David Frum: "Is America Still the ‘Shining City on a Hill’?"
david chou
Carmen et al:
我為了請Carmen解我一些在宗教議題上的疑惑, 過去曾與Carmen談過"City on a Hill"這個話題, 我當時也張貼了David Frum [美國新保守派的名政論家]: "Is America Still the ‘Shining City on a Hill’?"一文, 讓鄉親們參考. 我張貼該文, 其中有一個原因是David的文章之中有這麼一句話: "Then one of Van Engen’s antiquarians unearthed the sermon—mislabeled as having been delivered aboard the Arbella rather than (as Van Engen shows) before embarking." 這句話可真重要, 因為它解了我數十年的疑惑.
過去我讀的文章都說Massachusetts Bay Colony的創建者John Winthrop的"A Model for Christian Charity"證道詞是在他率領清教徒移民船隊前往北美洲的途中的演說, 可是我讀了他留下的"Journal"幾次, 都沒能找到有關的記載, 所以這個疑惑就一直無解, 直到我讀到David的文章, 疑惑才得解.
我今天再提這件事, 是因為我日前向Carmen請教Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn (Ret.)前些日有關"one nation under God, one religion under God" 與"The City on a Hill"的演說, 我之所以得知該項演說, 是因為我讀了一篇由Southern Baptist Church的Alan Cross牧師寫的文章.
Alan的文章介紹與批評Mike的演說與主張, 不過, 我也注意到它其中有如下一段:
"Flynn is referring to the Puritan John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and his use of Jesus’s claim that his followers were to be a “city on a hill” in Matthew 5:14 from the Sermon on the Mount. Winthrop, while on the Arbella before landing in Massachusetts, wrote A Model For Christian Charity in 1630 as he cast a societal vision for the Puritan colony based in the ethics of Jesus. "
Alan"Winthrop, while on the Arbella before landing in Massachusetts, wrote A Model For Christian Charity ------"這個說法是有問題的, 是一個以訛傳訛的錯誤.
David
"Winthrop, while on the Arbella before landing in Massachusetts, wrote A Model For Christian Charity ------"這個說法是有問題的, 是一個以訛傳訛的錯誤.
David
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Appendix I
Is America Still the ‘Shining City on a Hill’?
If the eyes of all people are upon America now, they are not witnessing an edifying spectacle.
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A shining city on a hill. Ronald Reagan loved the phrase. He used it over and over again, perhaps most notably in his 1989 presidential farewell address.
I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still.
Reagan usually clarified that he had not originated the “city on a hill” phrase, that it derived from a 17th-century Puritan sermon. But Reagan made the phrase his own, imbuing it with his vision of America as an example to the world.
That was a different and more self-assured era. The latest leader of Ronald Reagan’s party emphatically and repeatedly repudiated the idea of America as an example to anyone. In a 2014 interview, Donald Trump explained that he did not like the phrase American exceptionalism, because it offended Vladimir Putin: “Well, I think it’s a very dangerous term in one way, because I heard Putin saying, 'Who do they think they are, saying they’re exceptional?’”
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Trump often repeated the point in different ways and different contexts. We’re not so innocent either, he said, less as national self-criticism and more as an expression of his self-image as a ruthless player in a world of ruthless players.
Now Americans are transiting to a new political chapter. They may want their city to shine again. How can they reconnect to their historical vision of their country’s special mission? Thankfully, a fascinating guide for that task is right at hand, an elegant piece of historical detective work by a young English-literature professor at Washington University in St. Louis, Abram Van Engen.
Van Engen’s book bears the to-the-purpose title City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism. But what that book does is something much more wonderful than to-the-purpose. City on a Hill grasps a phrase you may think you understand—and then it turns that phrase to open the door to a huge room of rediscovered knowledge.
Readers look to historians to answer the question: What happened before us? When historians talk among themselves, however, they must address a prior question: How do we know what happened before us? Van Engen does both jobs at once, bringing to deserved attention a small group of careful conservators of the American past, who in the early years of the 19th century devoted themselves to discovering, preserving, editing, and publishing every document connected in any way to the founding of Puritan New England. New scholarship about colonial America rests on the labor Van Engen so vividly memorializes in the middle parts of City on a Hill—and then redeploys to tell a story of his own.
