The Pull Of The Land

Magna Carta: The Christian Connection

June 11, 2022June 11, 2022 Richard Barnes

In other posts I’ve noted that often history is taught as if it were a series of chaotic events without rhyme or reason. For example, I do not recall having studied the background to The Magna Carta beyond its importance to our liberties. It was only as an adult, long out of high school and college that I learned its critical Christian background.

A few years ago, Christian commentator, Bill Muehlenberge wrote a concise post on the Christian background to the Magna Carta which I believe you will find not only interesting but provocative and encouraging.

He has graciously given me permission to post it in its entirety which I have done below. I also recommend and encourage you to check out his blog, Culture Watch.

Thank you, Bill Muehlenberg, for your permission to publish your post here on The Pull of The Land:

Magna Carta: The Christian Connection

Eight hundred years ago the Great Charter was written, and we still are enjoying the benefits of it today. Simply put, this hugely significant document helped secure genuine democratic reforms, restrictions on government powers, equality and freedom under law, and other vital social goods we often take for granted today.

As Lynda Rose of Voice for Justice in the UK put it:

On 15 June 1215, with England on the brink of civil war, King John met with the barons at Runnymede and put his seal to what was in effect a peace treaty: Magna Carta. Today, that Charter has become one of the most celebrated and influential documents in history, rightly seen as the foundation for Democracy worldwide. Lord Denning described it as “…the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot.”

What is not so well known is the overwhelming influence of the Christian church on this vitally important document. Australian law professor Augusto Zimmermann explains the Christian roots:

Common law means a legal system based upon the English legal system; a mixture of customary law, judge-made law and parliamentary law. At least until the early 19th century, the common law was heavily influenced by Christian philosophy. This philosophy argues that there is a divine reason for the existence of fundamental laws, and that such laws are superior to human-made legislation, thus reflecting universal and unchangeable principles by which everyone should live. This assumption was expressed, among other things, in the Magna Carta of 1215, a charter which guaranteed the basic rights and privileges to the English barons against the king. Professor Aroney explains Christianity’s ideological influence upon the Magna Carta:

From [the time of Alfred] the kings of England have traditionally recognised their submission to God. At their coronations they take an oath before the Archbishop acknowledging the Law of God as the standard of justice, and the rights of the church. They are also urged to do justice under God and to govern God’s people fairly. Magna Carta was a development of these themes.

As Zimmermann explains in another important article:

At the time of Magna Carta (1215), a royal judge called Henry de Bracton (d. 1268) wrote a massive treatise on principles of law and justice. Bracton is broadly regarded as ‘the father of the common law’, because his book De legibus et consuetudinibus Anglia is one of the most important works on the constitution of medieval England. For Bracton, the application of law implies ‘a just sanction ordering virtue and prohibiting its opposite’, which means that the state law can never depart from God’s higher laws. As Bracton explains, jurisprudence was ‘the science of the just and unjust’. And he also declared that the state is under God and the law, ‘because the law makes the king. For there is no king where will rules rather than the law.’

The Christian faith provided to the people of England a status libertatis (state of liberty) which rested on the Christian presumption that God’s law always works for the good of society. With their conversion to Christianity, the kings of England would no longer possess an arbitrary power over the life and property of individuals, changing the basic laws of the kingdom at pleasure. Rather, they were told about God’s promise in the book Isaiah, to deal with civil authorities who enact unjust laws (Isaiah 10:1). In fact, the Bible contains many passages condemning the perversion of justice by them (Prov 17:15, 24:23; Exo 23:7; Deut 16:18; Hab 1:4; Isa 60:14; Lam 3:34).

A recent piece in the English press also discusses the Christian role in the production of the Magna Carta:

Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, played a central role in drafting the charter, which was signed by King John at Runnymede, Surrey. At least 11 other bishops were present.

