More a Matter of Mystery than Magic

Speaking of North and South in his Second Inaugural, he said: "Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes." Commenting on these passages a century later, Niebuhr wrote that Lincoln had successfully artic-ulated a sad but real truth: that "while the drama of history is shot through with moral meaning, the meaning is never exact. Sin and punishment, virtue and reward are never precisely proportioned."

Asked about what he has learned from Lincoln's spiritual journey, Obama tells NEWSWEEK: "My religious influences extend to the Founding Fathers, and I would include Lincoln in that category. Because these were men driven by reason and were full of skepticism and doubt. So much so that some of them considered themselves deists as opposed to strict Christians as we'd call them. But look at somebody like Lincoln: [he] starts off, as far as we can tell, a deeply skeptical but powerfully moral person who, as he finds himself in the midst of history and potential cataclysm, feels it necessary to hang on to a more explicit belief in providence and faith. And so that resonates with me. I think that there's a place where, the more seriously you take the world and the more you find yourself struggling with good and evil and war and the great moral questions of the day, the more you have to fall back on some sort of north star. Or you get lost. The kinds of issues that might get confronted are so difficult that the weight you carry was so great, that the possibilities of paralysis are—Lincoln himself acknowledged are—sometimes too present. What gets him out of bed, that's powerful stuff."

Lincoln understood—as did Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy—that politics is noble but provisional. There will always be more wars to wage, more injustices to correct. To the dead Great Men, to Obama (and to John McCain), the enormity and the endlessness of the problems posed by politics should lead not to despair but to what John Adams called "the duty of doing no wrong, but all the good I can, to the creation of which I am but an infinitesimal part." The alternative is nihilism, and a world built on mastering the temporal through the will to power. And that way madness lies.

"How far do our obligations reach?" Obama asked in his first book. "How do we transform mere power into justice, mere sentiment into love?" The faith that human beings can make some difference—that they can, in the words of George Eliot, make life less difficult to one another—is not innocence or naiveté. In a way, it is the essence of any faith that proposes to offer a vision of life that links the seen with the unseen, and the visible with the invisible.

For Obama, no matter how one translates David's final prayer, there is always hope, for without it life collapses into appetite. He is a Christian who believes in redemption but knows that nothing will ever be finally, fully complete on this side of paradise. We know he knows the story of David. If you read on through the death of the great king to the beginning of Second Chronicles, you will find Solomon's own prayer to God: "Give me now wisdom and knowledge, that I may go out and come in before this people: for who can judge this thy people, that is so great?"

© 2008