new church life: march/april 2015
It is right that we should not hide our lamp under a bushel of protective
self-interest, but at the same time we must be careful to keep the lamp’s fire
fueled with oil, with love of the Lord’s truth, and protect its flame from being
extinguished by cold gusts of falsity blowing in from the world around us.
Just because the middle ages erred in one direction does not mean that no
error in the opposite direction is possible. Just because the Church was once
too turned inward doesn’t mean it can never become too turned outward.
(WEO)
lincoln’s renewal plan
In his great work of saving the American union, Abraham Lincoln was guided
by the principles set forth in the nation’s founding documents: the Declaration
of Independence and the Constitution. He wasn’t trying to reinvent America
along new lines, but to call it back to the vision of liberty that gave birth to
the new nation in the first place. In his new biography of Lincoln, historian
Richard Brookhiser writes:
Lincoln’s most important allies in these efforts were the founding fathers. They were
dead. “They were a forest of giant oaks,” Lincoln told the young men of Springfield,
“but all the restless hurricane has swept over them.” But Lincoln called them back
to life for his purposes. Their principles, he maintained, were his; his solutions were
theirs. He summoned the past to save the present.
(To make the founding fathers effectual allies, he first had to edit them a bit – to
use the past, he had to save it from aspects of itself).
Lincoln turned the founding fathers into his fathers – and the fathers of a
revitalized American liberty to come. For Lincoln, the road to the future always
began in the past.... (Founders’ Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln, p. 6)
“He summoned the past to save the present.” Here, I believe, is the formula
we need to restore unity and revitalize the General Church. We, too, must
“summon the past to save the present.” In other words, rediscover the “first
principles” upon which the General Church was founded and renew our
commitment to them.
These truths were derived from the Word and there is tremendous power
in them. Like the truths that inspired the nation’s founding fathers, they were
“self-evident” to the founders of the Academy, from which the General Church
evolved. But now we need a rebirth of them in the Church.
Resurrecting and reapplying past principles does not imply a return to
every aspect of the Church’s attitudes and policies of the past. As Brookhiser
observes, Lincoln “edited” the founding fathers a bit to “save the past from
aspects of itself.”
But the shared reverence for, and confidence in, the Heavenly Doctrine,
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