A briefing note issued to members of the Synod reads: “The Church in England was central to the development of legal and human rights centuries before the French Revolution, now generally credited (along with the Enlightenment) for the secular genesis of human rights: the first parties to the charter were the bishops – led by Stephen Langton of Canterbury, who was a major drafter and mediator between the king and the barons; and its first and last clauses state that ‘the Church in England shall be free’.

“It is important that the Church’s crucial role in Magna Carta and its rights is not air-brushed out in 2015 – as was the role of Christians in the anti-slave trade celebrations.”

And recent research has even further demonstrated the Christians influence and underpinnings of this document.

New research suggests that Magna Carta may have been published predominantly by the church – rather than the Royal government of the day.

The revelations – announced as Britain prepares to commemorate the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta – shed remarkable new light on the politics behind the issuing of the charter.

The research suggests that early 13th century England’s King John was so reluctant to publicize the now world-famous document that the church had to step in to ensure that sufficient copies were made and distributed.

A new investigation into Magna Carta, carried out by scholars from the universities of East Anglia, Cambridge and King’s College London, has revealed, for the first time, that England’s bishops actually placed their own scribes inside the government’s civil service specifically to make copies of Magna Carta – so that every region of the country could have one.

The article concludes:

King’s College London’s Professor of Medieval History, David Carpenter, believes that the new revelations are “exciting discoveries”.

“We now know that three of the four surviving originals of the charter went to cathedrals – Lincoln, Salisbury and Canterbury. Probably cathedrals were the destination for the great majority of the other original charters issued in 1215,” he said.

“This overturns the old view that the charters were sent to the sheriffs in charge of the counties. That would have been fatal since the sheriffs were the very people under attack in the charter. They would have quickly consigned Magna Carta to their castle furnaces.

“The church, therefore, was central to the production, preservation and proclamation of Magna Carta. The cathedrals were like a beacon from which the light of the charter shone round the country, thus beginning the process by which it became central to national life,” said Professor Carpenter.

Last year while in England I had the privilege of seeing one of the four original copies at Salisbury Cathedral. I wrote an article about this at the time, noting the huge discrepancy between the Christian beginnings and development of England and its current anti-Christian stance. As I wrote there:

England is now an incredibly darkened and demonic place, with so much intense hatred of all things Christian. It is very difficult indeed for biblical believers to stand strong at the moment. Nonetheless, I have met many of these champions of the faith, pinpoints of light in a very black place, who are fighting the good fight.

But one after another they are being sued, harassed, bullied, pursued by the police, or taken to task legally by the secular lefties. This is really leading to full-scale persecution of true Christians. I thought things in Australia were bad, but they are even worse in the UK.

So please pray for the remnant of believers who are seeking to stand strong here. They are few and far between, but they are some of the boldest and bravest believers I have found. They know how dire things are, and they are still holding firm.

Magna Carta forever changed the world, and we still are enjoying the fruit of this overwhelmingly Christian document. But the tragedy is, the Western world is quickly renouncing its Christian past. And with it, it is renouncing freedom, democracy and rule of law.

Bound copy of the Magna Carta from 1556, displayed February 22, 2006, in Philadelphia

Mount St. Helens

May 30, 2022May 30, 2022 Richard Barnes

Working in Fort Worth I became acquainted with an attorney whose friendship is now a fine memory. We had many conversations about life and science and religion. And we have lost track with one another as so often happens in this life.

One such discussion veered onto the “age of the earth”, which for some reason was a big deal at the time. The attorney was convinced that the earth was multiple billions of years old. Although I was also taught likewise in my elementary and high school science classes, I nevertheless remained doubtful.

I asked, “Remember Mount St. Helens?” Of course, we both remembered. After all, at the time of our conversation, that cataclysmic event had not been that long ago.

That volcanic eruption took place on May 18, 1980, forty-two years ago this month, and changed the face of the earth for miles around.

