Riverwood Presbyterian Church

General Theology

Really, really, really Fallen….

by Jimmy Hopper

Last Tuesday I had the pleasure of giving the morning devotional to the Riverwood Classical School and, using the week’s Catechism question as a guide, talked about the Fall of man. Afterward, I was thinking about the Fall in light of a book I was reading the previous week. It was the second volume in Rick Atkinson’s trilogy about the American army in Europe in WWII, The Day of Battle and it focused on the Sicilian and Italian campaigns in 1943-44. As a result of this juxtaposition of book and devotional; it crossed my mind how inadequate, although totally valid, my illustrations of obedience to parents, etc. from the devotional were to the idea of fallen man and the truth of how far man fell from Grace. I suppose, in a sense, war is the ultimate example and result of fallenness.

To define the situation, it was determined to invade Sicily after the victory at El Alamein had driven the Germans from Africa. The Sicilian invasion was bloody but relatively quick and the British and American armies invaded Italy at Salerno, and began fighting an entrenched, well trained, disciplined, ruthless and barbaric army . This was the war of Ernie Pyle, the brilliant journalist who brought the war to life for millions and Bill Mauldin, the cartoonist whose creations, “Willie and Joe” became synonomous with the “GI,” the American soldier. The way north bogged down at Cassino after a disasterous attempt to attack accross the Rapido River on the German Gustav line. Winter came and the misery increased (I discovered that Rome is the same latitude as Chicago) as did the savagery. There was an invasion at Anzio to attempt to break the stalement but this bogged down also scant miles from the beach at the Pontine marshes. The two armies settled in to killing each other and the civilians who happened to be unlucky enough to be in the villages that sheltered the armies. The Americans that survived became what they were intended to become; instinctive killers forged by survival instincts developed under inhumane conditions. The Germans had long since reached this point.

The stalemate was eventually broken by the “weight of metal” thrown at the German lines as more and more bombs and weaponry, and men, became available to the allies. 750 tons of bombs and 200,000 artillery shells were dropped on the village of Cassino in six hours before the final assualt. Entire villages were reduced to rubble and when the Germans evacuated Naples, they destroyed infrastructure and booby trapped public buildings to explode after the Allied armies arrived. Many of the treasures of history and antiquity were destroyed by the fighting.

Rome was taken June 5, 1944, one day before the Normandy invasion. The Italian campaign had cost 312,000 Allied casulties and 435,000 German casualities. You would have to read the account to understand the barbarism and horror as these men (and civilians) faced the unleashing of modern weapons of war. Some of the scenes Atkinson described were simply painful to read.

So this too was the fallen world, inexplicable in its total fallenness, at least to a class of lovely and fresh faced children in the Riverwood Classical School. But it is not unexplainable because the root cause of the disobedience of children and war are identical. May these children never have to face war to this degree, but they, as do all men and women, will face the reality of their own sin and fallenness.