God in three persons, blessed Trinity!

“Holy, Holy, Holy”

“Holy, holy, holy! Lord God, Almighty!

Early in the morning, our song shall rise to Thee;

Holy, holy, holy, merciful, and mighty!

God in Three Persons, blessed Trinity!”

We moved from Bladenboro to Kinston, when I was seven and in the first grade, just before Christmas in 1945. The War had ended in the summer with the explosion of the world’s first atomic bombs. While not yet out of my childhood, I thus learned that I had been born into the world’s most dangerous period of history, the Atomic Age. Still and all, I had learned, and was learning daily, that God was “merciful and mighty,” and powerful in “love and purity.”. My parents had taught me that by instruction and example; New Light Free Will Baptist had taught me through preaching, teaching, praying, singing, and shouting. And now, I was entering Miss Hobgood’s Harvey Elementary School, where I would be taught by singing one of our Christian faith’s classic hymns of devotion and praise, “Holy, Holy, Holy,” twice weekly in assembly, September through May. Thank You, Lord God!

That is the rich religious foundation undergirding my journey. When I learned just lately that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb,” had named the bomb and the project itself, Trinity, I was appalled; and I cannot say that my research in two major biographies. and my seeing the movie, “Oppenheimer,” on Monday, have given me satisfactory information about his reasoning behind that choice. But I have discovered perhaps relevant information which permits making some sense of it all, and some analytical progress if nonetheless limited. To begin with, I have discovered that the rich faith tradition of Oppenheimer’s family heritage was denied to him. His parents renounced Judaism’s Covenant faith given to Abraham and to them by God and did not bring Robert and his brother Frank up in the Torah and its nurture and teaching.

Instead, they aligned themselves with a movement called the Ethical Culture Society, headed by a man named Felix Adler, whose intention, as described by Ray Monk in the biography, “Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center,” (p.23), was “.…despite its repudiation of theology,…a spiritual one. His [Adler’s] central motivation was to find a way of preserving the spiritual guidance that religions had provided, even after all faith in religious beliefs had been abandoned. He thought he had found what he was looking for in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, with its emphasis on what Kant called the ‘Moral Law’….”. ( Apart and freed from any divine Lawgiver, we might recognize.)

Kant’s Categorical Imperative, the Moral Law, may have guided Adler, but the powerful influence of Friedrich Nietzsche and his call to abandon all belief in the “dead” God whom the Enlightenment had dethroned, and modern men had “killed,” Nietzsche atheistically claimed, in favor of advancing scientific and humanistic knowledge in a world ” come of age,” is the wider philosophical view and intellectual arena into which the Oppenheimer’s son Robert was born in 1904, and came of age in New York City.

Oppenheimer, the genius of theoretical physics, destined evermore to bear the name, “father of the atomic bomb,” was, by all accounts, awkward, insecure, brilliant by towering measure, arrogant, irreverent, distant though courtly and polite, victimized, and….by his personal, introspective account in his waning last years, then deeply aware of the depth of inward sin lodged within the human spirit and mind. Oppenheimer went so far as to name that sin directly. It is pride, he unhesitatingly stated.

Two years before his death from throat cancer in 1967, Oppenheimer replied to Walter Cronkite on CBS Evening News, in response to Cronkite’s asking if he had a “bad conscience” about the bomb, by answering, “…I said once that…the physicist had known sin…I meant that we had known the sin of pride. We had turned to affect, in what proved to be a major way, the course of man’s history. We had the pride of thinking that we knew what was good for man….This is not the natural business of the scientist.”. His statement was mildly spoken, but heavy with reflective weight, I believe… and heavy with conscience.

At least once, I discovered in my research, Oppenheimer called himself a Christian. Whether he meant it, and just what that name signified to himself in his understanding of it, is something I do not know. But in the Cronkite interview, his identification of pride as humanity’s fundamental sin, besetting the human condition, accords with a central tenet of Christian orthodoxy, and points toward the divine One who alone knows what ” is good for man.”

Perhaps John Donne, the English clergyman, preacher, and poet of Holy Sonnet #14, together with Oppenheimer’s remembered thoughts about that sonnet when naming the bomb Trinity, as he claimed the opening line of Sonnet #14 as his, also, [it seems to me], “Batter my heart, three-Person’d God,” come into relevant focus here. Perhaps Oppenheimer’s few assertions about the “three-Person’d God,” about the “purple-wrapp’d last Adam,” and about the Resurrection that touches death, acknowledged his reception of poetic gifts of redemptive, eternal meaning for him. I can believe that the Third Person of the “three-Person’d God,” the Living God of John Donne’s Christian faith, had done that for the eminent scientist. Too brilliant to be satisfied with less than God’s Truth revealed through John Donne’s theological genius, Robert Oppenheimer’s scientific genius responded, I can believe. All glory to God!

Thanks be to God.