Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson Podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now, your host, Timothy George. Kristen Padilla: Welcome to today's Beeson Podcast. I'm Kristen Padilla, the producer of the podcast, and we've literally turned the tables on our host, Dr. George. If you could see is, I'm sitting in Dr. George's chair, and he is sitting where our guests normally sit. So welcome, Dr. George, to your own podcast. Timothy George: Well, thank you Kristen, I'm honored to be a guest on the Beeson Podcast today. Kristen Padilla: We're glad to have you. So what are we up to today? If you are a normal listener, you will know that once a month we feature a lecture on the podcast. These are lectures that we think are of course worth you hearing, that they have something to say, something edifying for your walk with the Lord. Kristen Padilla: So that is what we're doing this week, we are playing a lecture. And this lecture is one that Dr. George himself gave earlier this semester on February 13th, at a conference here at Samford called Racial Reconciliation and the National Covenant. This conference was sponsored by Beeson Divinity School, the Institute of Anglican Studies at Beeson, and the Institute on Religion and Democracy. And Dr. George, you were one of the organizers of this conference, am I correct? Timothy George: Yes, Dr. Gerry McDermott, who directs our Anglican Institute, and Dr. Mark Tully, who is the president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy in Washington, D.C., we had the idea that it would be a good thing if we would put on a conference focused on these two major themes: racial reconciliation on the one hand, and the national covenant on the other. Timothy George: Now, both of those words, reconciliation and covenant, are of course biblical words, biblical concepts. So we were trying to draw out of the wisdom of the Bible the lessons that we might apply to our own situation in this country in particular, but really all around the world, where there's great hostility, division, focused on racial tension in our own country, and how the concept of the covenant, the biblical covenant, the church covenant, the covenant of marriage, and the national covenant, might inform our working toward a better resolution on these issues. That's what we were trying to do. Kristen Padilla: Racial reconciliation has been something that you yourself have been passionate about. This isn't the first racial reconciliation conference that you have sponsored here at Beeson, am I correct? Timothy George: When Beeson began back in 1988, I used the phrase “a stewardship of geography” to refer to the fact that we live in a city that is deeply scarred by racial violence, racial tension. The legacy of slavery and discrimination and segregation that lingers over Birmingham, Alabama is known to everyone. But it's not limited to Birmingham, of course, or to the south, or to America. It's really a global problem, it's really a problem of the human heart. Beeson podcast, Episode 440 Timothy George April 16, 2019 Timothy George: So from the beginning we have tried to determine, here at Beeson Divinity School, that we would take some steps, maybe baby steps, we don't want to say we've done very much, but our intention is to try to deal with this problem in a way that is biblical, and that aims toward reconciliation. Kristen Padilla: I was at the conference where you delivered this paper, and it's called Geography, History, and Eternity, a Theological Stewardship. Can you provide some context to what you were trying to accomplish in this paper, and how it kind of fit into this theme of the conference? Timothy George: Reconciliation and covenant were the two primary biblical ideas that we were working with. I added a third word into that discussion, stewardship. Stewardship is a deeply biblical word in both the Old and New Testament, and I looked in particular at the stewardship of three areas of our life: geography, where we are; history, how we live in the world, past, present, and future; and eternity, because that's where we're headed. And I think in each of these areas we have a particular stewardship as it relates to racial reconciliation and how we live out our covenantal responsibilities. Timothy George: So one of the things I did in my talk was to talk about two rallies, two big meetings, mass meetings, that happened in Birmingham in the 1920s, the early 1920s. One was a visit of the then-president of the United States, Warren Gamaliel Harding, who spoke to 100,000 people who came to Birmingham to hear the new president. And his theme was race. It was really a remarkable talk, and a kind of unexpected one. Timothy George: And then the other rally happened very close to where we're sitting now, where our campus is located. Right off Lakeshore Drive where Samford University is located, there was a rally in 1923 of the Ku Klux Klan. 25,000 turned out to have new inductees brought into the Klan, a very powerful movement at that time. One of those inductees would later become a justice of the United States Supreme Court, Hugo Black. Timothy George: So I wanted us to juxtapose these two events and to think about the importance of where they happened, the stewardship of geography. This happened very close to where this conference took place, and has a lot of implications for how we, living