Van Engen’s story starts in the year 1630. A group of would-be settlers is about to depart England for Massachusetts Bay. There, they will found the city of Boston. Before they embark, their leader preaches to them about the new society they hope to build. It will be a society built on the principles of Christian charity: mutual care, but also mutual surveillance to enforce a stricter and purer version of their faith. That leader, John Winthrop, would become the first governor of the new colony.
English people had been settling in North America for decades before Winthrop’s company boarded their ship, the Arbella. English fishermen had been landing on the island of Newfoundland at least since the 1490s to dry their catch. Jamestown had been founded in Virginia in 1607, following a doomed earlier attempt to establish a colony in the 1580s. Extreme religious dissenters had landed at Plymouth, south of Boston, in 1620. The English slave plantations in the Caribbean dated to the 1620s as well.
So the Winthrop settlement could not claim to be any kind of “first.” For a long time, it was regarded by non-Bostonian Americans as very much an addendum to the foundational events at Jamestown and Plymouth. Since about 1950, however, the voyage of the Arbella has received more and more attention—not so much because of the things the voyagers did, but because of something their leader said.
In the course of expounding his vision of a new social order, Winthrop spoke the following words: “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people will be upon us.”
Read: The ‘city on a hill’ as a fortress in a moat
As Van Engen notes, those words did not spark excitement at the time. In the 200 years from 1630 to the 1830s, nobody is recorded to have ever cited or even mentioned them. Then one of Van Engen’s antiquarians unearthed the sermon—mislabeled as having been delivered aboard the Arbella rather than (as Van Engen shows) before embarking. The sermon was published in 1838, then immediately forgotten again. In 1930, Winthrop’s two “city on a hill” sentences were quoted on a monument raised to the 300th anniversary of Boston’s founding. Oblivion followed once more—until, in the later 1930s, the most acclaimed modern scholar of Puritan New England, Harvard’s Perry Miller, began arguing for Winthrop’s text as America’s founding moment.
Thanks to Miller, the phrase abruptly entered American civic discussion. Van Engen posted a chart of use of the “city on a hill” phrase, from almost none before 1950 up, up, up a rocket ride of quotation after 1980. John F. Kennedy was the first president to quote it, but it was Reagan’s creative misquotation—he inserted the “shining”—that affixed Winthrop’s words to the American creed.
Modern Americans are used to interpreting the “city on a hill” phrase as a premonition of America’s greatness, an early statement of the new nation’s providential mission. But as Van Engen shows, that’s not what Winthrop meant at all. Winthrop was not talking about America to Europeans. He was talking about Protestantism to other Protestants—and, for good measure, refuting and taunting his Catholic adversaries and enemies.
It’s often pointed out that Winthrop’s language referenced a passage in the New Testament, verses 14 and 15 of the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus there says, as the King James Version renders it:
“Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house.”
In Winthrop’s day, this passage was widely regarded as a devastating proof text for Catholics against Protestants.
Van Engen explains the Catholic view:
Jesus’s true followers were “set on a hill” to be seen by all. Since Protestants first appeared in the 1500s—since they had been effectively non-existent, invisible, unknown, or unseen for over a millennium—how could they argue that they were descended from the life and teachings of Christ? … The true church, Catholics proclaimed, was “hid from no man’s eyes.” … In Matthew 5:14, Jesus promised perpetual visibility to his true followers … and the only church perpetually visible since the time of Christ was theirs.
That polemical blow landed hard, and Protestants summoned all their ingenuity to refute it. They were obliged to develop a new idea of what was meant by “the city on a hill”—as not one place, but many; not an unchanging institution, but a human activity in time. Wherever true Christians congregated, that place would become the city on a hill imagined by the Book of Matthew.
And the surest proof that this “city on a hill” could appear literally anywhere was Winthrop’s claim that it might appear in so remote, obscure, and unimportant a place as the northwest coast of the Atlantic Ocean.
We know that Winthrop and company were on their way to raising one of the first cities of what would become the mightiest economic and military power in human history. But they, of course, did not know that. They could never have imagined it. To claim in 1630 that the “eyes of all people” would be fixed on one bit of shore along Massachusetts Bay would have seemed facially crazy even to the most messianic Puritan. Massachusetts would instead be the most extreme example of a broader general idea: The church of Christ could be brought into view anywhere—even the wilds of America.
