Election: Biblical, Political, Critical! Robert P. Tucker, Ph.D. [ Minister Emeritus of The

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1 Election: Biblical, Political, Critical! By Robert P. Tucker, Ph.D. [Minister Emeritus of The Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Lakeland, Florida] The Unitarian Universalist Church of St. Petersburg, Florida November 4, 2012 Copyright 2012 Robert P. Tucker Long before I was old enough to vote, I already knew what the word election meant; and I ll bet you did too, if you were raised in a Jewish or Christian home and regularly attended either a synagogue or a church. For those of us whose lives have been shaped and nurtured by the Judeo-Christian tradition, the earliest knowledge we have of election is almost certainly biblical in nature. [1] Sabbath after Sabbath and Sunday after Sunday, it was repeatedly drilled into us that some people are the elect of God. In the sacred scriptures of Judaism the classic formulation of the Jewish doctrine of election is found Deuteronomy, chapter 7, beginning at verse 6. There the prophet Moses (whose very existence is, today, questioned by some scholars) is portrayed as saying this to the Hebrew people: For you are a holy people to Yahweh your God; Yahweh your God has chosen you to be a people for his own possession, out of all the peoples that are on the face of the earth. It was not because you were more in number than any other people that Yahweh set his love upon you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples; but it is because Yahweh loves you, and is keeping the oath which he swore to your fathers, that Yahweh has brought you out with a mighty hand, and redeemed you from the house of bondage, from the hand of pharaoh, king of Egypt. Know therefore that Yahweh your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations, and requites to their face those who hate him, by destroying them... You shall therefore be careful to do the commandments, and the statutes, and the ordinances, which I command you this day. [7:6-11, RSV, slightly paraphrased to use the divine name, Yahweh, in place of its euphemism, LORD. On this, see any RSV Preface.] Yahweh s election of the Hebrews to be his Chosen People did not originate with Moses, of course. According to the Bible it can be traced back at least to time of the great patriarch, Abraham. In the book of Genesis Yahweh tells Abraham: I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a great blessing. I will bless those that bless you; and him who curses you, I will curse; and by you, all the families of the earth shall bless themselves. [RSV, 12:2f. par d.] I will establish my covenant between me and you and your descendants after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant... I will give to you, and to your descendants after you, the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession; and I will be their God. [Gen. 17:7f, RSV.]

2 2 Well, things didn t quite work out that way. Down the road, the Hebrews lost control of their northern kingdom of Israel, and then also of their southern kingdom of Judah. Not Yahweh, but Cyrus, the king of Persia, a faithful follower of the pagan god Marduk eventually freed the Hebrews from their infamous Babylonian Captivity. When some of them returned to Judah, they were no longer called Hebrews, but, as residents of that territory, they came to be known as Jews. After only a few more generations, these Jews would also lost control of their land, this time to the Romans. The everlasting covenant established by Yahweh with his chosen people would not take effect again until the United Nations re-established it by creating the secular state of Israel on May 14 th, [2] The Hebrew/Jewish doctrine of election underwent various changes during the biblical period. Some like Ezra and Nehemiah tried to strengthen and narrowly enforce it in ethnocentrically rigid ways. Others like Isaiah [19:19-25] tried to expand its boundaries to include other nations [Egypt, Assyria]. Yet a third development occurred among several of the post-exilic prophets [e.g., III Isaiah (Is ), see especially Is. 65]. Not satisfied with dividing humanity into only two classes (of Jews and Gentiles), they decided that even the Chosen People themselves could be sectioned off into those who were evil disobeyers of Yahweh, who would lose their inheritance, and those few righteous ones who constituted a faithful remnant and who alone would be the ones to inherit Yahweh s blessings. Then, there arose another bunch of Jews followers of a messianic prophet named Jesus who called themselves Christians. They also believed in the biblical doctrine of election, but they had a different idea as to who constituted God s Chosen People. Biblical Christians understood Jesus to be the chosen one of Yahweh, the elected one who was to function as the long-awaited messiah or Christ. [lk.23:31] One New Testament passage [I Tim. 5:21] refers to some angels as being elected; but, otherwise, the Christian scriptures have only humans in mind. Several explicit references to his elect are ascribed to Jesus in the gospels [e.g., Mt. 24:31]; and there are many other implicit quotations cited, such as the famous: Many are called, but few are chosen. (Mt. 22:14). However, just which humans are elected was always in dispute among the New Testament authors! Especially tricky was the fact that since the vast majority of Jews rejected the messianic claims made about Jesus, it did not seem right to the early Christians to consider all of God s Chosen People as being elected. The apostle Paul, for example, struggled mightily to explain who is and who is not yet but will be among the elect. [Romans 9-11.] Paul claimed, on the one hand, that only those who believed in the messiahship of Jesus could be among the elect; while, on the other hand, he claimed that before anyone ever believed anything, indeed, even before anyone was even born, Yahweh both foreknew and predestined some to be among the elect, and others to be among the reprobate. Not even these solutions made it completely clear who is elect and scholars continue to debate whether or not Paul s doctrine is ultimately one of limited or universal salvation. After the biblical period, both Jewish and Christian theologians took up the debate about election and most persisted in their conservative, exclusivist views. Within the Church, a few thinkers, such as Pelagius (4th C.), Erasmus (d. 1536), Arminius (d. 1609), and almost all of our own Unitarian Universalist forebears came down on the side of reason and free will. The great majority of Christians, however, continued to take single or double predestination and divine election quite seriously. The tragic outcome in most places was the establishment of some form of theocracy a system of government in which human beings rule in the name of some deity whose characteristics they can never agree about and whose existence they can never prove and which others doubt or deny outright either in the name of reason or in the name of their own, but different god or goddess or pantheon of multiple mythical deities. Under such theocracies there is no such thing as free speech, much less freedom of religion. Instead, pious dictators arise a Pope Innocent IV here, a John Calvin there, an Ayatollah Khomeini somewhere else.

3 3 Torture, burnings at the stake and holy wars proliferate. All of this arises out of the biblical doctrine of election! Thanks to the efforts and sacrifices of hundreds of thousands of our ancestors, you and I are no longer stuck with this biblical doctrine as being our way of defining the term election. Today, the first thing we think about when we hear that word mentioned is not religion, but politics! Instead of kowtowing to the priests of predestination, you and I find ourselves pulling a lever at the polls to exercise our free will in choosing whichever candidates appeal to us. No longer trapped within the cloistered confines of a religious theocracy, you and I are the privileged inhabitants of the world s greatest democracy, a country in which every voice can be heard and every vote can be counted! Over 35 centuries have passed since the election of Abraham, [c BCE.] [3]; and, in that time, we have come a long, long way! In the time that I have remaining, I don t want to preach to you about the joys, the ideals or the obligations of our constitutional privilege and right to vote. As Unitarian Universalists, you already understand both of these. Instead, what I would like to do is share with you some facts and quotations which pertain to this coming Tuesday, our national election day. In my research for this sermon, under the category of democracy I was amazed to discover an almost endless stream of harsh and negative comments. Some philosophers (such as Plato and Aristotle) had little good to say for democracy. Of course, various dictators and tyrants absolutely loathed the idea! For example, Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, who died in 1975, had this to say: We abhor political parties. We are against political parties, and we have none! Our regime is based on bayonets and blood, not on hypocritical elections! [4] If these words sound somehow distant or alien to you, listen to what our own American colonizer, the Puritan minister, John Cotton had to say (d. 1652): Democracy, I do not conceive that ever God did ordain it as a fit government... As for monarchy, and aristocracy, they are both of them clearly approved, and directed in scripture...as referreth the sovereignty to [God] himself, and setteth theocracy in both as the best form of government. [5] Among many definitions for democracy, I found these memorable examples: Under some latent biblical influence, one anonymous author described democratic elections as the way we find the Chosen People. [6] Our own Unitarian divine, the Rev. Theodore Parker (d. 1860) said: There is what I call the American idea...a democracy,--that is, a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people. [7] Not quite so enthusiastic, perhaps, was George Bernard s Shaw s quip that Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few. [8] E. B. White [d.1985] found a somewhat more charitable way of saying the same thing when he wrote: Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half the people are right more than half of the time. [9] I found Winston Churchill s remarks to be the most moving, however. In a 1944 speech, he told the British House of Commons: At the bottom of all the tributes paid to democracy is the little man [or woman!], walking into the little booth, with a little pencil, making a little cross on a little bit of paper no amount of rhetoric or voluminous discussion can possibly diminish the overwhelming importance of that point. [10] When I turned to the category of campaigning, I found dozens of wonderful stories. Here are just two: In accepting the Democratic presidential nomination in 1956, Unitarian Adlai Stevenson said: The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal...is, I think, the ultimate indignity for the democratic process. Be that as it may, he lost the race. [11] Contrast that view with the opinion of John F. Kennedy s father, Joseph Kennedy, who orchestrated his son s successful campaigns for a seat in the U. S. Congress: We re going to sell Jack like soap flakes! And he did, too. [12]

