When Prime Minister Baldwin confessed on 22 May 1935, that he had been ‘completely wrong’ and was ‘completely misled’ regarding future estimates of German air power, Churchill’s emotions boiled over. When his turn came to speak, Churchill pulled out all the rhetorical stops.
For the first time for centuries we are not fully equipped to repel or to retaliate for an invasion. That to an island people is astonishing. Panic indeed! The position is the other way round. We are the incredulous, indifferent children of centuries of security behind the shield of the Royal Navy, not yet able to wake up to the woefully transformed conditions of the modern world.17
Churchill knew that the way to avoid hysteria and panic was through a frank assessment of the situation, followed by the development and execution of plans to respond to the crisis.
Within five years, Churchill would be the country’s leader as Nazi warplanes – whose pace of construction Baldwin had woefully miscalculated – were setting British cities ablaze. Churchill had to employ his skills as an orator not only to tell the people the facts but also to reassure them, even as they dodged bombs, slept in underground tunnels and grieved over lost loved ones.
The hysteria had begun to build in 1939, when people living in the south of England along the Channel were told to burn their maps, secure their food supplies and take other measures to prevent invading Nazis from seizing the advantage. By the time Churchill became prime minister, in May 1940, multitudes throughout the British Isles were terribly afraid. But as he took to the airwaves in his new leadership role, Churchill’s resonant voice had a calming effect, even when he had to deliver distressing news.
Though the balance, he said, was sometimes hard to strike, ‘it is very much better sometimes to have a panic feeling beforehand, and then be quite calm when things happen, than to be extremely calm beforehand and to get into a panic when things happen.’18
We need leaders who don’t need the spotlight
Churchill’s ego was forged through his trials and challenges. His early arrogance was noteworthy. Recall the letter he wrote to his mother after the Battle of Omdurman, in which he said, ‘I do not believe the gods would create so potent a being as myself for so prosaic an ending.’19
But the furnace of adversity that Churchill entered in ensuing years seared the edge off that arrogance and produced humility. Part of his effectiveness as prime minister was that he saw himself as one of the people – no better, no worse. This galvanized his supporters and made them love him. Many assume that one must be aloof to be a leader, but Churchill believed otherwise. In the crisis of war, he realized that his reassuring presence among the anxious people of Britain was needed.
The root of Britain’s victory over Adolf Hitler may lie in the contrast between arrogance and humility. ‘Pride goes before destruction,’ says Proverbs 16.18. Pride was at the core of the Nazis’ stance: pride in Hitler as their leader, pride in their race, pride in their right to world dominance. In fact, as we have seen, Hitler’s appeal to his nation was to overcome the humiliation wrought by the Versailles Treaty. In a sense, Hitler and the Nazis were all about pride.
Churchill, on the other hand, spoke honestly of the weaknesses to overcome, the hardships to be borne and the near-impossible task of winning the war. In doing so, he and the British people who rallied behind him proved that ‘God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.’20
We need leaders who recognize the difference between authority and power and who function in that knowledge
Over the year that followed the collapse of the Munich Agreement and the onset of war, Churchill stood firmly with Neville Chamberlain. He had every opportunity to criticize Chamberlain’s leadership or to bring up the failures of the past. At any time, he could have said, ‘I told you so.’ But he didn’t. Churchill was not a man like Hitler, who sought office for his own gain. Churchill truly served those he represented. People who had waited to see the showdown between Churchill and Chamberlain after the change in leadership must have been very disappointed to witness the two working together as if nothing had gone before. The war needed to be fought and won – that was all that mattered. Magnanimity was called for, and Churchill proved by his actions that he believed it.
Churchill proved to the British people and to his parliamentary colleagues that they had misjudged him. In 1939, every slur that had been spoken against Churchill was replaced with the greatest respect. Churchill quickly rebuilt the trust he had lost when he switched political parties in 1904 and then in 1924. He re- established the confidence in him that had been shattered by the 1915 Gallipoli disaster and the economic failure of returning Britain to the gold standard in 1925. In the early days of the war, he served at the pleasure of the prime minister, focused on his job, and offered his best advice.
The secret of Churchill’s leadership was his instinctive understanding of the difference between power and authority, as we’ve already seen. Rather than use his growing influence to lead a coup, Churchill submitted to authority and was granted power. ‘At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene,’ he later wrote of his appointment as prime minister.21 True power is granted only to those under authority. Churchill kept himself under Chamberlain’s authority, and therefore he could be trusted with power.
Hitler was a mere authoritarian who, in the end, had to sequester himself in an underground lair. The only power he had left was expressed in his own suicide. Churchill, on the other hand, continues to speak with leadership-shaping authority even today.
We need leaders mature enough to have overcome past failures
There is a narrow zone in which all of us can function with remarkable excellence. It is bounded by our God-intended identity and purpose; the gifts he has given us to accomplish our high purpose; the functional talents and skills we have that lend themselves to the task; and the quality of our inner core, which is formed by the way we respond to our trials and learn from them.
