God and Churchill HB

by Jonathan Sandys

  There is, then, a clear historical pattern in the Bible that has moved within the channels of God’s crucial interactions with his people – a relationship into which everyone can choose to enter. The ‘cycle of nations’ is especially apparent in the book of Judges.

  A nation is founded on values and principles centred on God (Judges 2.7). During the time of Joshua and the leaders who immediately succeeded him, the nation of Israel enjoyed a period of clear truth. Their culture was anchored to a solid belief system whose values formed the consensus for the key institutions undergirding the society’s infrastructure. In our contemporary society, the most graphic evidence of this phase is in the scriptural inscriptions and references to God on old public buildings (which many powerful groups now want declared unconstitutional and removed).

  A ‘lapse of memory’ phase follows (Judges 2.10). When the old ‘values regime’ dies, a new one emerges.10 Often a new consensus forms around values that are alien to those of the previous regime. In the United States and other Western nations, this stage began in the 1920s and emerged even more intensely in the 1960s.

  As the memory of God as the source of national blessings fades, there is a season of rebellion (Judges 2.11–12). Influential cultural elites rebel against the founding vision and its underlying truths and values. A critical mass of other people in the society join with them.

  Next comes the age of the refiner’s fire (Judges 2.14–15). The consequences of rebellion from God’s ways fall on the society. The ruin of society-stabilizing institutions, such as the family and centres of worship, become the kindling for the conflagration that begins to burn the very core of the civilization.

  This crisis sparks a desire for remembrance, and recovery begins to grow among insightful people within the society (Judges 3.9). Prophets arise in the initial phase of this period, calling people back to fundamental values. They are persecuted at first, but eventually they are heeded by enough legitimizers to begin a slow restoration.

  A critical mass of leaders and the populace repent and seek to turn themselves, their institutions and their nation back to God and his revealed truth (Judges 10.15–16; 2 Chronicles 7.14). Repentance means a radical change of direction. In a biblical context, it means a turn back to God and his ways. In a society founded initially on biblically revealed Judeo-Christian principles, the remnant community is the critical facet of society whose repentance blesses the whole.

  Revival winds begin to blow across the national landscape (Judges 5.1–3). Substantial numbers of people within the society join the movement of repentance and turn back to foundational beliefs and principles. In the mid-1940s, revival began stirring in the United States. All the way through the 1950s, local churches were often packed for revivals that lasted for up to two weeks. Billy Graham’s ministry touched millions across the world.

  There is a restoration of God’s kingdom principles among many within the culture (Judges 5.9–11). The society’s fundamental truths are again revered, there is a return of respect for institutions promoting the original values, and the culture is restored to its roots. In 1740, during the age of the Great Awakening, Benjamin Franklin wrote the following reflection after a visit by evangelist George Whitefield: ‘It was wonderful to see the change soon made in the manners of our inhabitants. From being thoughtless or indifferent about religion, it seem’d as if all the world were growing religious; so that one could not walk thro’ the town in an evening without hearing psalms sung in different families of every street.’11

  The land has ‘rest’ until a new generation arises that forgets God (Judges 3.11). Rest is not the same thing as a national malaise. Rather, it is a period characterized by stability, peace, productivity and prosperity. The 1950s boomed across the West and in many other quarters, as the focus was on recovery and restoration. ‘One nation under God ’ was added to the American pledge of allegiance in 1954. In Germany, a massive effort transformed school textbooks and other tools that the Nazis had used to sow their poison into society. West Germany became one of the world’s most prosperous nations. And then came the 1960s, and another ‘lapse of memory’ began.

  THE DESTROYER–DELIVERER MOTIF

  Within these cycles of history, we observe another biblical theme: the destroyer–deliverer motif. The book of Revelation refers to an apocalyptic being at the end of time as ‘Apollyon – the Destroyer’.12

  Though Hitler was not the figure foreseen in Revelation, he was certainly the face of Apollyon in his time, ‘possessed of a demonic personality’.13 The apostle John, in his writings, speaks of ‘the spirit of the antichrist, which … even now is already in the world’.14 The apostle Paul seems to identify this spiritual being as the ‘lawless one’.15

  The antichrist spirit, then, manifests itself across history in all who seek to undermine the peace, order and well-being of civilization. Many Bible interpreters believe this spirit will be incarnate in a particular world tyrant towards the end of time. Until then, Hitler and those like him will appear across the historic cycles of nations, threatening their unravelling, as noted in a previous chapter. This is why the Catholic philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand often referred to Hitler as an antichrist.