The eruption blew out the side of the great mountain at 300 miles per hour with temperatures of 660 degrees Fahrenheit. One hundred-year-old trees snapped like toothpicks. The surface of the earth changed in a matter of minutes. Mudflows cut 100-feet canyons in hours, leaving layers of rock which would usually be interpreted as geological ages. In the following months, mudflows cut hundreds of feet of solid rock. The canyons created are reminiscent of the Grand Canyon, only smaller.

My attorney friend and I had been taught that the Grand Canyon had to have taken hundreds of millions of years to have been formed. However, Mount St. Helens canyons were formed in mere months.

Trees clogged Spirit Lake and formed three feet of bark peat in just a few years. Huge trunks sank to the bottom of the lake and stood upright as “buried trees”, similar to the “millions of years old” buried trees in Yellowstone Park’s fossil forest. Only the Spirit Lake buried trees came about in roughly a decade.

The Mount St. Helens catastrophe was minuscule compared to the worldwide flood of Noah’s day. Yet, she changed the face of the earth around her in a matter of days and weeks and a decade or two. Even forty-two years later, its impact is still developing.

Should geologists return to their ancient roots and consider that the earth’s age cannot be determined woodenly? That is, instead of “uniformitarianism”, believing (by faith) that whatever is seen on the surface of the earth has occurred by uniform, natural processes, perhaps we ought to consider cataclysms, including the Great Flood of Noah’s day when “were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.”

Surely such a cataclysm gave an appearance of age which modern geologists would be wise to consider, no?

My attorney friend and I discussed this at great length including finding seashells atop mountains and being told they were millions of years old. Really? They looked exactly like those we’d find on the beach over the weekend. As children we wondered about that assertion.

We still wondered.

It was a stimulating conversation.

But we never had the opportunity to discuss again.

Mount St. Helens eruption, March 27, 1980.

Forty years after eruption, thousands of trees decimated by the eruption still float on the lake near the base of the mountain.

Covered in ash: pickup truck and some of the tens of thousands of trees and countless animals killed by the volcanic eruption.

Volcanologist David Johnston taking notes and smiling at his camera on the eve of the eruption. He did not survive.

Rainy Days

May 25, 2022May 25, 2022 Richard Barnes

Rainy days in the mining camp are cherished memories and I suspect they are so for many of my contemporaries. Put another way, rainy days did not get me down. (Although, every once in a while, Mondays did.)

Of course, the rains I witnessed in Hurricanes Donna, Cleo, Maria, and others were extraordinary and Texas rains that come with some spring seasons are dangerously intense. Nevertheless, the curtains of water that fell during every rainy season in El Pao made a lifelong impression on the memory banks of my childhood (Memory).

The rainy season ran roughly from May through November, with crashing rains especially concentrated in June, July, and August, which overwhelmed more than half the days of the month. I’ve been told that El Pao’s rainy season more or less paralleled that of South Vietnam’s monsoon season. If so, that explains how landscape photos or films of that part of Venezuela can be easily confused with similar scenes of Southeast Asia.

For example, after watching The Ugly American, my father’s first comment was how much the landscape in the movie looked like our area of Venezuela. Of course, this was a Hollywood film; however, Thailand landscape around Bangkok provided the background sceneries and some scenes were actually shot there, because they very much looked like South Vietnam.

A former colleague had served in the Vietnam War and when he visited our property in Puerto Rico, which looks like the regions around El Pao, he walked to the edge of our ridge and stood silently for several minutes. Later, as we drove back to town, he merely said, “This looks like South Vietnam.”

This might explain why I became so attracted to Singapore whenever I visited on business less than a decade ago. Unlike southern Vietnam and El Pao, Singapore has two monsoon seasons. One of them runs from June to September, which is roughly parallel to El Pao’s. The rains, her lush, abundant jungle foliage, the green which predominates, and the tropical climate surely were major factors for my remembering my visits there with fondness.

Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, Puerto Rico, El Pao. In my child’s memory, I do not think of war and devastation. Just rains and green and beauty.