Winston Churchill most definitely entered his personal ‘zone of excellence’ when the king summoned him to Buckingham Palace and asked him to form a new government and lead the nation through the war. This was when Churchill realized that his previous hardships and successes had prepared him for that moment. The purpose he had felt as a teenager at Harrow; the awakening of his gift of exhortation in his extraordinary speaking ability; the sharpening of his leadership skills; and the toughening of his character through dealing with rejection, failure and his own ‘besetting sins’ all came together in a grand confluence. He had to overcome immense challenges to his character and reputation, but even these hardships contributed to bringing him into his personal zone of excellence.
Earlier, we saw how young Winston overcame his educational limitations by taking advantage of a lull in the action to read and study after he arrived in India to join his regiment. And yet that wide array of knowledge would have proved useless without the wisdom to understand and apply the principles he had learned. Overcoming his doubts about God during his time in India brought Churchill to the ‘foundation of wisdom’, which is ‘fear [reverence and respect] of the LORD’.22
‘Wisdom shouts in the streets’, says Proverbs 1.20, and ‘cries out in the public square’. Churchill’s wisdom, gained by acquiring knowledge and learning from his own disappointments and failures, thundered in the House of Commons, the streets and the great public square.
Rarely in history have all the elements of greatness converged so quickly, and with such completeness in a crucial moment, as they did in Winston Churchill. As the book of Proverbs says:
[God] stores up sound wisdom for the upright;
He is a shield to those who walk in integrity,
Guarding the paths of justice,
And He preserves the way of His godly ones.23
As previous chapters have shown, Winston Churchill’s way was preserved so remarkably that it constitutes a miraculous protection from God himself. Churchill’s role was indeed to guard ‘the paths of
justice’. Now, more than seventy years after the end of the Second World War, we are not enjoying the fruits of that civilization simply because of luck. Rather, we enjoy them because God intervened in history through a remarkable man, Winston Churchill.
The example of Churchill and his times can give us hope in our present circumstances. If God was engaged in human history back then, we can be certain that he is guiding its course today as well.
14
Help and Hope for Our Times
On this day of Sabbath the British people mourn a great David-like figure who is buried with the pomp and reward of a great Old Testament Patriarch… . He was a new King Cyrus… . He rose like a hero, highest in those months in 1940 when the future of human decency was at stake, and when Jewry and Christianity were on the same side, which was the side incarnated by him… . [Churchill] succeeded: because of his resolution and – allow me to say this – because of God’s will, of which, like every human being, he was but an instrument. He was surely no saint, he was not a religious man, and he had many faults. Yet so it happened.
JOHN LUKACS
WE BEGAN OUR RESEARCH into the life and times of Winston Churchill with an eye towards discovering the ‘hidden something’ behind his singular role in world history. What we found, ultimately, was a testimony not as much to Churchill’s spirituality as it was to God’s sovereignty. What we’ve endeavoured to show in these pages is not that Churchill had particular beliefs about God but that God, in his wisdom, was able to use this ordinary human being for extraordinary purposes.
What eventually brought us together was our common belief that God had raised up Churchill in the crucial hour to stand in the gap and preserve the future of Christian civilization for generations to come. In that way, Churchill takes his place among the ranks of those who have emerged at key points in history to defend and preserve their civilizations.
A brief, and admittedly incomplete, survey shows that these leaders were often unlikely candidates for heroic work – Moses, stuttering his way through the deliverance of his people while trying to control his anger; Cyrus, the Persian king, freeing the Jews from exile to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple; Abraham Lincoln, scorned and oft-defeated, rising to the role of Great Emancipator; and Winston Churchill – sometimes lacking judgement and insight, seemingly capricious and waffling in his early years – ultimately becoming the resolute champion who overcame the Nazi threat to humanity.
If God has intervened through such flawed individuals throughout history, it gives us hope for our own lives and for the dreadful hour through which we are now passing.
WHAT IF?
Some have wondered what might have happened if Winston Churchill had never been born or if he hadn’t emerged on the stage of world history at the precise moment that he did.
The Churchill biographer (and current Mayor of London) Boris Johnson, for example, provides a scenario for a ‘non-Churchill universe’:
[If we] take Churchill out of the equation … we leave the fate of Britain and the world in the hands of Halifax, Chamberlain, and the representatives of the Labour and Liberal parties. Would they have treated with Hitler, as the Foreign Secretary was proposing? It seems overwhelmingly likely… .
It was Churchill – and only Churchill – who had made resistance to the Nazis his political mission… .
If you end British resistance in 1940, you create the conditions for an irredeemable disaster in Europe.1
As interesting as these speculations might be, a more intriguing question from our perspective is, Why Winston Churchill? Why did this particular man show up on history’s stage at the precise moment to become the antithesis to Adolf Hitler and save Christian civilization?
We believe that Churchill’s life is an example of how God dynamically engages with human events by intervening at critical junctures to guide the course of history towards its telos – its ultimate end, purpose or goal. We believe Churchill intuitively recognized that he had a destiny tied to a greater historical purpose and that his life at times was preserved because, as he told his bodyguard, Walter Thompson, he had ‘important work to do’.
THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY
Jesus taught that the purpose of history is the advancement and full manifestation of God’s kingdom in the world. In one of his great apocalyptic messages, Jesus told his followers that the ‘gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end [telos] will come’.2 The ultimate goal of history will have been reached.
Jesus set this prediction in its historical context, speaking of Daniel’s time, the days of Noah, seasons of upheaval in nature and a constancy of ‘wars and rumours of wars’.3 There is a pattern to the unveiling of God’s kingdom in history – advancement followed by resistance through human attempts to build rival empires. Perhaps Churchill, knowing the Bible as he did, saw Hitler’s dream of the Third Reich as one of these rival empires to Jesus’ kingdom of love, grace, goodness, peace and joy.4 He muses on similar themes in his Thoughts and Adventures:
Many centuries were to pass before the God that spake in the Burning Bush was to manifest Himself in a new revelation, which nevertheless was the oldest of all the inspirations of the Hebrew people – as the God not only of Israel, but of all mankind who wished to serve Him; a God not only of justice, but of mercy; a God not only of self-preservation and survival, but of pity, self-sacrifice, and ineffable love.5
WHERE IS GOD?
Despite Churchill’s conviction that God intervenes in history, there were many who suffered in Hitler’s concentration camps who asked a different question: Where is God? To all appearances, from inside the barbed wire, Nietzsche was right when he declared that ‘God is dead’.
One cannot respond casually to such spiritual and psychic pain. And the question persists today. Where is God?
When asked in a 1968 interview if he was saying that God had actually died, Dr Thomas Altizer, one of the leading proponents of God-is-dead theology, explained that he was not speaking of death as we understand it but of the existential sense some felt of God’s ‘absence’.6 His idea seemed to be an extreme form of deism – that God the creator, the First Cause, had withdrawn from the world to such an extent that he may as well have been dead. God was not engaged with history but had left things to humanity. Some other God-is-dead theologians saw this absence as a central element – even a necessity – of God’s love. If he created us to be free, then he must pull back so that we can be truly free.
Those who look for God’s direct intervention in human history as proof of his existence will one day have all the evidence they need – though it may not be in the way they desire. In the meantime, in his inscrutable and infinite wisdom, he has chosen to work through frail and fallible human beings to achieve his purposes. Thus, even as millions languished in the Nazi death camps, seemingly without hope, God was present and active, working through people like Churchill to bring liberation. In fact, even before Hitler and his murderous regime came to power, God was preparing those who would bring down the tyrants, restore peace and accomplish his will.
Churchill himself made note of God’s timely intervention in the affairs of history. In his essay on Moses in Thoughts and Adventures, he observes how the Egyptians ‘sought to arrest the increase of male Israelites’ in their midst. Their ‘final solution’ – to borrow a phrase from Hitler – was to slaughter the male babies. ‘There was evidently at this time a strong tension between the principle of Jewish life and the ruthless force of established Egyptian civilization,’ Churchill observed. ‘It was at this moment that Moses was born.’7
Here again we see the concept of ‘a certain day’ or a momentous time, those pivotal moments in history that occur in relation to God’s purpose and plan. Chronological time involves the ticking of the clock or the progression of the calendar. Momentous time refers to periods of special opportunity or significance. Thus, Scripture speaks of times and seasons. Within the cycles of chronologi
cal time (that is, the bounds of human history), God interacts with humanity at key moments to maintain the historical course that will ultimately arrive at the intended destination: the fully revealed kingdom of heaven. But he allows for variations in the unfolding of history for the sake of human freedom.
Still, in every chronological sequence, there is a build-up towards the momentous time identified by Jesus in Matthew 24– the culmination of chronological history and the full revelation of the kingdom of God. Everything that happens in history – whether by God’s intentional will (the blessings that come to people and nations) or by God’s permissive will (which, again, makes allowance for human freedom) – is tied to that great end, or goal, of history.
THE GREAT RIVER
Think of the movement of a great river such as the Nile, which flows more than four thousand miles from the heart of Africa to the Mediterranean. Though countercurrents, swirls and cross-currents at times move against or athwart the main current, nothing alters the central flow. Sailors can steer against the mighty current, but they are ultimately carried downriver to the sea.
With respect to human freedom, God’s permissive will allows us to steer ourselves, our nations, our institutions and our cultures against the current, but even then we are still in the all-encompassing flow of history that will take us inevitably to the great encounter with Christ at the end of time. As the Lord of history, God will not allow any occurrence along the chronological flow to sink our vessels. He always raises up a deliverer to grab hold of the tiller and get us back into the main current. Thus, the prophet Daniel was able to write:
Praise be to the name of God for ever and ever;
wisdom and power are his.
He changes times and seasons;
he deposes kings and raises up others.8
Every human deliverer who has appeared throughout history is simply a type of the Grand Deliverer who will come at the destination-point of history to establish the rule of God’s kingdom of ‘righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit’ everywhere.9
God and Churchill HB Page 23