‘Tis the season to cut down a tree! As Christians hack at trunks and deck the boughs to celebrate the true God, Jesus Christ, we do well to recall St. Boniface, who is perhaps the Church’s most pious lumberjack. Boniface (c. 675-754 AD) was a missionary to the Germans and the first archbishop of Mainz. As he persisted in teaching the truth, and certain people persisted in worshiping trees, he decided enough was enough. “All idols under foot be trod, / The Lord is God! The Lord is God!” (TLH 19:5), a hymn that Boniface clearly had in mind (in spite of its being published 921 years after his death). As for the story of what happened, I’ll leave that to Willibald, who recorded the event in his Life of St. Boniface (translated by C. H. Talbot). Note that the term Catholic in the quote that follows still largely has the sense of “doctrinally true according to God’s Word,” rather than the negative connotation that became associated with the Roman Catholic Church by the time of the Reformation. Without further ado:
“Now many of the Hessians who at that time had acknowledged the Catholic faith were confirmed by the grace of the Holy Spirit and received the laying-on of hands. But others, not yet strong in the spirit, refused to accept the pure teachings of the church in their entirety. Moreover, some continued secretly, others openly, to offer sacrifices to trees and springs, to inspect the entrails of victims; some practiced divination, legerdemain [conjuring tricks], and incantations; some turned their attention to auguries, auspices, and other sacrificial rites; while others, of a more reasonable character, forsook all the profane practices of the Gentiles [i.e., pagans] and committed none of these crimes.
“With the counsel and advice of the latter persons, Boniface in their presence attempted to cut down, at a place called Gaesmere, a certain oak of extraordinary size called in the old tongue of the pagans the Oak of Jupiter [Thor]. Taking his courage in his hands (for a great crowd of pagans stood by watching and bitterly cursing in their hearts the enemy of the gods), he cut the first notch. But when he had made a superficial cut, suddenly the oak’s vast bulk, shaken by a mighty blast of wind from above, crashed to the ground, shivering its topmost branches into fragments in its fall. As if by the express will of God (for the brethren present had done nothing to cause it) the oak burst asunder into four parts, each part having a trunk of equal length. At the sight of this extraordinary spectacle the heathens who had been cursing ceased to revile and began, on the contrary, to believe and bless the Lord. Thereupon the holy bishop took counsel with the brethren, built an oratory [small chapel] from the timber of the oak and dedicated it to Saint Peter the Apostle.”
In Christ,
Pastor Richard
