Christian ethics and morality: Jesus, Gandhi and Churchill

Thomas Jefferson admires Jesus as a great moralist. Jesus's public activity begins with his Baptism by John the Baptist, at which time he was about 30 years of age. We know little about him prior to that; such as how he became a rabbi and an expert on Torah. Reading the Sermon on the Mount, I wonder from whom he got all these ideas (ethics and morality). I am hoping to find the answers by reading theology; this is why I am reading the work of Pope Benedict XVI, who is a great intellectual scholar/theologian.

Fighting Hitlerism is to save Christian civilization

A powerful man without morality is a very dangerous thing, Hitler is a case in point; there is no God in his life and his world. He was worshiped as a god. Before becoming a war-time Prime Minister, Churchill said of Hitler, “a haunted, morbid being, who, to their eternal shame, the German people in their bewilderment have worshiped as a god.”

Churchill uses Christian Ethics to fight Hitlerism to ensure the survival of the Christianity which is the essence of western civilization.

In June 1940 when England stood alone, Churchill said in Commons, “I expect the Battle of Britain is about to begin, upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization.”

In 1941 Churchill told Harry Hopkins (FDR's closest advisor and confidant), “We can find nothing better than Christian Ethics as which to build, and the more closely we follow the Sermon on the Mount, the more likely we are to succeed in our endeavor.”

“The book gave pith and marrow to our English tongue, from majesty of its pronouncements comes our moral code.” I forgot who said about the Great Book; it sounds like a Churchillian language.

Gandhi is inspired and influenced by Jesus' teachings and actions

Gandhi never became a Christian, but he was greatly influenced by Jesus, especially by the Sermon on the Mount, which inspired his non-violent resistance. Gandhi once wrote,

“Jesus put in a picturesque and yelling manner the great doctrine of non-violent non-cooperation. Your non-cooperation with your opponent is violent when you give a blow for a blow, and is ineffective in the long run. Your non-cooperation is nonviolent when you give your opponent all in place of what he needs. You have disarmed him once and for all by your apparent cooperation, which in effect is complete non-cooperation.”

When Gandhi's biographer Louis Fisher visited him in his tiny cottage in 1942, he noticed the only picture on the all is Jesus with the words “He is Our Peace” underneath.

Ephesians 2:14

“ For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us;”

After visiting India in 1931, Bishop McConnell said Gandhi was “fundamentally Christian in spirit in certain respects and was Christiainizing Hinduism in spots, he was a Hindu through and through. . . They look forward to Hinduism as the predominant religion of a Hindu Empire in India,...with Christianity doing service by holding up ideals to Hinduism.”

In April, 1931 Rev. E.J. Graefe called Gandhi a “devout follower of Christ, . . . though not a Christian, lived the ideas of Christianity in a way to shame most Christians.” Due to his

absorption of the moral values of Christianity, Gandhi was able to win the following of the masses and the intelligentsia as well.

Comparison of Gandhi and Jesus 
In his “When Jesus Came to Harvard”, Harvey Cox compares Gandhi to Jesus, “Both grew up on the outskirts of an overtaxed and mistreated empire. Both drew on the classical sources of their own religious traditions—Jesus the Torah, Gandhi on the Bhagavad Gita—but reinterpreted them in the light of current challenges. . . Both were accused from the radical wings of their respective nations of being either an irresponsible rabble-rouser or a spineless compromiser. . . Both died violently in the attempt to fulfill their vision.”