http://www.lukeford.net/luke_ford/bio/l1.html My active search for a world-transforming career began at about age seven when I learned to read. I loved history, particularly of the British, American and Old Testament kind. I teethed on books of heroes such as Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln and King David.
I believed that English-speaking people had a divine mission to civilize the world by making it western, democratic and Christian. This divine mission began with Abraham in Genesis and continued through Moses and the prophets Isaiah and Daniel to Jesus, Columbus, Martin Luther, democracy, capitalism and America. I believed in one ethic for everybody - a Bible-based English-speaking White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Male ethic.
My historical bent should have merged with my Seventh Day Adventist (SDA) religion. Christianity, I learned from my father who chaired Avondale's religion department for over twenty years, was uniquely a historical faith. God had sent His Son into our history.
But I perceived that intervention diminishing the grandeur I wanted for my history. My religion and my ego were at odds. Christianity taught that the life and death of Jesus fulfilled history. The greatest hope of all my Christian friends was for the Second Coming which would end all history. The Cross was not an event in the temporal process that I understood by history. Rather, it was an event in the history of salvation, an eschatological moment in the realm of eternity when this profane history came to an end, just as history comes to an end for each Christian who is in Christ. (Eliezer Berkovitz)
