Likewise, humanity can only be itself when the divinity, from which it emerges, sufficiently withdraws. The sun in the sky is our great blessing precisely because it maintains its life-giving distance. Indeed, the best image of God’s meekness can be found simply by looking into the heavens. God’s relationship to us is a bit like parents letting kids be kids, or an elephant tiptoeing through tulips. If God did not do this, God would overwhelm us. Because all power belongs to God, God can only enter our lives in meekness, deliberately setting aside all pretensions of power. Indeed, it is a strength that is characteristic of God himself. Yet our faith proclaims meekness to be a virtue. Lacking power, one has no choice but to be quiet, gentle, easily imposed on, submissive. Or, at least, that being meek is the demeanor of those who are weak. They rhyme, and many would consider them to mean the same thing: lacking in power.
The words “meek” and “weak” both flow into English from old Germanic and Norse roots. Whatever his virtues, James Henley Thornwell was not meek! But as Christian denominations again divide, this time over questions of human sexuality, retrieving Thornwell still serves a purpose: sometimes the best way to learn a concept is through its opposite. The slavery of Blacks in the American South is now a settled question. It was they, after all, who “in obedience to blind impulses and visionary theories, pull down the fairest fabric of government the world has ever seen, rend the body of Christ in sunder, and dethrone the Saviour in His own Kingdom…Are our country, our Bible, our interests on earth and our hope for heaven to be sacrificed on the altars of a fierce fanaticism?” “If Slavery indeed be consistent with the Bible,” he wrote-and Thornwell was sure that it was-it naturally stood to reason that abolitionists bore “tremendous” responsibility for the split. It is retrieved in Joshua Zeit’s Lincoln’s God: How Faith Transformed a President and a Nation (2023): The Old School Presbyterian leader James Henley Thornwell, known as the “Calhoun of the southern church,” was incensed by the suggestion that slavery was a sin. Here is one, quite strident, voice from that era.
In the years preceding the American Civil War, the unity of several American Christian denominations was sundered over the question of slavery. A Homily for the Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
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