In case you missed it, a powerful and moving (and even humorous) prayer was delivered at today’s inauguration of Barack Obama as the forty-fourth President of the United States—the benediction pronounced by the Rev. Joseph Lowery (you may recognize the first paragraph as the words of James Weldon Johnson’s great hymn Lift Every Voice and Sing, which, yes, was sung last Sunday at Trinity):

“God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, thou who has brought us thus far along the way; thou who has by thy might led us into the light, keep us forever in the path, we pray, lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met thee, lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget thee. Shadowed beneath thy hand may we forever stand—true to thee, O God, and true to our native land.

“We truly give thanks for the glorious experience we’ve shared this day. We pray now, O Lord, for your blessing upon thy servant, Barack Obama, the 44th president of these United States, his family and his administration. He has come to this high office at a low moment in the national and, indeed, the global fiscal climate. But because we know you got the whole world in your hand, we pray for not only our nation, but for the community of nations. Our faith does not shrink, though pressed by the flood of mortal ills.

“For we know that, Lord, you’re able and you’re willing to work through faithful leadership to restore stability, mend our brokenness, heal our wounds and deliver us from the exploitation of the poor or the least of these and from favoritism toward the rich, the elite of these.

“We thank you for the empowering of thy servant, our 44th president, to inspire our nation to believe that, yes, we can work together to achieve a more perfect union. And while we have sown the seeds of greed—the wind of greed and corruption—and even as we reap the whirlwind of social and economic disruption, we seek forgiveness and we come in a spirit of unity and solidarity to commit our support to our president by our willingness to make sacrifices, to respect your creation, to turn to each other and not on each other.

“And now, Lord, in the complex arena of human relations, help us to make choices on the side of love, not hate; on the side of inclusion, not exclusion; tolerance, not intolerance.

“And as we leave this mountaintop, help us to hold on to the spirit of fellowship and the oneness of our family. Let us take that power back to our homes, our workplaces, our churches, our temples, our mosques, or wherever we seek your will.

“Bless President Barack, First Lady Michelle. Look over our little, angelic Sasha and Malia.

“We go now to walk together, children, pledging that we won’t get weary in the difficult days ahead. We know you will not leave us alone, with your hands of power and your heart of love.

“Help us then, now, Lord, to work for that day when nation shall not lift up sword against nation, when tanks will be beaten into tractors, when every man and every woman shall sit under his or her own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid; when justice will roll down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.

“Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man, and when white will embrace what is right.

“Let all those who do justice and love mercy say amen.”

—Dwight Christenbury

[Welcome! This post refers to a previous post, "Blogging Calvin (Yes, Really!)," from 31 December 2008, which describes a plan for reading John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion in one year.]

What’s the point, you might well ask, of reading Calvin’s nearly-five-hundred-year-old Institutes of the Christian Religion? Isn’t it out of date? Haven’t the world and the church changed too much for Calvin to be all that relevant any more? Isn’t it almost idolatrous for us to let one man’s views shape everything we believe?

Well, Calvin himself had a ready answer to the question, “Why read the Institutes?” He believed that it would help the reader to better understand and interpret the Bible:

“Although Holy Scripture contains a perfect doctrine, to which one can add nothing, . . . yet a person who has not much practice in it has good reason for some guidance and direction, to know what he ought to look for in it, in order not to wander hither and thither, but to hold to a sure path. . . . Perhaps the duty of those who have received from God fuller light than others is to help simple folk . . . to find the sum of what God meant to teach us in his Word” (“Subject Matter of the Present Work,” p. 6).

(Calvin, as you can probably tell, seems to have had a healthy ego; he tries to be modest from time to time and to ascribe the credit for his brilliance to God, but he often doesn’t bother. For instance, while he “would shrink from seeming to appraise [his] work too highly,” he promises nevertheless that “it can be a key to open a way for all children of God into a good and right understanding of Holy Scripture” ["Subject Matter," p. 7].)

Still, questions of relevance (or at least questions of priorities for busy people) are legitimate; for what it’s worth, here are my answers to such questions:

• Isn’t Calvin out of date? Yes. And no. . . .
• Haven’t the world and the church changed too much for Calvin to be all that relevant any more? Yes, both the world and the church have changed: in matters of science, for example, we’ve long since learned that many of Calvin’s assumptions about the universe and the natural world are not valid; and the church has abandoned some of Calvin’s theological ideas as well. But it’s important that we know where we’ve come from, and in fact the foundational system of belief that Calvin lays out still applies for those of us who consider ourselves Reformed Christians.
• Isn’t it almost idolatrous for us to let one man’s views shape everything we believe? It certainly would be, but Calvin (healthy ego and all) doesn’t claim to be infallible–and even if he did, there’s no reason why we need to consider him infallible. We should read Calvin to learn, not to be indoctrinated. How ever archaic, outdated, and quaint Calvin may seem, he was indisputably brilliant, and it’s good practice for us to wrestle with well-reasoned arguments and ideas, even if we ultimately reject some of them.
• What’s the point of reading the Institutes of the Christian Religion? In some ways, it’s like the familiar question asked of mountain climbers: Why climb it? Because it’s there!

And a final thought: We may choose a church because our friends go there, because we like the architecture of the building, or because our ancestors went there, but these reasons are not ultimately the reasons that different churches exist. Different Christian denominations exist because different ideas about God, about the world, about the Bible, and about the church exist. Whether you’ve been a Presbyterian all your life, for two weeks, or never, isn’t it worth knowing something about what, for better or for worse, makes us Presbyterians distinctive?

—Dwight Christenbury