The Vision
by R.C. Sproul Jr.

Not many people know that Robert E. Lee was offered overall command of the United States military on the eve of the War of Northern Aggression. Not many people know that Lee was opposed to the idea of secession (that is, he believed it not wise, not that he believed it illegal or immoral). Not many people know why Lee refused the offer, and took command of the army of the Confederate States. The reason was loyalty. Lee turned his back on the call of the United States government, and took up the sword to defend a brand new nation because of loyalty.

That's one of the things I love most about Lee. He understood not only the virtue of loyalty, but where it should be directed. Loyalty, properly understood, requires a delicate balancing of ideology and kinship. Our duty to be loyal is first to ideas, to principles. At a lower level we are called to be loyal to those we are in covenant relationship with, even when they are less than perfectly sound. I don't, for instance, ditch my daughter because I find someone else who is more godly. On the other hand, if my daughter becomes a feminist, and I find her trying to indoctrinate a stranger, I enter the fray on behalf of the stranger who is fighting for the angels.

We want and need to be loyal to family because they are family (and family extends out in concentric circles to include church, neighborhood, state, denomination etc.) The closer the tie, the greater the duty of loyalty; thus Lee rejects the claim of Washington in favor of the claim of Virginia, his home state.

But most of all we need to be loyal to truth. 'Ruth never changes. We need not worry that if we commit to truth that someday it will betray us. We may commit to falsehood that we mistake for truth, but if our commitment is to truth, we retain our loyalty when we exchange the lie for the truth. A loyalty to truth then is by no means the hallmark of a closed mind. It is because I am committed to truth, loyal to it, that I will always test my beliefs to see if they are true. It is ironically the open minded who have no loyalty to truth. If there is no truth to be found, then why bother to look? If all truth claims are but thinly veiled power grabs, then I will be loyal to only those truth claims that are in the ascendancy right now. Thus someone like Al Gore can be pro-life for a season here, pro-abortion for a season there. It's not a function of a lack of loyalty, it only reveals what that loyalty is to: re-election or pragmatism.

Lee, unlike Gore, was a great man. From a career development approach, the answer to whom he should serve was obvious. He could lead the army of an up and coming world power with an the perks and powers pertaining thereunto. Or he could take over for a ragtag bunch of farmers in a country that wasn't even born yet, and which would at birth, face the assault of this new world power. But Lee didn't take that approach. From a loyalty approach the answer was equally obvious: he could fight for Virginia, or against Virginia.

At the Highlands Study Center we seek to practice and inculcate in others a loyalty to truth, and to those with whom we have covenantal ties. We see loyalty as a great virtue, properly directed. And we try to be loyal to the truths that have been handed down to us by the great men of the past. Loyalty to truth and loyalty to kin intersect when we consider our duty to teach our kin truth. I am loyal to my spiritual forefathers, and to generations to come for instance when I teach my children (and teach others to teach their children) the truths found in the Shorter Catechism.

Loyalty is at its base a looking outside of oneself. It means honoring those people and ideas that bind you together with others. It means seeing oneself as part of something bigger than oneself, and wishing and working for the well-being of the greater thing. Or in short, it means thinking and acting covenantally. Thus Chesterton wrote, 'On the one side is the individual life and its passions and affections, which has its own reasonable claim and importance; on the other is something entirely different, which is the duty of human beings to hand on the permanent possibilities of human culture and citizenship. For that purpose it is emphatically not true that love is enough; it is necessary to have something that is, if possible, even greater than love, and of which the name is loyalty.'

We would add that the culture we seek to build, or better yet, be a part of building, is a culture of godly dominion; the citizenship we proclaim is citizenship in the eternal kingdom. We want to practice an active loyalty which in affirming truth likewise denounces error, which in embracing Christ likewise expels the world, which in laboring for the seed of the woman, labors against the seed of the serpent. We want to get off the sidelines, practicing not a loyalty only deep enough to elicit a rousing cheer, but a loyalty that throws us into the very midst of the game, the trenches of the war. We want to love loyally all of our students, whether long term or short, on site or off, into doing likewise.