  However, in every period of unravelling (historical stages in which it seems God’s historical purpose is about to be undone by human causes), a deliverer emerges. Will Durant writes of ‘heroes of history’, and David Aikman of ‘great souls’. This is certainly what John Lukacs has in mind when he refers to Winston Churchill as ‘a great David-like figure’ and a new ‘King Cyrus’. All the human deliverers who have saved the world and their societies from evil, tyranny and the threat of extinction lead up to the ultimate Deliverer, Jesus Christ.

  Our contention is that Winston Churchill was a deliverer prepared and brought onto the human scene through a sovereign act of God to counteract the work of Adolf Hitler, who manifested the dark power he worshipped and was its agent in his historical moment and geographical sphere. We have not tried to cast Churchill as a religious pietist. But he was a willing and available leader with an intuitive sense of divine destiny. As we have shown, Churchill grew in his understanding that his destiny was set by God himself. He is a wonderful example of how God ‘looks at the heart’, not at ‘the outward appearance’.16

  A NEW ‘CHRISTENDOM’

  Both Churchill and Hitler believed there were propitious moments when destiny-defining events occurred. However, a major difference between Churchill and Hitler was in their view of the Jews and their place in history.

  For Hitler and the Nazi eugenicists, Jewish blood weakened the human species, subverted the rise of Aryan superiority, and needed to be eliminated. Churchill, on the other hand, saw that through the Jews the foundations had been set for the ‘highest forms of human society’.17 In his Thoughts and Adventures, he writes, ‘This wandering tribe, in many respects indistinguishable from numberless nomadic communities, grasped and proclaimed an idea of which all the genius of Greece and all the power of Rome were incapable.’18

  Churchill saw the West in his day as benefiting from the values of Judeo-Christian civilization, but he did not view ‘Christian civilization’ as the exclusive property of the West. Today, given the shift of the centre of world Christianity to the global South, it is even less accurate to conflate ‘Christian civilization’ and ‘Western civilization’. According to the religious historian Philip Jenkins, ‘Christendom … may well re-emerge as [a primary cultural reference] in the Christian [global] South – as a new transnational order in which political, social, and personal identities are defined chiefly by religious loyalties.’19

  Churchill’s internationalist vision and fervour meant that he did not see himself or his mission as narrowly restricted to the survival of Western societies. He sought their preservation as a crucible for principles that would benefit the entire world. Though, like all mortals, he suffered prejudices – especially in his early life – he genuinely believed the British Empire helped to bring progress
in what today would be called ‘developing nations’.

  Churchill understood himself as an instrument of God’s intervention, which is why he sensed a mission to save ‘Christian civilization’ from the threat of Nazism. Here, then, is our hope for the cataclysmic time in which we live: The same God who brought forth Winston Churchill (and other deliverers) still rules over history, and he has a deliverer – or deliverers – for our season as well.

  It might even be the ultimate Deliverer.

  THE ‘ODDITY’ OF CHURCHILL

  ‘How odd of God to choose the Jews,’ quipped the British journalist William Ewer. The poet Ogden Nash is said to have replied: ‘It wasn’t odd; the Jews chose God.’ We might also say, in light of what we’ve seen of Winston Churchill’s life, ‘How odd of God to choose Churchill.’

  Odd, indeed, for Churchill was sometimes a stranger to his own class and their world view. For one thing, he had a different perspective of hope than did many of his contemporaries. ‘Material progress,’ he said, ‘in itself so splendid, does not meet any of the real needs of the human race.’20 Future development, ‘even though it takes shapes we cannot now conceive, or however it may expand the faculties of man, [cannot] bring comfort to his soul’. But in that very fact lies ‘the best hope that all will be well’.21

  Through many tribulations and mistakes, Churchill came to realize the source of help and hope for all people. He was an orator and not a pulpiteer, yet through his orations and life’s example, Churchill was able to ‘give the reason for the hope’ that was in him, to borrow a phrase from the apostle Peter.22 Often, he returned to the truth in one of the Scriptures that Elizabeth Everest had instilled in him:

  God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.

  Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea;

  Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof.23

  As God was Winston Churchill’s ‘very present help in trouble’, so God will be for us. The promise is not just for prime ministers and presidents but for all who will humble themselves and seek God’s help. Through the prophet Isaiah, God says, ‘I live in a high and holy place, but also with the one who is contrite and lowly in spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite.’24

  Winston Churchill had every reason to be arrogant, but he learned contriteness in the dangers and humiliations through which he passed. It takes such trials for most of us to come down from trying to usurp God’s ‘high place’ so that we are instead positioned to receive his help and hope. Isaiah also reminds us that ‘people walking in darkness have seen a great light.’25 Churchill found that the greater the darkness, the brighter the light.

  The source of what Sir Charles Wilson termed Churchill’s ‘buoyancy’ arose from his Judeo-Christian world view. It sustained him all the way to the end. Despite the sorrows and challenges he faced, the journey was full of meaning and purpose, undertaken with exuberance and always with hope.

  It seems fitting to allow Churchill the final word, instructing and inspiring us in our times of danger and darkness as he did the people of his era:

  Let us be contented with what has happened to us and thankful for all we have been spared. Let us accept the natural order in which we move. Let us reconcile ourselves to the mysterious rhythm of our destinies, such as they must be in this world of space and time. Let us treasure our joys but not bewail our sorrows. The glory of light cannot exist without its shadows. Life is a whole, and good and ill must be accepted together. The journey has been enjoyable and well worth making – once.26

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Winston Churchill, speech in the House of Commons, 22 April 1926, in Winston S. Churchill, Never Give In!: Winston Churchill’s Speeches (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 73–4.

  2. Proverbs 21.1, RSV.

  3. See Daniel 2.21.

  CHAPTER 1: A VISION OF DESTINY

  1. Winston S. Churchill, ‘Finest Hour, Man of the Millennium’, Finest Hour, no. 104, Autumn 1999, 12–15. The full text of the article can be found online at www.winstonchurchill.org/images/finesthour/pdf/Finest_Hour_104.pdf.

  2. Ibid.

  3. Martin Gilbert, Churchill: The Power of Words (Boston: Da Capo Press, 2012), 8.

  4. Winston S. Churchill, A Roving Commission: My Early Life (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930), 5.

  5. Ibid.

  6. Cited in Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Moral Imagination (Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), 255.

  7. William Manchester, from his Introduction to Winston Churchill, My Early Life: 1874–1904 (New York: Touchstone, 1996), ix.

  8. Ibid.

  9. Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life (New York: Henry Holt, 1991), 6.

  10. Ibid., 9.

  11. Manchester, introduction to Winston S. Churchill, My Early Life, x.

  12. Gilbert, Churchill: A Life, 22.

  13. Ibid.

  14. Winston Churchill, My Early Life: 1874–1904 (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 5.

  15. Randolph S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill: Youth, 1874–1900 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), 255.

  16. Winston Spencer Churchill, Savrola: A Tale of the Revolution in Laurania (London: Longmans Green, 1899), 44.

  17. Stephen Mansfield, Never Give In: The Extraordinary Character of Winston Churchill (Nashville: Cumberland House, 1995), 39.

  18. Winston Churchill, My Early Life, 13.

  19. Retrieved from www.churchill-society-london.org.uk/garter.html.

  20. ‘Mr. Churchill Declines High Honour’, Sydney Morning Herald, 31 July 1945.

  21. Gilbert, Churchill: A Life, 19.

  22. Ibid., 20.

  23. Ibid., 22.

  24. Ibid.

  25. Ibid., 38. Some suggest that Lord Randolph Churchill did not have syphilis. However, the statement regarding the doctors’ diagnosis is cited by Gilbert.

  26. Ibid.

  27. Richard M. Langworth, ‘Cover Story: From Dream to Reality’, Finest Hour, no. 56, 1987, 8; www.winstonchurchill.org/images/finesthour/pdf/Finest_Hour_056.pdf.