now with the stewardship of history, as we look forward to the stewardship of eternity. Kristen Padilla: Well, thank you for your perspective and your paper, for your contribution to the conversation. If someone wanted to find out more about the content of this conference, where would they go? Timothy George: I'm glad you asked that question because there were a number of outstanding papers and speakers, presentations, and our plan is to gather all of these together into a brand new volume that will focus on the title, Racial Reconciliation and the National Covenant. It will be edited by our colleague, Dr. Gerry McDermott, and we hope to have more information about that new book coming soon. Kristen Padilla: So now we're gonna turn it over to Dr. George in this paper that he gave here on Samford's campus on February 13, 2019. It is called Geography, History, and Eternity, a Theological Stewardship. Timothy George: Our conference is focused on two biblical words, both central to Jewish and Christian faith, represented by speakers in this conference. Two great, if contested, concepts: covenant and reconciliation. I want to introduce a third word, also from the Bible, a word that may serve as a link between covenant and reconciliation, and that is the word stewardship. Timothy George: Last year, our beloved friend and mentor, Dr. James Earl Massey left this world for a better one. Three times he presented our William E. Conger lectures on biblical preaching at Beeson Divinity School. One of those lecture series became a book which he titled Stewards of the Story, based on St. Paul's statement in First Corinthians 4:1, “This is how one should regard us,” Paul says, “as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God.” Timothy George: “Preachers of the gospel,” Dr. Massey said, “are stewards of the mysteries of God. Stewards of the story.” The Greek word is [inaudible 00:08:00], we get economy, economics from that word, which is very similar to another Greek word, [inaudible 00:08:06], overseer, bishop. Timothy George: A steward is a person into whose care and responsibility something precious has been entrusted. And while Dr. Massey was speaking particularly to preachers about preaching, stewardship has a wider application to the theme of this conference. And I wanna say that we have all of us a threefold stewardship. A stewardship of geography, a stewardship of history, and a stewardship of eternity. Timothy George: So the stewardship of geography. I will take you back to the early 1920s, right here in Birmingham, Alabama, and describe briefly two major rallies that took place. One, October the 21st, 1921, downtown in what was then called Capitol Park, which is today known as Linn Park. Birmingham had 180,000 people in 1921. More than 100,000 people attended this rally to hear the recently elected president of the United States, Warren Gamaliel Harding. Timothy George: 1921 was the 50th anniversary of the city of Birmingham. Birmingham is a post-Civil War city, founded in 1871. There were a lot of celebrations, they invited President Harding, he came, 100,000 people turned up to listen to him, and he chose as the topic of his address race. He said, “I'm gonna tell you something whether you like it or not.” Timothy George: Now let me begin to say we don't usually associate Warren Harding with anything progressive. It was a return to normalcy, it was this blah-blah Republicanism. But he said something on that occasion that WEB DuBois said was a braver, clearer utterance on race than Theodore Roosevelt had ever dared to make, or that William Taft or William McKinley ever dreamed of. What did he say? Timothy George: First of all, he said race was not just a regional problem. “I could say to you people of the south, both white and black, that the time has passed when you were entitled to assume that the problem of race is peculiarly and particularly your problem. It is the problem of democracy everywhere. If we mean the things we say about democracy, whether you like it or not, our democracy is a lie unless you stand for equality.” Warren Harding. Timothy George: Two, he argued for black suffrage. He said, “Blacks should be allowed to vote if they are fit, and whites should be disallowed to vote if they're not fit.” Now, he spoke at Capitol Park in a segregated space. African Americans were behind a chain-link fence. And when he made statements like that, they erupted in great applause, whereas the whites sat sullenly silent. Timothy George: Third, in his speech he promoted the newly introduced to Congress anti-lynching law. It did not pass in the 1920s because it was filibustered by southern Democratic senators. It was even opposed by Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s, and as late as 2005 the United States passed a resolution apologizing for the failure to enact the anti-lynching bill of the 1920s. Timothy George: So that's just one rally. Timothy George: There was another rally two years later. September the 13th, 1923. All of you, when you came to this campus today, came down a road we call Lakeshore Drive. And some students say, “Why do we call this Lakeshore Drive? There's no lake.” Well, there used to be a lake. And when you leave the campus today, just look across Lakeshore Drive and you'll find there Homewood High School, you'll find a big park, nice walking trail. That used to be Edgewood Lake. Timothy George: In 1923, the dam had broken, and Edgewood Lake had become a dry bed a very popular place for picnics, for parties, for dances. And on September the 13th, 1923, at Edgewood Lake, across the road from where we're sitting, there was a great rally. It drew, not 100,000, but 25,000 people. It was evening. This was the meeting of the Robert E. Lee Klan number one, the oldest and largest KKK in Jefferson County, one of the largest in the south. They were holding a mass initiation ritual. Nine o'clock, the flaming crosses came out, there was the inductions that took place. Timothy George: One of those people who were inducted into the KKK across the road from where we're sitting on that night was the teacher of the largest Sunday school in Birmingham, Alabama, met at First Baptist Church which used to be downtown. Had over 1,000 Sunday school students coming to hear this man teach. You know what his name was? Hugo Black. Hugo Black was from Clay County, he was a lawyer, he was very ambitious. And he was inducted that night into the KKK. Timothy George: He resigned two years later because he was getting ready to run for the United States Senate, and he was afraid this could be a liability. He later said in his memoirs he joined the Klan because it was politically advantageous. He resigned from the Klan for the same reason. But he still sought their support for his election, and spoke at a rally they held. Timothy George: Now, over the years Hugo Black became known as one of the most liberal justices on the United States Supreme Court, a strong advocate for the First Amendment. And he was the justice who swore in a new fellow justice named Thurgood Marshall. That was Hugo Black, who became a member of the KKK across Lakeshore Drive. We have a stewardship of geography, ladies and gentlemen. Timothy George: Let me say a word about a stewardship of history. Pope John Paul II, in his groundbreaking encyclical Ut unum sint, that they may be one, from the words of Jesus and John 17, praying to the heavenly father that his disciples would all be one so that the world might believe. And in this encyclical John Paul II introduced this term to ecumenical discourse, “a reconciliation of memories”. It's become a kind of technical term, we talk about it all the time in ecumenical work. A reconciliation of memories. Timothy George: And that is because, as William Faulkner, who was not a pope or a theologian but pretty good writer, said, “The past is never forgotten, it is not even past.” There can be no reconciliation of memory without a prior purification of memory. Because the consequences of the past still remain and still make themselves felt, sorta like radioactive nuclear material. You can bury it, you can hide it, but it has an afterlife, and it can still do damage for years to come. Timothy George: The reconciliation of memories works on that same premise. It requires an act of courage and humility in recognizing wrongs in the case of ecumenism that have often been done in the name of Jesus Christ, and the name of the church of Jesus Christ. And this makes any kind of theological sense only because the mystical body of Christ is extended across time, and because, as Christians believe, once and for all Jesus Christ has taken on himself the sins of the whole world. Timothy George: Well, we have a stewardship of history. And I want to mention just in passing, because I don't have much time to talk about either one of these reports, two recent reports, both controversial, that aim at a reconciliation of memory. Timothy George: One is from Princeton University, Princeton and Slavery. Princeton was founded in 1746. The first nine presidents of Princeton, including Jonathan Edwards, held slaves. Princeton always say itself, maybe still to some extent does, as centrally positioned geographically along the eastern seaboard, drawing from the strengths of both the north and the south and the west. Timothy George: In 1851, that's 10 years before the Civil War started, 63% of the students at Princeton came from slave states. New Jersey had passed a law in 1804 calling for the gradual abolition of slavery, but it didn't happen all at once, it took a long, long time. And so Princeton issued this report some years ago, a year or two or three ago, not long ago, acknowledging this, reviewing this. Not so much apologizing for it as just saying, “This is who we were. This has impacted us.” Timothy George: Now, even after the Civil War, these memories were hard to die. Because the question arose for places like Princeton and Harvard and Yale, “What about the alumni who had fought for the Confederacy from our schools? We're gonna honor the war dead.” Harvard has a great place called Memorial Hall that honors that veterans who had died in war. Timothy George: Well, at Harvard and at Brown, only union soldiers were named. The others were just obliterated from memory. At Yale, both union and confederate alumni were listed, and listed by rank and military affiliation. At Princeton, to my knowledge the only place where this is true, they were all listed alphabetically without any designation of whether they were north or south. Princeton wanted to bring out this report. Timothy George: Now, there was another report from another school, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Received a lot of press. And they want back and quoted a