Contents
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Preface
1. Legacy
2. Beginnings
3. Survival
4. Onslaught
5. Defeat
6. Resistance
7. A nation divided
8. Stirrings
9. Apocalypse
10. Pilgrims and ploughmen
11. Side of the angels?
12. Two tribes
13. A tongue of our own
14. Martyrs
15. Protestant wind
16. Secret lives
17. A nation chooses (1)
18. A nation chooses (2)
19. Brother against brother
20. Commonwealth
21. Cauldron
22. Restoration
23. Revolution
24. New horizons
25. Balance of power
26. Revival
27. Beacon
28. Slough of despond
29. Colossus
30. New lands
31. Jubilee
32. New power
33. Band of brothers
34. Titans
35. Aftermath
36. Furnace
37. Sisters of mercy
38. The Great Game
39. Lady of the Lamp
40. Soldiers of the Queen
41. Grand Old Man
42. Besieged
43. Hubris
44. Hard times
45. So near
46. So far
47. Lost
48. Praying for our lives
49. Seeing a way through
50. Tin legs
51. Bearing the unbearable
52. Living with evil
53. Sticking it out
54. A New Jerusalem
55. Letting go
56. Against all odds
57. Crisis
58. Down to the sea
59. Turning the tide
60. Standing firm
61. Turning aside
62. Sirens
63. Drift
64. New landscape
65. New citizens
66. New resolve
Epilogue
Appendix 1
Bibliography
Redeeming a Nation
Biblical Reflections on English History
Philip Quenby
ONWARDS AND UPWARDS PUBLISHERS
Copyright 2011 © Philip Quenby
Onwards and Upwards Publications
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ISBN: 978-1-907509-24-7
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Scripture quotations taken from the HOLY BIBLE, KING JAMES VERSION are marked KJV.
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Dedication
Thine be the glory.
Acknowledgements
We are bound so close in the bundle of life that it is difficult to thank one without expressing gratitude to all. There is nevertheless a person whom it is right to single out: my mother, who taught me to know and love the Lord, whose passion for history fired my own and whose example is ever before me. No greater gifts can a parent give their child.
Preface
“But I have raised you up for this very purpose, that I might show you my power, and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.” Exodus 9:16.
There was a time when it did not seem too fanciful to think that, if God were not exactly an Englishman, then he did at least seem particularly well-disposed to this island race. In British India, the sons and daughters of the Raj were even called “heaven’s breed.”
Gone are the days when England stood head and shoulders above the rest of the world in almost all fields of endeavour. A lead that had been substantially eroded by the start of the First World War was obliterated by the Second. Amidst the exhaustion and bankruptcy that attended the end of that subsequent conflict, the country famously lost an Empire and failed to find a role.[1] One statistic will suffice to illustrate the straitened circumstances of those times. Before the titanic struggle with Germany, some 40% of all cargoes were carried in British ships. By 1945, the great majority of those vessels had been sunk. The nation’s depleted resources were cruelly exposed by the Suez crisis.
Since then, mass immigration and social change have transformed the land. There is a sense that the nation is in danger of forgetting its history, of losing its moral and cultural bearings: hence this book. It is not exactly a history, and certainly it contains nothing that is new in terms of historical research. Its purpose is not to break new ground but rather to apply old knowledge. Each chapter is designed to be read in conjunction with the Bible passage that is highlighted at its start.
The selection of characters and events for this book is unashamedly subjective. With some exceptions, I have generally steered clear of those who tend to be thought of as being great men of faith. What I have sought to show is that God has worked in the secular history of this land just as he has guided its religious life.
One last point: England has been greatly used and blessed by God, but she has not been always and everywhere on the side of right. Where she has been the oppressor, God has raised up men and women against her – William Wallace, Robert the Bruce, Joan of Arc, Erskine Childers, Roger Casement and Mohandas Gandhi, to name just those who figure in these pages. Americans will no doubt bemoan the absence of their founding fathers and other nations their own heroes of resistance and independence, but there simply is not space to cover every injustice of fifteen-and-a-half centuries.
For all that, this is a history of which we can be proud. My prayer is that understanding what God has done for us, with us and through us in the past will spur us once again to seek the face of our Lord, that we might truly be “a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God.” (1 Peter 2:9).
London 2009.
1. Legacy
Matthew 5:1-12.
Key word: compassion.
