The Battle Hymn of the Republic went from being a South Carolina camp meeting tune, to a memorial ditty for a Yankee Abolitionist (John Brown), to a national battle song of Calvinist theology, written by a Unitarian, for a nation that was about 82% Transcendentalist in its beliefs. The North’s Hymn started in the South. The South’s theme song, “Dixie,” which was one of Abraham Lincoln’s favorite tunes of the War, was written by a Northern minstrel, Daniel Decatur Emmett, on a rainy Sunday in September, 1859. The two sides were intricately intertwined in the roles they played as God’s orchestrated, as well as orchestrating, instruments. If God did, in fact, give the words to Mrs. Howe as she states in her autobiography, the Hymn might be seen as the preliminary message to explain why He caused the War.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He has loosed the faithful lightning of His terrible, swift sword;
His truth is marching on.
This is not a pretty picture. It ultimately talks of Judgment Day when Christ comes to end history. The Civil War with its 600,000 dead, thousands more wounded, and millions of dollars of damage done is just a drop in the bucket of the ultimate destruction of the universe described in the Book of Revelation to which Julia Ward Howe referred in the larger context of this first verse. It is the imagery of blood flowing as deep as a horse’s bridle. It is the picture of a vengeful, all-powerful, holy God who will take no prisoners because of the magnitude of human sin He has endured for millennia. One question can be raised here. If man is inherently good and ultimately perfectible as Unitarian doctrine of her day stated, why would Mrs. Howe write that grapes of wrath and a terrible swift sword need to be part of the process? Simply improving and expanding educational methods should do the trick, as the Transcendentalists and Unitarians believed.
I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps;
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps.
His day is marching on.
This altar and fire imagery presents a God of Battles, an oft-used phrase during the War, in which several thousand stacked rifles with bayonets thrust toward the sky seemingly pay homage to the One who is going to use them as His instruments to execute His righteous sentence. That sentence can only imply personal and/or national guilt of some sort, another Calvinistic principle Mrs. Howe rejected. The inevitability of His day marching to completion without chance of turning is predestination in its shortest expression, an idea that the Rev. William Ellery Channing would consider nonsense.
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat,
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment seat;
O be swift, my soul, to answer Him! Be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.
Now she hears the bugle call for God’s attack against humanity that will only go in one direction, with no chance of retreat from His declared purposes, Judgment Day with Heaven or Hell as the options. In response to this unmistakable proclamation she calls for a conversion experience in answer to the trumpet call sent forth, something she herself apparently never experienced up to the time she wrote her autobiography.
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me;
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.
Seventy-five percent of this song talks of God’s wrath, judgment, and sentence. The final quarter brings hope that the inherent nature of Christ, not His teachings which are to be guides to a holy life, completely transfigures human beings. The glory in His bosom, the heart of the matter, does not
soften the human heart. God says, “I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will keep My judgments and do them.”(Ezekiel 36:26, 27) The verbs all express inevitability to God’s will that does not rely on human will to accomplish His ends. The method He chose to use was Jesus Christ’s death as an atonement for sin, contrary to Dr. Channing’s view. It is our duty in our current day, a cherished word to many during the War, to die to set men free in a way that transcends the bonds of slavery of the soul, not just of the body.
sources:
Deen, Edith. Great Women of the Christian Faith. Barbour and Co., Inc. Westwood, New Jersey, 1959
Howe, Julia Ward. Reminiscences, 1819-1899. Negro Universities Press, New York, 1899.
Browne, C. A., Revised by Willard A. Heaps. The Story of Our National Ballads. Thomas Y. Crowell Co., New York, 1960.
I'm here to eliminate all the guilt you've built up over the years, maybe decades, about making New Year's Resolutions you haven't kept. Here's the Ultimate NYR you CAN keep. Repeat after me and have a great 2008:
Hey, my buddy, Jack said I could use this great pic of sunrise on my campus, so here it is. Now...
OK, it's the day after Christmas and y'all might have some time to watch a movie or two. Well, I want to clue you in to a secret about some of the movies you might watch. 'Guy Flicks' are usually a lot of action, shooting, sword fighting, blood and guts...Right?!! 'Chick Flicks' are kissy-face, huggy-bear relational, guy gets girl kinda thing, according to sterotyping. Some of my favorite CFs are 'Steel Magnolias', 'Funny Girl', 'Funny Lady', 'Pride and Prejudice' with Greer Garson, 'Tea With Mussolini', & 'The English Patient' (found this one on Oprah's list). Now, let me clue you in to some supposed Guy Flicks:
If someone tells you he/she 'loves you from the bottom of his/her heart', in light of Jeremiah 17:9 which says, "The heart is deceitful above all else and desperately wicked," should you expect there to be some problems between you?
This is the time of year when angels get a little more press than usual, so I want to be a bit of an advocate for the holy ones at least. The fallen ones get too much press as it is, so they can go pound sand as far as I'm concerned.
I think someone should tell the hot air merchants persuading us we're dooming ourselves through Global Warming that they could reduce the CO2 levels of the world if they'd just SHUT UP!!
This morning there was one bright star in the southern sky that made me think of the famous star appearance over Bethlehem. Where did the magi get the information to follow the star to Jesus' birthplace? Daniel, Hananiah, Azariah, and Mishael (I've thought it ironic that the guys 'on fire for the Lord' had Jewish names that made H.A.M. as a mnemonic device to remember them) got deported to Babylon centuries before, took their Messiah Knowledge with them, and planted the literary and scientific seeds that bore fruit at just the right time in astronomical/astrological history!
There are morning people and night people. You know...the first wake up at the crack of dawn, the latter at the crack of noon or one. Well, there are Morning Christians and Night (mourning?) Christians. The first awakes at 4:51am like I did today and say, "Good morning, Lord." The latter drag themselves out of bed and say, "Good Lord, morning!" (That assumes they beat the noon wake up call, of course.)
The venue for these thoughts had to be changed for reasons beyond my control. Some objected, some looked forward to them. Well, for you guys who wanted to see what came next, here's a recap of what's come before:
