The church in the whirlwind

As Abraham Lincoln struggled to make sense of a war that threatened to tear apart the United States, a pastor reassured him that God was on the side of the Union Army. But Lincoln rejected this comfort by claiming, in his Second Inaugural Address: “The Almighty has his own purposes.”

Most of the time when the church gets in trouble it’s because we think God and we are on the same side. At its best, the church first has strived to encounter the Almighty in the midst of a whirlwind that destroys what was once known. When the church emerged, it quickly lost its protected exempt status as a sect of Judaism and became a treasonous outlawed cult. For the next 300 years it developed its identity as a persecuted church. All of the early theologies and liturgies were formed as a response to the whirlwind of persecution from the dominant culture.

Then Emperor Constantine was converted, which ended the persecutions. A generation later everyone had to be baptized to retain Roman citizenship. It was another whirlwind that changed everything in the life and theology of the church which was struggling to figure out the purposes of the Almighty.