More a Matter of Mystery than Magic

As first chronicles in the Hebrew Bible comes to an end, David—king and general, a favorite of the Lord's and the dominant figure of his time—is growing old. As he contemplates death, the king offers God effusive praises, but then his thoughts turn wistful, dark, fatalistic. The Lord is omnipotent, David and his people ultimately powerless. "For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers," David says. "Our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding." That is the King James version of the verse. Miqveh, the Hebrew word translated as "abiding," though, also means "hope," a textual choice that can render the passage even bleaker: "Our days on the earth are like a shadow," reads another English translation, "and there is no hope."

What makes this exegetical exercise interesting is that Barack Obama chose the passage for the epigraph of his first book, the 1995 "Dreams From My Father." He quoted only the first half (about being strangers and sojourners), but acknowledges that the complete verse, with its tragic, cold-eyed realism about the world as it is, speaks to his own religious sensibility. That Obama was drawn to the grim last words of a charismatic, flawed and dying king gives us a small glimpse into the religious, philosophical and historical imagination of a potential president.

Obama's first Sunday morning at Trinity Church in Chicago led him to connect his own life and the lives of those around him with the most epic of sagas. David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion's den, Ezekiel's field of dry bones, he says, "became our story, my story; the blood that was spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world." In Obama's experience, this transporting vision—one that invests the seemingly ordinary with extraordinary drama and meaning—is tempered by the kind of realistic view of life David expressed in First Chronicles, a perspective that was perhaps best articulated in the 20th century by the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who wrote: "Original sin is that thing about man which makes him capable of conceiving of his own perfection and incapable of achieving it." Niebuhr's understanding of politics was equally skeptical—not cynical, but skeptical: "Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's capacity for injustice makes democracy necessary."

Belief and doubt, hope and fear, ambition and humility: Obama's religion is a new chapter in a long American tradition of presidents and politicians for whom faith is more a matter of mystery than magic, of enduring questions rather than pat answers. This is not to say that the religious are simplistic or simple-minded for believing, in the Christian tradition, that the world has been redeemed by the death and resurrection of the Son of God. It is to say, however, that reason and experience make it impossible for many believers to accept that any religious creed can alone make sense of the unfolding tragedy of history. The innocent suffer, and the innocent die; some are poor, and some are rich; evil can, and does, strike out of a brilliant blue sky. Where was God at Auschwitz? Where is he when a child dies? The old Sunday-school hymn—"Jesus loves me, yes I know/for the Bible tells me so"—is reassuring as far as it goes, but a lot of believers are more perplexed than enlightened the more they heed Saint Paul's injunction to "think on these things."

The tradition of which Obama is a part is best exemplified by another of his heroes: Lincoln. "Probably it is my lot to go on in a twilight, feeling and reasoning my way through life, as questioning, doubting Thomas did," Lincoln, who belonged to no church, said. "But in my poor, maimed way, I bear with me as I go on seeking a spirit of desire for a faith that was with him of olden time, who, in his need, as I in mine, exclaimed, 'Help thou my unbelief'." He added: "I doubt the possibility, or propriety, of settling the religion of Jesus Christ in the models of man-made creeds and dogmas … I cannot without mental reservations assent to long and complicated creeds and catechisms."

Lincoln's faith evolved through the trial of the Civil War. Unlike some war presidents, he neared victory with a growing sense of humility and an awareness that, however just he believed his own cause, the conflict had clarified some things but not all things. He knew slavery would end, but he knew little else.