I can’t think of the significance of July 4 without looking to Abraham Lincoln. July 4, 1863 was the day after the defeat of Robert E. Lee’s army at Gettysburg, and the day of Ulysses S. Grant’s victory at Vicksburg. The tide had turned. Lincoln was asked to make a few remarks at the dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg. His “few remarks” are now enshrined as one of the greatest speeches in history.
His words were few, 292 to be exact. The main speaker, Edward Everett, had droned on for two hours, and the prayer by Rev. T.H. Stockton was 4 times as long as Lincoln’s entire speech. But what a speech – and he very clearly had July 4 and the Declaration of Independence squarely in his sights. Garry Wills calls the Gettysburg Address a “second founding,” determined “to correct things felt to be imperfect in the founders’ own achievement.”
With elevated rhetoric, he reframed the 87 years that had passed since the Declaration as “Four score and seven.” It was not just that 87 years had passed. It was now time, a pregnant, fulfilled kind of time that had finally come. He reiterated the words that had always been there – that the Founders birthed “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Lincoln understood the way language in Scripture works: it’s there and familiar, but in a new historical season, the words flex their muscles and are discovered to mean more than had been realized.
This war had become a “test of whether such a nation can endure” – that is, if it takes seriously its own proposition of equality, not just denied to black Americans but also twisted into evil. Of course, we are haunted by our shameful history that, 100 years after Lincoln’s definitive “second founding,” announcing “a new birth of freedom,” politicians are still be bickering over Civil Rights. And even today, true equality under the law and in the hearts of our citizens is still frustratingly elusive.
What intrigues me about Lincoln is that, even though he never joined any church, and had no theological training, he was the wisest, most profound theologian of his generation. He read the Bible hungrily and constantly, and could quote entire chapters by heart. In a nation where shrill preachers hollered about which side God was on in the war, Lincoln’s address refused to cheer for the winners or blame the losers. He dared to ask, on the great stage of history, what God was up to.
Historian (and friend of our church) Vernon Burton notes Lincoln’s theological humility: “His faith precluded understanding the mind of God. Although certain God was using him to His end in working out history, Lincoln found it presumptuous to dictate what God’s intent might be.” And yet from his deep reading of Scripture, Lincoln caught glimpses of redemptive, hopeful purpose in even the darkest, most grueling suffering.
At Gettysburg, he found the way not just to grieve or celebrate the dead, but intuited that they had somehow “consecrated” and “hallowed” this ground, and that it is upon us to carry on their “unfinished work.” Mind you, not many of them had a clue about this unfinished work; most had lesser or more ignoble goals – yet Lincoln crowns them with glory anyhow. “We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.”
Then in his 2nd Inaugural (700 words – long-winded for him!), at the very moment listeners ached for him to claim a great victory, and taunt the rebel South, he perceived that the entire war and its aftermath were God’s verdict on the dark sin that had stained America and its much-prized freedom. As Edward Achorn put it, “For the first time, an American president in an inaugural address was denouncing slavery as an unmitigated evil, speculating that God himself had rendered that judgment on it by punishing all Americans through this disastrous war.” Both sides were complicit. Both sides suffered.
And in God’s dispensation, as Lincoln alone seemed to grasp, there are never “sides.” “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God; each invokes his aid against the other. The prayers of both could not be answered. The Almighty has his own purposes.” I imagine Moses, Isaiah, Matthew, and Paul nodding as they heard such biblical wisdom.
Then, with words we are desperate to hear and live into today, the words that capture the deepest and only dimly perceived dream of the Founders, Lincoln laid out how genuinely free people live: “With malice toward none; with charity for all… let us bind up the nation’s wounds.” We’re now twelve score and ten years old. It’s time.