“Compassion is a moral defect.” That is not the statement of a sadist or a psychopath or a mass murderer. It was not made by the apologists of Nazism, neither by Chairman Mao’s Red Guards, nor by the wild-eyed fanatics of any modern political or religious movement. It was instead the sober reflection of a man honoured in his age and in ours. This was the world view of Seneca, who lived from 4 BC to AD 65. He was a man of learning and sophistication – lawyer, philosopher, author and playwright, companion to the wealthy and advisor to the powerful. His tragedies such as Phaedra, Medea and Oedipus have had a lasting impact on European literature. Yet he also had the dubious distinction of being tutor to the infamous Emperor
Nero, the man who fiddled while Rome burned and had Christians thrown to the lions, whose crimes Seneca tried to check but ultimately condoned.
It is almost impossible for us now to recapture the spirit of the pre-Christian pagan world. We perhaps know something of their monuments and histories, their poetry and legends, but we cannot readily put ourselves back into their way of looking at nature and their fellow man. If we think about it at all, we tend to regard the ancients as people pretty much akin to ourselves. True enough, they did not have our technologies, but in all essentials they seem men and women just like us. Not only that, but they created empires of astonishing culture, complexity and achievement. It is precisely for this reason that we can be so profoundly shocked when we are confronted by the reality of what the world was like before the Christian era. For the Roman Empire, like those it replaced or existed alongside, was first and foremost a creation of power. As far as the Romans were concerned, might most assuredly was right. Year after bloody year, internal dissent was brutally crushed, rebellious provinces brought to heel and barbarian nations treated merely as sources of slaves and tribute.
The brutality of Rome was casual and expressed in the commonplace, but also calculated. In the hands of the state it was the studied projection of power over every man, woman and child in Republic or Empire. In 71 BC, for example, the Roman general Crassus finally crushed the slave revolt that for years had laid waste the south of Italy and struck fear into the people of Rome. The slave leader Spartacus was killed and he and his fellow slaves were crucified to show the world how this mighty nation treated those who dared defy her. Some 5,000 spread-eagled captives lined 300 miles of road leading to the outskirts of the Eternal City herself, carefully spaced out over intervals of 165 paces, a monument to the Roman genius: order alongside the most exquisite cruelty. Indeed, crucifixion was so common in this “kingdom, strong as iron” (Daniel 2:40) that the killing of an obscure carpenter from Nazareth could easily have passed without notice.[2] Rome brutalised the powerful just as she brutalised outcasts: like the poet Petronius, Seneca at length took his own life when he lost the favour of Nero. Such was the old paganism.
The Beatitudes.
On a hill in this self-same Roman Empire, Jesus taught us a new way. Even today, after two thousand years of Christianity, the Sermon on the Mount can still astound and discomfort with the radicalism of its message. At the time it was spoken, it amounted to nothing less than standing the world on its head. If you seriously believe that compassion is a moral defect, how do you begin to grapple with the idea that the merciful and the persecuted are blessed? (Matthew 5:7 and 10). If your world is built on military might, how do you respond when told to love your enemies? (Matthew 5:43-44). If you value wealth and display, how do you react to the idea that the poor are blessed (Matthew 5:3, Luke 6:20) and that giving to the needy should be done in secret? (Matthew 6:1-4).
The Beatitudes form only a small part of the Sermon on the Mount, yet so profound are they that they have inspired men to the heights of Christian endeavour. This chapter examines just three aspects of them: place, people and God’s standards. Or, to put it another way, where Jesus taught, whom he taught and what he taught.
Place.
In Matthew 5:1 we are told that when Jesus saw the crowds “he went up on a mountainside and sat down.” The location invites a parallel between these events and those of the time of Moses, who also received divine instruction when “the LORD called to him from the mountain and said, ‘This is what you are to say to the house of Jacob and what you are to tell the people of Israel” (Exodus 19:3). Moses was the great prophet and teacher of the Old Covenant and in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus expounded the central teachings of the New Covenant, proclaiming the manifesto of the Kingdom of God. In each case, the choice of a mountain symbolises a halfway place between heaven and earth, where we see the celestial interacting with the human in a particularly immediate way.
The location, therefore, leaves no doubt that the words which Jesus spoke are of the most immense significance.
People.