Monsoon rain in Ho Chi Min City (formerly Saigon)

Leaving Venezuela — Mike Ashe

May 21, 2022May 21, 2022 Richard Barnes

In response to my prior post (Leaving Venezuela — 1966) my friend, Mike Ashe, emailed me his own take about the same subject, as he also left at an early age.

I appreciated his recollections and thoughts and asked his permission to post, which he generously granted.

Hi Richard

I guess if we kids stayed in El Pao long enough, we ended up going solo to schooling elsewhere.

My dad left by train at age 14 traveling from Chuqicamata, Chile, to a high school in Buenos Aires. The Chilean Rail Line ran from Arica to La Paz. I don’t think that the train stopped in Chuqui; they had to flag the train down to board.

He would travel by train to Santiago and by taxi to Cordoba and take a train to Buenos Aires.

My grandpa worked for Anaconda Copper and spent 40 years in mining camps in Chile and Mexico.

In my case I shipped out at age 12 and spent two years at Admiral Farragut Academy. I did go back home to El Pao one summer. Holidays were spent in the school dorm or visiting friends

In those days there was no communication except by mail which most of the time was late or lost in transit.

A lot of my classmates were from South America so I had plenty of company that could relate. Also, I must say that my El Pao education served me well in transitioning into a different educational system. Admiral Farragut was a top-notch military school with high academics and an over-the-top discipline standard.

Seventy five percent of the graduates received appointments to the US Naval Academy, Annapolis Md. The most notable Farragut graduates are Astronauts Charles Duke and the first US Astronaut in space, Alan Shepard.

Actually, getting out of El Pao was a good thing since boarding school provided me with an opportunity to socialize with many boys from different backgrounds around my age. Cubans (great athletes), Colombians, a few Brazilians, and mostly US students.

The transition from being the oldest two or three boys in a mining camp to a school with hundreds of students mostly older and a lot more worldly, was bracing.

I was fortunate to have Chuck Gould as my roommate for two years (Chuck later played football at Michigan State). Chuck actually became my best friend, and nobody messed with Chuck. Or his friend! At age 13 he weighed over 200lbs and could outrun anyone in the Junior or Senior school including some exceptionally fast Cubans.

I did miss my family and El Pao but can honestly say that life was a great adventure for me in Florida. I was able to play sports for the first time. It was a great awakening for me. So grateful to have been provided that opportunity.

Also, both of my brothers spent their high school years in boarding schools Linsly Military School in Wheeling, WV. They also felt that going solo provided them with some great opportunities that they would not have had if they had remained in Mexico.

Really enjoy Pull of the Land

Take care

Mike

Panoramic View of Chuquicamata at 9,850 ft above sea level in the Atacama Desert (driest desert on earth). Mining of gold and copper started in 1882. My grandfather (Mike Ashe), an electrician on the New York subway system, accepted a job there in 1923 as an electrician working in the power plant. My dad was born in Harlem, New York his sister and brother were both born in Chuqui. In 1943 my grandfather accepted a transfer to another mining camp in Cananea, Mexico, also located in the Sonora Desert. The Cananea mine is the second deepest open pit mine in the world at 2,790 ft. The Bingham Mine in Salt Lake City is the deepest; both are copper mines. When I was working, I would fly into Salt Lake and never got tired of seeing Bingham from the air.

Leaving Venezuela — 1966

May 18, 2022May 18, 2022 Richard Barnes

Researching and writing about the Bogotazo — whose repercussions are with us still — elicited a few childhood memories which, for what it’s worth, I’ll document here.

I left Venezuela in 1966, fully intending to return to live there one day. See Playa Hicacos, 1966 for my personal recollections of that year in my childhood, which was yet another tumultuous year in Latin America.

My intentions never materialized because, as the Spanish aphorism puts it, “El hombre propone y Dios dispone” (“Man proposes and God disposes”), loosely based on Proverbs 16:9, but quoted in classic Spanish literature such as Don Quijote. So, although I was able to visit a number of times, especially summers during student years, I never returned to live there again.