Read: America’s unfinished second founding
Nineteenth-century New Englanders and Americans did not care about the religious controversies of the Counter Reformation era. They fixed their attention on the two earlier settlements in Jamestown and Plymouth. It was the 200th anniversary of the Mayflower landing in 1820, not the bicentennial of Winthrop’s sermon, that inspired one of Daniel Webster’s greatest orations on the American founding. The 300th anniversary of the Mayflower landing became the occasion for even more splendid commemorations in 1920, headlined by Governor Calvin Coolidge, vice-president elect of the United States. By contrast, the ceremonies in Boston in 1930 involved only municipal dignitaries and addressed a local audience.
And here is where Harvard’s Perry Miller enters Van Engen’s story.
Born in 1905, Miller rebelled against what he perceived as the materialistic society of the 1920s. In his own life, Miller was a fierce anti-Puritan who ultimately drank himself to death before his 60th birthday. Yet he found in the legacy of Puritanism a source for the idealism that he believed American society needed. Not a religious man himself, Miller’s voracious scholarly energy early grasped Winthrop’s neglected sermon as the great credo for his vision of American nationhood.
Van Engen quotes from one of Miller’s lectures: “A society that is both clear and articulate about its intentions is something of a rarity in modern history.” Miller cited Winthrop’s sermon as evidence that America met his standard of clear, articulate intention. “The great uniqueness of this nation,” Miller wrote in a private letter, “is simply that here the record of conscious decision is more precise, more open and explicit than in most countries.” The friend to whom Miller wrote that letter was the poet Archibald MacLeish—like Miller, a passionate New Dealer and social reformer. MacLeish perceived in Miller’s idea of American purpose a justification for an ambitious style of political leadership. Because America was based on articulate texts by which it could judge itself, MacLeish wrote to an agreeing Miller, “an American leader has the prophet’s role to play as well—or should.”
The murder of one of those prophet-leaders, John F. Kennedy, seems to have propelled Miller into his final, lethal drinking binge. But the prophetic text that Kennedy was the first president to cite survived as Miller’s legacy.
Through the mid-twentieth century, American literary history had no place in it for this 1630 sermon. After Miller died, Winthrop’s sermon gradually became the key text for defining and explaining the development of American literature from its origins to the present day. Percolating through new editions and anthologies of American literature, rising in prominence as scholars continued to wrestle with Miller’s work, by 1979 it opened and anchored The Norton Anthology of American Literature, the most dominant anthology on the market. A few years before, Norton had not included Winthrop’s sermon at all. Almost in a flash, it became the foundation of American literature.
Miller was a liberal, not a conservative; a domestic reformer, not a Cold Warrior. But the “city on a hill” language Miller publicized was brilliantly adapted to the rhetorical needs of Cold War America. That nation regarded itself both as the center of events and as a society profoundly vulnerable to external shocks. “The eyes of all people will be upon us”—and those eyes could condemn as well as approve. The city on a hill could fail. That defeat would drag all humanity to “take the last step into a thousand years of darkness,” as Ronald Reagan warned in the 1964 speech that launched his national political career.
Ronald Reagan seems never to have appreciated his debt to Miller, which was only fair, because Miller probably would have had little good to say about Reagan. Miller might have been especially offended that Reagan amended Winthrop’s biblical phrase to meet Reagan’s different purposes. Along the way to the presidency in 1980, Reagan dropped the apocalyptic terror of a “thousand years of darkness” and instead brightened Winthrop’s “city on a hill” into a “shining city on a hill.” That creative misquotation changed the meaning of the phrase in potent new ways. The destiny of the city on a hill was uncertain. But if the city was already shining, then its destiny had been achieved. Hopes had been fulfilled, the dream had been realized, and now the task shifted from creation to preservation, or possibly restoration—to scrub off any grime that dimmed the shine.
The city on a hill does not seem very shiny in the year 2020. Pandemic, economic crisis, and an incumbent president attempting to overthrow the democratic election he undoubtedly lost by a large margin: If the eyes of all people are upon America now, they are not witnessing an edifying spectacle. Yet hope always remains, and that is how Van Engen wraps up his wonderful archaeology of an American idea.
In his final paragraphs, Van Engen cites an important and more recent use of the New Testament text from which Winthrop drew in 1630, the funeral of former President George H. W. Bush on December 5, 2018. The dean of the Washington National Cathedral, Randolph Hollerith, read from the Book of Matthew. Like Winthrop and all those who borrowed from him, Hollerith started at 5:14, the familiar “city on a hill” verse. Hollerith continued to read 5:15, the bit about the lamp and the bushel. Then he pressed on to 5:16: “In the same way, let your light shine before men so that they may see your good deeds and praise your father in heaven.”