We know from Matthew 4:23-25 that Jesus had already been throughout Galilee teaching, preaching and healing and that “large crowds … followed him.” Yet we are told in Matthew 5:1-2 that when the Lord sat down on the hillside it was his disciples who gathered near to him “and he began to teach them.” Indeed, the word that is translated “disciples” literally means “learners.” It is significant that Jesus taught close followers, not the crowd as a whole. This pattern is repeated throughout Christ’s earthly ministry: often, though by no means always, a chosen few receive the message and are sent out to share this with others. Jesus had done the groundwork. His audience was waiting expectantly. The time had come for the disciples to learn in greater detail what they needed to know and do and say. Jesus taught and empowered these faithful ones, just as he teaches and empowers those who listen to his voice today. Hence, the Great Commission given by him to his followers is to: “go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” (Matthew 28:19-20).
The discourse that comprises the Sermon on the Mount ends with the parable of the wise and foolish builders (Matthew 7:24-27), which emphasises the importance of practising what has been preached. This should cause all those who count themselves followers of Christ to reflect on what we should be doing to share what he said. Not just to share it, but to sense the profound challenge to all our assumptions about the way in which human beings should relate to each other and to God.
God’s standards.
In the Beatitudes we see some of the things that God particularly identifies as blessed. To be blessed means more than just to be happy, because happiness is an emotion often dependent on outward circumstances. The blessings that Jesus describes mean the ultimate well-being and the distinctive spiritual joy of those who share in the salvation of the Kingdom of God. We see that there is no easy identification of divine blessing with worldly success, since the values of the Kingdom of Heaven are not those of the world: “’For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,’ declares the LORD. ‘As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.’” (Isaiah 55:8-9).
This distinction between God’s standards and those of the world appears very powerfully in the blessing that is pronounced on “the poor in spirit”. The phrase might at first sight seem perplexing, but other parts of Scripture help throw light on it. The version of the Beatitudes that is contained in Luke’s Gospel (the so-called Sermon on the Plain) says “Blessed are you who are poor” (Luke 6:20), whereas Matthew’s Gospel makes it clear that Jesus is talking about something more than material poverty by including the words “poor in spirit” (Matthew 5:3). In his letter to the early church James, the brother of Jesus, asked the rhetorical question: “Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom he promised to those who love him?” (James 2:5).
To be poor in spirit, then, means to be poor in the eyes of the world, since it involves living according to God’s values, not those of fallen humankind. Yet perhaps for precisely that reason it also denotes being rich in faith. It necessitates being humble in our relationship with God, recognising that we owe everything to him. It entails complete dependence on God and it signifies regarding everything we possess – spiritually, intellectually and materially – as God’s. It is no accident that the Beatitudes begin and end by talking about those to whom the kingdom of heaven belongs – the poor in spirit and those who are persecuted because of righteousness. Again, we need to reflect on whether we have such poverty of spirit, whether we are applying God’s standards in the way that we live our lives and whether we are standing up for what is right.
The teachings of the Beatitudes (and indeed of the Sermon on the Mount as a whole) help deepen our und
erstanding of the earlier teachings given through Moses, including the Ten Commandments. What Jesus says makes it clear that it is not enough to live within the letter of laws relating to killing, adultery, divorce, oaths or retribution: the spirit of the Beatitudes demands a root and branch approach, with no place for inner dispositions that breed violence or injustice. Such things are entirely at odds with the generosity and compassion of God, whose perfection is the model for the righteousness that Jesus demands. Later in the Sermon on the Mount he says: “Be perfect therefore, even as your heavenly father is perfect.” (Matthew 5:48 and 6:1-8. See also Matthew 5:27-28).
What Jesus was driving at in the Beatitudes is that there should be consistency between our attitudes and actions, our beliefs and behaviour. What he said was equally upsetting to the rule- and law-obsessed Jewish establishment of his day as it was to the pagan Romans. The Beatitudes reminded them, as they remind us, that applying God’s standards in our lives and in our nation is not a box-ticking or form-filling exercise. It is not about the nature of the food we eat or the kind of clothes we wear. It is not about having laws against discrimination or anti-social behaviour. It is about our innermost being. It is about the attitudes that we have towards both God and man, and the way in which we act these out in our lives. The Sermon on the Mount as a whole sets an ethical standard so high that some have dismissed it as completely unrealistic or have projected its fulfilment to the future Kingdom of God. Yet it contains the values that Christians for centuries have striven to make real in the world in which they live. Above all, it reminds us of what God’s standards look like.
Redeeming a Nation (Timeless Teaching) Page 1