"Arm her soldiers with the cross..."
Why a 150-year-old hymn is instructive for Christians engaging politics and culture
Our family worships at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Siloam Springs, Arkansas.1 Redeemer is a traditionally liturgical church, meaning that our services follow a familiar pattern every week. We sing, pray, read, and reflect at the same times during the service, bringing a sense of consistency—and, as a result, anticipation—to our worship.
The hymns and songs we sing are familiar, too. We don’t sing the same hymns each week, of course, but it is normal to encounter a song several times a year, usually at a familiar part of the service. One of these is “Jesus, with Thy Church Abide,” written in 1871 by Thomas Pollock. There are a few arrangements of this hymn, but this is the version we sing:
Since our family started attending Redeemer in September 2016, we have sung this song together at least two dozen times, including this past Sunday. But it wasn’t until this most recent service that something clicked with me about this hymn’s message for Christians in our political and cultural engagement.
Consider this verse:
Arm her soldiers with the cross,
brave to suffer toil or loss,
counting earthly gain but dross:
we beseech thee, hear us.
Through this hymn we are praying, as soldiers of the church, to be armed not with weaponry best equipped to win earthly battles, but with the humiliating instrument of the cross. We are to be brave and courageous in our engagement with a unwelcoming and hostile world, particularly as we face inevitable defeats. And when we are able to win these sorts of battles, we are to count these victories as rubbish, as garbage. Worthless.
But then consider this next verse:
May she holy triumphs win,
overthrow the hosts of sin,
gather all the nations in:
we beseech thee, hear us.
We, as the collective church body, are urged to win “holy triumphs,” to, through the power of the Holy Spirit, defeat sin, and to bring all the nations of the world into the fold of Christ’s glory and grace. This is clearly not a call for exhausted resignation; it is a call to spiritual arms in the name of our risen King.
This raises an important pair of questions: First, how do we reconcile these two verses? And second, how does this apply to our efforts to faithfully engage the world around us, including political spaces?
As for the first question, while we should certainly aim to win triumphs for the Kingdom, these efforts may not always be successful by our hands, hence the preceding verse about preparing to suffer losses with courage, boldly, and without hesitation. We are called to sow for the sake of the Kingdom, not necessarily to reap.
As for the second second question, this is the essence of my in-progress book. Specifically, in the fifth chapter of Uneasy Citizenship, I spell out several things I believe are essential to Christian political engagement. Some of these are related to the posture with which we engage our world, a posture rooted in humility and strength, boldness and kindness.
By the world’s standards these traits are incompatible, but by Christ’s standards they are reinforcing. We do not “win holy triumphs” "and “gather all the nations” by beating our opposition into the ground or coercing their behavior through idolized and fleeting victories. We do it as servants, armed only with the cross of our crucified Savior.
While there is no evidence Pollock meant for his song to apply specifically to Christians’ political engagement (let alone the 21st-century American political landscape), the message of these eight short lines provides the way forward all the same. Earthly gains made in earthly ways are worthless. Just as the work of Jesus confounded the status quo and confused established institutions in His time, so too must Christians in our engagement with politics today.
If you ever find yourself in Northwest Arkansas on a Sunday morning, we’d love to have you join us.