Adding that subsequent verse to the famous quotation changes its meaning from boast to injunction. The subsequent verse challenges Americans as individuals and as a people to accept their own responsibility to restore their city’s gleam. The city does not shine magically, but because of human effort. It shines not by the lights we have heard so much about over the past five years—wealth and weapons—but by moral worth.
Modern minds cannot think like Winthrop’s. But they can, just as Perry Miller hoped, learn from Winthrop an idealism adapted to the more secular beliefs of their own times. The city on a hill can at last glow again, if lit by better deeds and more concern for the regard of the rest of humanity.
Here’s the relevant excerpt of Flynn’s comments from Baptist News:
There is a time, and you have to believe this: that God Almighty is like involved in this country because this is it. This is it. This is the last place on Earth. This is, this is the shining city on the hill. This is the city on the hill. The city on the hill. The city on the hill was mentioned in Matthew. OK? It was mentioned in Matthew. And then a guy by the name of Winthrop mentioned it again in 1630. In 1630, OK, before the country was formed. And he also coined the term New England. “We’re going to go to this New England” — this new world he was talking about. And he talked to the people there about this thing called the city on the hill. And then Ronald Reagan a couple of hundred years later again talked about it as the shining city on the hill. And they’re talking about the United States of America. Talking about the United States of America. ‘Cause when Matthew mentioned it in the Bible, he wasn’t talking about the physical ground that he was on; he was talking about something in the distance. So, if we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion, one, one, one nation under God and one religion under God. Right? All of us together. Working together. I don’t care what your ecumenical service is or what you are. We have to believe that this is a moment in time where this is good versus evil.
Flynn is referring to the Puritan John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and his use of Jesus’s claim that his followers were to be a “city on a hill” in Matthew 5:14 from the Sermon on the Mount. Winthrop, while on the Arbella before landing in Massachusetts, wrote A Model For Christian Charity in 1630 as he cast a societal vision for the Puritan colony based in the ethics of Jesus. The treatise deals prominently with themes of love and care for the needs of one another and to value each other. Winthrop calls upon the Puritans to follow the biblical prophet Micah’s vision to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God, lest they incur God’s judgment. He says that if they keep unity, obey the Lord, and love one another, they will be blessed by God. But, if they turn away from the commands of God, they will be judged harshly.
It is in this context that Winthrop says the new Puritan colony will be a “city upon a hill” in the sense that the world will be watching them, so they need to get this right and not fail in their quest to be a people living for God and one another.
For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God, and all professors for God’s sake. We shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are a going.
Nothing in Winthrop’s understanding of being a “city upon a hill” involves inherent national greatness or any kind of prophetic destiny as God’s shining example or last hope for the world, per se. It is about moral responsibility and a calling to live out their mandate to be the people of God who loved, gave to, and served one another. His hope was that when the rest of the world looked at them, they would see a society of charity and mercy, which was a decidedly Christian vision of a community of interdependence. Of course, the Puritans did not faithfully live this mandate out as they had culture clashes with Native Americans, began bringing in African slaves, and by the early 1660s had to adopt the Halfway Covenant because so many of their children and grandchildren were not professing Christians. The sense of charity and mercy did not extend to the Native population as by 1676, the Puritan minister Increase Mather, claimed property rights over “the Heathen People amongst whom we live, and whose Land the Lord God of our Fathers has given to us for a rightful possession.” So, Winthrop’s vision as articulated in his Model For Christian Charity speech went somewhat off the rails within a generation.
But, the imagery of America being a “city on a hill” was later articulated by President John F. Kennedy as a way to call us to national sacrifice and adopted in the political career of Ronald Reagan, who used it over and over again to describe how he saw America. He alluded to it prominently at the end of his Farewell Address in 1989:
I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it, and see it still.
Winthrop’s vision of a “city upon a hill” was a localized view for a Christian colony that would be observed by the world to see if they were living out their profession of faith or not. Reagan’s view was of America as the transcendent goal of human freedom that would be teeming with prosperity and be a glorious society of harmony with commerce and free movement of people. Immigrants are welcome to this Shining City!
