President Harry Truman was the only president of the 20th century who didn't attend college (he was educated beyond the college level today, being able to read Cicero in Latin). Truman had some idiosyncracies: he hated air conditioning, daylight saving time, and time zones. (He carried two watches, one for Washington DC time and the other for "real time," the time in Missouri, his home state.) He disliked television which was just coming into American homes; he predicted that television would turn politics into showbusiness. (Was he ever right!)
Another thing about Truman--he has been vilified for dropping the atomic bomb to end the war with Japan in August of 1945.
One commenter sarcastically wrote about Truman's character, "It takes 'character' to drop an atomic bomb on defenseless civilians? How many women, children, and elderly were killed as a result of the fire bombing raids and two atomic bombs dropped on Japan during WWII ordered by Truman?" (He wrote this after viewing a speech at the University of Texas by David McCullough during a lectureship series on the inner character of the presidents of the 20th century. Historian McCullough had high praise for Truman's character. The commenter disagreed, hence his sarcastic use of "character."
This brings up an issue pertinent to those who teach and preach the Bible. But first, we need to examine what we should do in reference to the issue of Truman and the bomb: we have to place Truman's decision in the context of the history, that is, the circumstances in which Truman made the decision.
We should ask, "What was happening in WWII in the Pacific?" Anyone familiar with the Japanese knew that they were going to fight to the last man, the very end. To surrender in the Japanese culture was a disgrace. It was to "lose face." Anyone familiar with what was going on in the war in the Pacific knew that the closer American soldiers came to mainland Japan, the bloodier the fighting became. Various battles as the U. S. came closer and closer to the mainland of Japan had been bloodbaths with high losses of life.
For example, there was "Operation Iceberg, the April 1945 assault on the island of Okinawa, 400 miles from the Japanese mainland but politically part of Japan proper. For three months, the Japanese fought almost to the last man. Meanwhile, wave after wave of kamikaze aircraft dove on U.S. and British Commonwealth ships (even the super-battleship Yamato made a suicide sortie). The result was more than 50,000 U.S. casualties and more than 400 Allied ships sunk or damaged." (In contrast, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy that day, the invasion cost 2,499 American lives. The Japanese lost a quarter of a million military and civilians. But an invasion of the mainland would have made Operation Iceberg look like a picnic."
Also occurring at this time were the U. S. air raids on Japan which were daily killing an estimated minimum of 20,000 to a maximum of 80,000 on some days. With all of those facts in mind, David McCullough writes, "Truman and his advisers made the only decision they could have made; indeed, considered in the context of World War II, it wasn’t really much of a decision at all." Truman made that decision to shorten the war and save lives, both American and Japanese. And that's what happened.
Having said all of that, the point is that before one denigrates Truman for a lack of character, he needs to read history and thereby put Truman's decision in the context of the times, after all, nothing has meaning without a context.
And there's another point to all this: those who teach the Bible should be readers, readers of the context of the times in the ancient world of the first century and of the context of the times in which the Israelites of the Old Testament record lived. They didn't live in a vacuum, they lived in space and time, that is, history. The context of the times would explain why Jonah hated Nivivites. The context of the times explains why a man told Jesus that he couldn't follow Him because he had to bury his father. What did he mean by that? The context of the times explains why God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Abraham, rendering it impossible for him to walk through the two halves of a sacrifice laid out on the ground. Nothing has meaning without a context.
So, teachers, be readers, but not just readers, become voracious readers. George Washington's library contained 884 books. Thomas Jefferson owned at least 6,487 volumes. Warren Buffet said, "My key to success was reading 500 pages of material every day. Ravi Zecharias' library consists of 7,000 books; Warren Wiersbe had 14,000 tomes in his library.
Winston Churchill said, "If you cannot read all your books, at any rate, handle, or, as it were, fondle them — peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on their shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that if you do not know what is in them, you will at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them, at any rate, be your acquaintances.”
What are you reading? How about looking at II Timothy 4:13?
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