resolution of the SBC from 1995 that one of our own colleagues here, Dr. Charles T. Carter, chaired the committee, which acknowledged the nature of American slavery and the way that southern baptists in particular had failed to support, in some cases opposed, legitimate initiatives to secure the civil rights of African Americans. And this report from the seminary in Louisville acknowledged the role of that particular institution in this [inaudible 00:20:39]. Timothy George: Both of these reports have been criticized. What are the criticisms? Too little, too late. You can't apologize for something you didn't do. You can't repent for the dead. That was kind of from the left. But there were criticisms from the right. You're just trying to re-institute a form of works righteousness, and you're not depending as you ought to on the grace of God. These were criticisms that these reports generated. I think at best what they were trying to do was take a baby step toward the reconciliation of memories. Timothy George: Now, I said we had three stewardships, I wanna mention one more. The one I know least about because I've not experienced much of it, and that's the stewardship of eternity. Samford University has a seal with three Latin words that define the purpose, the vision of our university. Deo doctrinae eternitate, which we render “For God, for learning, forever.” Timothy George: It does not mean Samford University is forever. “Nothing gold can last,” Robert Frost wrote. I've been to Athens, I've seen where Socrates and Aristotle taught, it's ruins today. I've walked through the forum in Rome, once the nerve center of a great empire, now stone upon stone ruins. Nothing gold can last. Timothy George: And yet eternity, the Bible says, God has placed in our hearts, so that we do have a stewardship of eternity because we cherish values of a life fit for eternity. A life more kind than clever, more shaped by compassion than competition. A life fit for a faith that outweighs fears and a hope that gives confidence. If we don't have a stewardship of eternity, we will turn in on ourselves. There is no way out. Timothy George: I know this can be misappropriated, and has been. I've read Karl Marx, I know what he said, “Religion is the opiate of the people,” and sometimes in history regrettably that has been all too true. And yet, at the heart of the biblical faith, for both Judaism and Christianity, is this fact: the Bible teaches that this world does not terminate on itself. God has placed eternity within our hearts. Or, as St. Augustine put it in Book one of the Confessions, “You have made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.” Timothy George: Only if we have a stewardship of eternity does it make any sense to care about those children yet waiting to be born, and to see a connection between that and the still-festering wound of racism in our country today. Timothy George: When I was a student at Harvard Divinity School, we didn't have preaching. They didn't think we needed it. But I was the pastor of a multiracial church in Chelsea, Massachusetts, inner-city Massachusetts, Boston, and I knew I needed preaching. My congregation knew, and sometimes they told me. Timothy George: Some of us Harvard Divinity School students, mostly the African American students I have to confess, a few of us white guys too, they petitioned the dean. Back in those days, deans had real power, they could do something. So we petitioned our dean, Krister Stendahl, and said, “We'd love for you to have preaching, even if it's not a part of the regular curriculum. And we recommend that you fly up Dr. Gardner Calvin Taylor,” who we all knew about, one of the great, great preachers of our time. “Fly him up from Brooklyn, where his great church was, and let him just one day a week talk to us about preaching.” Timothy George: And the dean agreed to do that. So every Wednesday afternoon in Andover Chapel, Harvard Divinity School, Dr. Gardner Taylor would hold forth in his own inimitable way about preaching, about church, about ministry, but mostly just about life. The only teacher of preaching I ever had. Timothy George: Well, I'll never forget a story he told. When he was in Louisiana, a young pastor, preaching one Sunday night in a rural area, just at the time electricity was being introduced into that part of the country, and suddenly the lights went out. Dark. He didn't know what to say. Somebody, an elderly deacon in the congregation, cried out, “Preach on, preacher! We can still see Jesus in the dark.” Timothy George: I've thought about that a lot. We can still see Jesus in the dark. And the message of the gospel that Gardner Calvin Taylor proclaimed and tried to help us to learn how to proclaim is that even when we can't see Jesus in the dark, he can see us in the dark. And he promises never to leave us, never to forsake us. Timothy George: We have a stewardship of geography. We have a stewardship of history. And yes, we also have a stewardship of eternity. God help us to be faithful to all three. Announcer: You've been listening to the Beeson Podcast with host Timothy George. You can subscribe to the Beeson Podcast at our website, beesondivinity.com. Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational, evangelical divinity school training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. 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