  28. Richard Langworth’s introduction to Winston S. Churchill, The Dream, electronic edition: RosettaBooks LLC, 2014.

  29. Richard M. Langworth, ed., Churchill by Himself: The Definitive Collection of Quotations (New York: Public Affairs, 2008), 73.

  30. Winston S. Churchill, The Dream, electronic edition: RosettaBooks LLC, 2014.

  31. Winston S. Churchill, A Roving Commission: My Early Life (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930), 36.

  32. Ibid., 43.

  33. Ibid., 59.

  34. Ibid.

  35. Ibid.

  36. Ibid., 77.

  37. Ibid., 106.

  38. Ibid., 109.

  39. Ibid., 107–8.

  40. Violet Bonham Carter, Winston Churchill: An Intimate Portrait (New York: Konecky & Konecky, 1965), 19.

  41. Winston S. Churchill, A Roving Commission, 115.

  42. Ibid., 166.

  43. Carter, An Intimate Portrait, 22.

  CHAPTER 2: SURVIVING DESTINY’S PERILOUS PATHS

  1. Randolph S. Churchill, The Churchill Documents, Volume 2: Young Soldier, 1896–1901 (Hillsdale, MI: Hillsdale College Press, 2006).

  2. Winston S. Churchill, A Roving Commission: My Early Life (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930), 191.

  3. Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life (New York: Henry Holt, 1991), 82.

  4. Randolph S. Churchill, The Churchill Documents, Volume 2, 784.

  5. Celia Sandys, Churchill Wanted Dead or Alive (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1999), 38.

  6. Ibid., 39.

  7. Richard M. Langworth, ed., Churchill by Himself: The Definitive Collection of Quotations (New York: Public Affairs, 2008), 273.

  8. Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Volume 6: Finest Hour, 1939–1941 (Hillsdale, MI: Hillsdale College Press, 2011), 420.


  9. Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Volume 1: Youth, 1874–1900 (Hillsdale, MI: Hillsdale College Press, 2006), 462.

  10. Winston S. Churchill, A Roving Commission, 244.

  11. Ibid., 245.

  12. Ibid.

  13. Ibid., 250.

  14. Ibid., 252.

  15. Langworth, Churchill by Himself, 214.

  16. Winston S. Churchill, A Roving Commission, 258.

  17. Ibid.

  18. Randolph S. Churchill, The Churchill Documents, Volume 1: Youth, 1874–1900 (Hillsdale, MI: Hillsdale College Press, 2006), 465.

  19. ‘Warm Tribute to Mr. Winston Churchill’, Daily Telegraph, issue 9721, 22 March 1900, 7; http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=DTN19000322.2.24.

  20. ‘The Victoria Cross’, History Learning Site, www.historylearningsite.co.uk/victoria_cross.htm.

  21. Randolph S. Churchill, Churchill Documents, Volume 1, 467.

  22. Winston S. Churchill, A Roving Commission, 259–60.

  23. Ibid.

  24. Celia Sandys, Churchill Wanted Dead or Alive, 86.

  25. Ibid., 94–5.

  26. Winston S. Churchill, A Roving Commission, 271–2.

  27. Ibid., 274.

  28. Ibid.

  29. Ibid.

  30. Ibid., 279.

  31. Ibid., 280.

  32. Winston S. Churchill, The Boer War: London to Ladysmith via Pretoria and Ian Hamilton’s March (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 77.

  33. Winston S. Churchill, A Roving Commission, 280.

  34. Ibid.

  35. Ibid.

  36. Ibid., 281.

  37. Ibid., 282.

  38. Ibid.

  39. Ibid., 297.

  40. Ibid.

  41. Winston S. Churchill, A Roving Commission, 354.

  42. Winston S. Churchill, speech to Joint Session of US Congress, in Robert Rhodes James, ed., Churchill Speaks 1897–1963– Collected Speeches in Peace and War (Atheneum, 1981), 781.

  43. Gilbert, Churchill: A Life, 148.

  44. Winston Churchill, Thoughts and Adventures (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1932), 304.