the city below with a massive shockwave, set off a raging firestorm and bathed every living thing in deadly radiation. Nearly 70,000 people are believed to have been killed immediately, with possibly another 70,000 survivors dying of injuries and radiation exposure by 1950. Today, Hiroshima houses a Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum near ground zero, promoting a hope to end the existence of all nuclear weapons.
It is sobering to remember that the United States remains
the first and only country ever to have used an atomic bomb.
Thank you for reading. Your thoughts and comments are always welcome. Please feel free to share on social media as you wish.
*I have published a variation of this post on each August 6 for several years.