4 4 It occurred to me that you and I might like to give some advice to our various candidates, so I looked to see if there were any such bits of wisdom we might cite from well-known sources. I ll leave it up to you just which candidate you would tell what follows: The ancient Athenian orator, Isocrates [d.338 BCE], once said: If you truly wished to find out what is best for the country you would listen more to those who oppose you than to those who try to please you. [13] With perhaps even more wisdom than he ever suspected, President (and Unitarian) Thomas Jefferson once wrote: No man will ever bring out of the presidency the reputation which carries him into it. [14] Then there is this famous statement issued by General William T. Sherman to the Republican National Convention in 1884: If nominated, I will not accept; if elected, I will not serve. [15] We all know how hard elections can be on us voters. Sometimes none of the candidates looks very appealing. Faced with just such a situation, the story is told that, when asked if he voted, one disgruntled old codger replied, Well, I cast my pearls alright! You may need to think about that one a little. (Cf. Mt. 7:6!) [16] The fact is, of course, that campaigns and elections especially when they are lost are extremely hard on the candidates as well. After losing a senate race to Stephen A. Douglas, Abraham Lincoln told a friend how he felt: Like the boy who stubbed his toe; I am too big to cry and too badly hurt to laugh. [17] Even more poignant is this statement made by then Senator Robert Dole after losing the 1984 presidential nomination. When asked how he responded to the loss, he said: I slept like a baby: I cried every hour on the hour. [18] With the exception of a few places like my old stomping grounds in a certain Midwestern state in a big city located on a rather large lake, where the policy used to be, Vote Early, Vote Often, the outcome of most American elections depends solely upon one thing: the people who vote. For reasons that escape me, the percentage of eligible voters who vote in America tends to be much lower than the same percentage in European countries. [19] It is almost as if we don t understand what an enormous privilege it is to be able to cast a ballot and have it count! It is almost as if we don t appreciate the sacrifice sometimes even unto death that millions of our friends and relatives have made in the U. S. military defending our freedoms and our democratic principles. At the close of America s Constitutional Convention, a woman asked Benjamin Franklin, Well, Doctor, do we have a republic or a monarchy? Franklin replied, A republic if we can keep it. [20] Recognizing that apathy is a far greater danger to our political way of life than any foreign power could ever be, President Franklin D. Roosevelt once said: Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves. [21] It is so obvious: as my fellow Texan, President Lyndon B. Johnson put it, Voting is the first duty of democracy! [22] Tuesday is Election Day in America. Important issues are to be decided. Extremely powerful positions in government are to be filled. What course our immediate future is about to take will be determined. So much that matters to so many is at stake! With these thoughts in your minds, let me leave you with these words of President Harry Truman in your ears: By their votes, ye shall know them. [23] May the spirit of freedom be with you!

5 SOURCES [1] Patrick, Dale and Gary S. Shogren. Election. The Anchor Bible Dictionary, v ed., pp [2] World History. The World Almanac ed., p [3] Anderson, Bernhard W. Understanding the Old Testament. 4th Ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1986, p [4] Seldes, George. The Great Quotations. New York: Pocket Books, 1967, p. 56. [5] Seldes, George. The Great Thoughts. New York: Ballantine Books, 1996, p [6] Spinrad, Leonard and Thelma. Speaker s Lifetime Library (four vols. in one). West Nyack, NY: Parker Publishing Co., Inc., 1979; vol. I., p. 87. [7] Seldes, Thoughts, p [8] Spinrad, vol. I, p. 86. [9] Seldes, Thoughts, p [10] Spinrad, vol. I, p [11] Ibid., p. 45. [12] Fadiman, Clifton, Ed. The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1985; p [13] Seldes, Thoughts, p [14] Ibid., p [15] Spinrad, vol. I, p. 45. [16] Ibid., p. 87. [17] Fadiman, p [18] Tonne, Arthur (Msgr.). Jokes Priests Can Tell, vol. 3. Hillsboro, KS: Multi Business Press, 1985, p [19] Spinrad, vol. I, p. 87. [20] Fadiman, p [21] Spinrad, vol. IV, p. 21. [22] Spinrad, vol. I, p [23] Ibid. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ You may contact Dr. Tucker at: drroberttucker@aol.com