At the charming Huffington Post, the blogger RJ Eskow muses on the Pastor Ted Haggard scandal, and relates Bob Dylan’s 1983 song Man Of Peace to the woebegone preacher. Hmm. I can see why Eskow would like to see the song only as an indictment of hypocritical preachers and leave it at that. It serves the purpose quite well. One big difference, however, between the writer of the song and the writer of the blog post, is that the songwriter actually believes in a personal devil, in the Satan who sometimes “comes as a man of peace,” whereas the blogger seems only to believe in bad people — people with the “lust for power” that he alleges was Haggard’s flaw: “It is that power lust that represents that side of reality some call Satan, that whispering shadow in the human spirit that often - all too often - ‘comes as a man of peace.’” Well, some think that Satan is more than just a whisper in the human spirit — some believe, I daresay, that “Satan is real.” That perspective makes all the difference to how one hears this song. Certainly, preachers can be hypocritical, even false-hearted (I know nothing about Ted Haggard, though I found this post at GetReligion.org interesting). Yet, false men of peace can come in all shapes and sizes, as humanitarians and philanthropists, like the song says. And from a Biblical perspective, as the songwriter well knows, anyone other than God who promises to supply peace on earth is someone of whom to be very suspicious.

When the singer sings:

Well, the howling wolf will howl tonight, the king snake will crawl,
Trees that’ve stood for a thousand years suddenly will fall.
Wanna get married? Do it now,
Tomorrow all activity will cease.
You know that sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace.

… I don’t think he’s only alluding to a preacher being tripped up by his own sins. We’re all sinners, and that includes anyone who preaches from however high a pulpit. Presumably, if Haggard’s congregation consists of mature Christians, their reaction will be to pray that he can win the struggle against the demons that have been destroying him. The fact of someone being flawed does not invalidate any good and true things which he or she may have preached, or else there would be no valid preaching, ever. Nevertheless, “do as I say and not as I do” is never a strong position from which to teach, and, from the latest news reports, Haggard appears to have problems that he is currently incapable of dealing with honestly.

The Huffington Post blogger here also tells us how he’s been “on a Dylan kick lately, having stopped listening closely when he moved into his evangelical phase. Now I’m discovering a great body of work there. Dylan, like William Blake and many others, found rich food for inspiration and poetic truth in the books of the Bible. Then he, like many who embrace evangelism, eventually drifted away.” He relates 1983’s Man Of Peace to Dylan “mov(ing) out of his fundamentalist phase.”

Well, “fundamentalism” is a word and concept that is much used and abused. For many it seems to mean anyone who actually believes that Jesus Christ really died to redeem humanity from its sins, and anyone who takes the Bible seriously as the inspired word of God. If that’s your definition of “fundamentalism” then certainly Dylan’s gospel records could be described as “fundamentalist.” And, although the writer Eskow appears unaware of it, Dylan has of-course amply demonstrated many times since 1983 that he continues to hold those things to be true. In Eskow’s view, apparently, as in many others’, Dylan would have had to continue singing nothing but gospel songs in concert and putting out nothing except explicitly faith-oriented albums in order to continue demonstrating his belief in those things. An odd and extreme standard to impose on anyone, isn’t it? But then people have always been fond of imposing odd things on Bob Dylan.

…

Addendum: And here’s a clip of Dylan doing a jolly version of Man Of Peace at Wembley Stadium in England in 1987 — four years after he first wrote and recorded it. It might be noted that the song he performed immediately prior to this on that night was Gotta Serve Somebody (from Slow Train Coming) and five songs later in the set he performed In The Garden from Saved, which of-course includes these lines:

When they came for Him in the garden, did they know?
When they came for Him in the garden, did they know?
Did they know He was the Son of God, did they know that He was Lord?

Dylan appears sadly unable to see how the “fundamentalism” of his gospel material conflicts with the rest of his work.

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