from Special Correspondent T.S. deHaviland
If a homeless man walked around claiming that be believed God had called him to be president, we’d all call him crazy. But when a twice-failed oilman from a wealthy and well-connected family says the same thing, we call that “strong leadership.”
What legitimates one over the other? Is it merely that the latter has a better chance of actually succeeding? If that were the case, why the need for divine fiat, why not merely say “I’d like to be president?” Both call on heavenly providence, but it is only the disenfranchised one we call crazy. Does wealth give access to God? Does poverty prevent it? Does privilege confer the right to speak the holy will?
Perhaps it doesn’t. Consider the following case: a rich developer decides one day to build a 200 foot tall neon green penguin on some suburban property he owns. He gets all the proper permits – or simply uses his influence as a wealthy developer to get his way around the zoning ordinances. When he’s done, he puts a little flashing light on top of the penguin so airplanes don’t hit it.
When questioned by the local media about why he’d want to do such a thing, the developer responds that God called him to do it.
Well, clearly, we’d all consider him a few cans short of the proverbial six-pack.
Or take the example of John the Baptist. Here was a homeless fellow who wore weird clothes, hung around in the desert, and ate bugs. Most Christians, and even quite a few Muslims and Jews, are quick to say he was a true prophet and a holy man.
So wealth alone doesn’t convince us one has a direct line to The Big Kahuna.
So what does? Is it some attachment to a pre-existing church? David Koresh and Jim Jones both had that, though, and few would board the bus to Waco or Jonestown now.
Maybe it’s simply being in the right place at the right time. Jesus, after all, who never directly declared himself a holy man (his cryptic response to the question, “I am who you say I am,” is notable only for its ambiguity), could have just as easily been dismissed for yet another street preacher who got sideways with the officials and got himself crucified if he had been born a little earlier or a little later, miracles and resurrection notwithstanding. Those can as easily be ignored as championed; after all, revisionist history is as old as history itself. There’s always room for skepticism or belief when expedient. We generally chalk the theory of relativity and the moon landing up to good math and good engineering respectively, but who is to say they aren’t miracles too? The existence of both certainly defy the odds.
When a preacher says he speaks to God, especially if said preacher is free from affairs with church secretaries and his financial improprieties have yet to be discovered, and if he’s preaching in an established church, we’re quick to acknowledge that claim as more-or-less legit. But there’s no scriptural indication that you have to be particularly holy to be chosen, as the stellar collection of liars, shirkers, and philanderers from Jonah to David attests. Nor is it necessarily the case that the chosen don’t get royally screwed, as was the case of Job. So we run into another roadblock: how you live your life seems to bear little relationship on whether or not your God-call is the real thing.
There are few conclusions we can draw with any kind of certainty here. “Beware false prophets” is a nice idea, but how can we possibly know? If it’s mere popularity that’s at issue, Rasputin would be a saint. If it’s outcomes we look at, we’re either asked to predict the future in the case of our current batch of holy men, or we’ve got to judge Jesus and Mohammed and Gautama Buddha pretty harshly for all the mayhem that’s been done in their names over the last couple of thousand years.
“It just seems right” as a criterion also traps us. After all, the actual teachings of the three revered ones mentioned above, all that business about loving each other and being nice and giving to the poor, really threaten our way of life, and unless severely modified to justify all our killing, lying and stealing, tend to make us kind of squirm. How many people in the cabinet of the current president have ever turned the other cheek? And anyway, the homeless guy probably feels great about his call to office too.
We can maybe resort to extreme skepticism, but that’s hardly belief by most interpretations of the word. Perhaps, the next time you see that homeless mass, shuffling along behind his shopping cart and carrying on about God, you’d do well to listen.
John the Baptist was probably considered an ascetic by the Hebrews, indicative of living a holy life. The transition, then, to prophet would have been easier. Ascetism is something most Americans have no concept of. Also, Wiliam James talks about the spiritual experiences of saints as being mentally disturbed, but able to produce valuable insights from those mental deviations. Theresa a little off her rocker, if you know what I mean. This is another concept that most American Christians will think nothing about—that being a visionary means something unusual and extroardinary (abnormal) happens in the mental process of a spirtually-heightened individual.
But even the fact that John was and is considered a prophet by many people, and even though he paved the way for a belief system of compassion and humility, that doesn’t make his claim for God true.
Whether the claims of the homeless man and politician are true is less important than the actions either pursues under the banner of a holy name. The president is more likely to do something with his vested power (which is only as powerful as the number of people placing faith in that claim), and so we pay heed.