While much can be commended in both Winthrop’s and Reagan’s visions, they both fall short of what Jesus referred to. When Jesus spoke of a “city on a hill,” he wasn’t speaking of a Christian colony in Massachusetts or of Reagan’s America. He wasn’t talking about any earthly nation at all. He was talking about those who would believe in, follow, and be transformed by him into his light-bearers. He was talking about how the church was to represent God. Here are Jesus’s words from Matthew 5:14-16:
14 “You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. 15 Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. 16 In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.
Jesus’s followers were to be the “light of the world” because they were to reflect Jesus’s light. In John 8:12, Jesus says, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” Jesus isn’t saying that America, or any society or nation, can be the city on a hill that is the last, best hope of the world. He is saying that he is the light of the world and that when his followers reflect his light, they illuminate the world for others to see the good works and life that comes from God through Jesus.
Winthrop got close to getting the analogy right because he called the Puritans to follow and reflect biblical teachings about charity and mercy as they followed Christ. His shortcoming, as seen by the Puritan breakdown over the next few decades, was thinking that a whole society could possibly do that well over the long term. Reagan’s vision of America being a city on a hill wasn’t terrible because he was simply building off of biblical imagery to make a point about the goodness and potential example of our country, but it still falls far short of what the saying really means.
But, Flynn gets this imagery wrong because he goes beyond what both Winthrop and Reagan seem to allude to in his suggestion that God had America in mind as the last best hope for the world, the city on a hill. And, he calls upon the churches in America to come together to make that happen — to make America the city on the hill that Matthew wrote about when he quoted Jesus and that Winthrop spoke of in 1630 and that Reagan called us to in the 1980s. That is a Christian Nationalist view of a Divine purpose for America that is not at all what Jesus had in mind when he said that his followers, what would soon be the church, would be the city on a hill because they would reflect his light (the light of Jesus and the gospel) to a watching world in desperate need of that light everywhere.
You don’t have to be a Christian or believe in God at all to think it important to understand what this biblical imagery actually entails. But, I am a Christian and I think it inappropriate to co-opt words that were clearly meant for those who follow and believe in Jesus to then be applied to a nation-state 2000 years later made up of people from all religions or no religion at all. That isn’t what America is and it isn’t what Christianity teaches either. The church exists in society, but it isn’t the whole of society because there will always be people who do not believe in or follow Jesus, as much as I would like everyone to do so. And yet, we must all live peaceably together.
It isn’t a knock on America to say that it cannot be the biblical city on a hill. America can and should be a good country and an example to other nations, and that is what I believe Reagan meant by the term. But, America isn’t the church and the church isn’t America. If the church properly follows Jesus, the light that it reflects can help illuminate America and help it be a better country. But we shouldn’t get things confused about who is who.
We can misuse biblical imagery in our national dialogue. It happens a lot. But, we really shouldn’t go back and ascribe our misuse to the original intent found in the Bible.
Alan Cross
Carmen Lin
我看了The Souring of the American Exceptionalism 那篇開頭，他說Commitment to liberalism once distinguished the United States，其實那是他自己的錯覺。至少我們知道好些開國元勳不是這種看法，華盛頓總統和福蘭克林都不是。還有他對川普總統的批評也是有偏見。
我還是認為福林將軍是好人，他愛美國的心，相信大家都可看出來。
可能是那個用庚子賠款的決定讓一位法國的歷史學家看到美國的偉大，而讓他來美國參觀軍隊、工廠和學校，想找出美國偉代的原因，但是都沒看出來。一直到他進了教會參加崇拜，他才看出美國的偉大是因為美國人敬拜上帝，心很良善。所以他說：什麼時候美國人失去敬畏上帝的心，美國就會失去她的偉大。
那位歷史學家所看到的是正確的。今天的美國人長期受了進化論教育，都把人變成跟禽獸差不多。
幾天前我又看到一個大學教授發表一篇錯誤的看法，他大概回想以前的美國婦女留在家中不上班而專心照顧家庭，居然說：不要讓女學生讀醫學、工程和法律。我在臉書分享時說：那人沒想到，時間的輪子是無法倒轉的，只能繼續前進。
人就是人，看法常常都會有偏差，福林將軍當然也難免。
時間的輪子已經把我們帶到末世了，整個世界大翻轉，惡人越來越多，最近美國發生多件拿槍亂殺人的案件。最可惡的是個從監獄假釋出來的慣犯，開一部旅行車故意闖入一個天主教學校的學生在街上慶祝聖誕節的遊行隊伍和觀眾中、壓死人、使人受傷與不治而死的好幾個。
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