Nevertheless, as Whittaker Chambers put it in his magisterial Witness, “No land has a pull on a man as the land of his childhood.” And that pull is still with me.

In that era, “globalism” was an unheard-of term. Large companies, such as Bethlehem Steel and United States Steel, were known as “American” companies, whereas today such seek to be known as “global” companies, with minimum, if any, loyalties to the United States, regardless of their founding or corporate headquarters.

American families were stationed in myriad and distant spots across the continents and the early schooling of their children was addressed by establishing schools modeled after those of the origin state of the company. So, for instance, the Bethlehem Steel school in El Pao was generally modeled after the norms of state schools in Pennsylvania. So, as an example, when those schools required standard tests for the elementary schools across the state, those very tests were also administered to us.

As far as I know those who attended the school in El Pao did well once they transferred to the United States.

And they usually transferred at an early age. I was 12 years old when it was my turn to transfer, and I was not an exception.

We travelled to Miami for annual leave, but my stomach churned a bit that year because I knew that at the end of that vacation, I would not be returning with my family to Venezuela. We nevertheless enjoyed our visit with family in Florida and the Northeast. I was happy to see the Langlois Motel in Miami again. Our family had been staying there for years and it was a favorite of the cousins and us.

What I most remember, though, was the farewell at the Miami International Airport. Back then we had no obstacles to staying with travelers in the Pan American Airways waiting lounge and then at the gate.

My father and mother said their farewells to my aunt and cousins, as did my sisters. Then they each embraced me and expressed their hope to see me again at Christmastime. I bravely succeeded in holding my tears and keeping my voice from cracking as I hugged back.

Then we waved good-bye as they left the terminal and disappeared into the plane.

My aunt and cousins and I walked back to the parking lot, exchanging few words, but I could tell they were a bit anxious about me. I just wanted to get back home and find a spot where I could be alone.

But my aunt had other plans. She drove us to Miami Beach. I asked why are we going there, especially at this hour? “Oh, just for a ride.” Then I understood she was doing her best to distract me. I was not a happy camper for that, but I kept it to myself. The radio played that week’s top song, “Cherish”, performed by The Association. It seemed a bit too treacly, even for a 12-year-old, but what did I know. It became one of the very top songs of that year.

Then “Eleanor Rigby” by The Beatles came across the airwaves. That song, about loneliness, was more in tune with my sense at the moment. As the only surviving relative of Eleanor Rigby put it in an interview in 2008, “A lot of time has gone by, and Eleanor’s side of the family has run out. They were ordinary, hardworking folk, the Rigbys — joiners, bricklayers, farmers, and the like — not the kind of people you expect to go down in history. And now there’s nobody left.”

That about encapsulates my anomie back then.

Days later one of my cousins told me they were very surprised I had not broken down. I assured her that I had indeed broken down — inside.

Months later I learned that on the plane, a gentleman who sat across the aisle from my father had leaned over and told him about having been left in the United States years before in circumstances very similar to ours. Only in his case, the parents were headed back to Germany. He had noticed our farewells and wanted to assure my parents that all would be well. But he did not sugar coat it: he said that, even after so many years, he still gently grieved whenever he thought of that day.

The reader should keep in mind that in 1966 communication with El Pao was via short-wave radio. Or mails. It was like going to the other side of the earth.

Psychedelic drugs and English fashion — Carnaby Street, Twiggy, Alfie — were “in” and for young folks it was difficult to tell the difference between genuineness and just plain marketing and promotion. Regardless, it seemed the world was going upside down and that the self-centeredness of Alfie generally reflected western mores at the time.

As the American and British scenes seemed to careen off course, South America was wracked by coups and a violent Cordobazo in Argentina, further Communist infiltration into the highest echelons of the military in Venezuela, and, by 1966, La Violencia had caused the abandonment of over 40% of the arable land in Colombia.

So, as we asked, “What’s it all about?” the seeds of upheaval continued to be sown in abundance in Latin America. And the harvest in Venezuela became most apparent in the 90s and to the present day.