Victor Glover is not the first Christian astronaut. This member of the Church of Christ on Abell Street, Wharton (Texas), who has taken a Bible and the symbols of Christian communion with him, is not the first to do so either. Others like him have also recited the Lord’s Prayer during the countdown to their journey into space.
It has been more than half a century since man first set foot on the moon, despite that some insist the images of man landing on the moon were staged by Stanley Kubrick – according to one of the most popular ‘urban legends’, now euphemistically termed ‘fake news’, which originated in the last century.
All Evangelical Focus news and opinion, on your WhatsApp.
If you were already born on 20 July 1969, this is a historic moment in television that you will remember, even if you didn’t have a television set (I watched it in a bar surrounded by people) or were barely old enough to remember (I was only five years old). But those black-and-white images of Commander Armstrong stepping onto the surface of the Sea of Tranquillity are never forgotten. What few people know is that, in the space adventure, God was not absent either.
Since childhood, many of us have been fascinated by space travel. My youngest son left me a book he’d borrowed from the library (The Conquest of the Moon), whilst I was reading a rather more boring one, which accompanied a television series (Destination: Moon) by Dan Parry.
Antonio Muñoz Molina, incidentally, has written a fantastic novel about the impression that day made on him (The Wind from the Moon), though the most spectacular book I know of is the one Taschen produced for the fortieth anniversary, featuring the articles Norman Mailer wrote for Life Magazine.
At home – where we’ve always been big Tintin fans – we often re-read the two visionary albums that Hergé drew sixteen years before Armstrong set foot on the moon. Although there were other dreamers who imagined space travel as early as the 19th century—writers such as Jules Verne or H. G. Wells, but also Edgar Rice Burroughs—who not only wrote about Tarzan but also many space fantasies—and my admired Alex Raymond—the creator of Flash Gordon, as well as the wonderful Rip Kirby, one of my favourite detectives—alongside filmmakers such as Georges Méliès or Fritz Lang.
Yuri Gagarin is credited with the phrase that he did not see God in space, something he never said, as it was Nikita Khrushchev who attributed it to this Orthodox Christian.
The moon features in stories, legends and folk songs. It is both a ‘moon and a bell’, and a giant round cheese in the sky. Something so far away and distant that even today it is not surprising that some remain sceptical that man has ever reached it. It was a scientist working for the Nazis, Wernher von Braun (1912–1977), who developed the rocket model in the United States that would make interplanetary travel possible. From the test pilots attempting to break the ‘sound barrier’ emerged the first astronauts – as the ‘father of New Journalism’, Tom Wolfe, so aptly recounts in that gem of a book, The Right Stuff.
The Cold War was the context in which NASA was born. The Russians had been pioneers in space since they launched the first artificial satellite in 1957, Sputnik. A poor little dog, Laika, followed in its wake, dying of heatstroke in the spacecraft. Two others would survive, before the first man, Yuri Gagarin, was sent into space. He is credited with the phrase that he did not see God there. Today we know he never said it. He was, in fact, an Orthodox Christian. It was a quip by Nikita Khrushchev.
The first woman to fly into space was also Soviet, Valentina Tereshkova, in 1963 – no American woman travelled into space until 1983 – until President Kennedy took up “the challenge of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth”. His 1961 speech came shortly after the Russians’ first spacewalk.
Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman quoted the opening words of the Bible as he gazed upon the Earth from space.
Following the Gemini project – launched in 1964 – came the Apollo programme, which began with the disaster of 1967. The first mission to approach the Moon was Apollo 8. Its commander was Frank Borman. The words he spoke whilst gazing at the Earth are those with which the Bible begins: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”. This prompted a lawsuit from the atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair, because, according to her, the biblical quotation violated the separation of church and state. Borman justified it by saying that he had the overwhelming feeling that there was “a power greater than any of us, that there was a God and certainly a beginning”.
Among the crew of Apollo 11, which reached the moon, was Buzz Aldrin, an elder at a Presbyterian church in Houston (Webster Presbyterian Church) which has produced many astronauts. His pastor, Dean Woodruff, suggested he take some small plastic bags containing bread and wine to celebrate Holy Communion on the moon, using a chalice that is now in the church and is used on that day, once a year. He did so by reading some words from the Gospel, which he had written on a card sold at auction in 2007: “I am the vine, you are the branches; whoever remains in me, as I in him, will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5).
Aldrin says that “he then gave thanks for the intelligence and spirit that had brought two young pilots to the Sea of Tranquillity”. All this took place during the minutes of silence, which were not broadcast on the radio. He recounts the event in the interview published by Life Magazine in August 1969, as well as in his 1973 book (Return to Earth), expanded upon in his 2009 work (Magnificent Desolation), which caused a major stir in the media. The discretion or censorship was due to the lawsuit Borman had faced shortly before – he explains in the book. The truth is that Commander Armstrong looked at him with respect, but said nothing at the time.
Dean Woodruff, the pastor of Buzz Aldrin’s Presbyterian church, was the one who suggested he take bread and wine to celebrate Holy Communion on the moon using a chalice that is now in the church.
The eighth man to set foot on the moon was the evangelical James Irwin (1930–1991) on Apollo 15, who was the first to drive across it in an all-terrain vehicle in 1971. The following year, he founded a Christian organisation with a Baptist pastor in Colorado Springs (High Flight Foundation) to talk about how he felt the power of God as never before.
The passage he most often quoted when speaking in churches across the country was the one he meditated on whilst traversing the lunar mountains: “I lift up my eyes to the hills—where does my help come from?” (Psalm 121).
In his magnificent book on the first seven astronauts, Tom Wolfe discusses the faith of John Glenn, the second man to fly into space and the first to orbit the Earth, who received the Prince of Asturias Award for International Cooperation in 1999. At the press conference he gave in Washington, he said: “I am a Presbyterian, a Protestant, and I take my religion very seriously, in fact”.
John Glenn spoke of the Sunday schools where he had taught and the church committees on which he had served, but he said something far more interesting: “We are placed here with certain talents and capabilities. It is up to each of us to use those talents and capabilities as best you can. If you do that, I think there is a power greater than any of us that will place the opportunities in our way, and if we use our talents properly, we will be living the kind of life we should live”
In the faith of astronauts, sometimes sentiment prevails – as with Irwin, who ended up searching for Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat – and at other times talent – as in Glenn’s remark, which Wolfe correctly interprets as part of the American religion whereby ‘God helps those who help themselves’.
The Gospel is actually neither of these things, neither Aldrin’s individual communion nor Glen’s incomprehension, when he says: “To look at this kind of creation and not believe in God is impossible.”
The eighth man to walk on the moon was the evangelical James Irwin (1930–1991) on Apollo 15, who was the first to drive across it in an all-terrain vehicle in 1971.
The truth is that one can look at Creation and not believe in God. Why? Although “the heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1), men “exchanged the truth of God for a lie” (Romans 1:25). It is true that we all live for something that captures our imagination and heart, giving meaning to our lives, but without the intervention of the Holy Spirit, that will never be God.
If we look to created things to give us the meaning, hope and happiness that only God can give, we will be slaves to an idol, rather than to God. Abraham was called out of the ignorance of worshipping the moon, to serve and worship the living and true God. The promise he received was not easy to believe. Yet when God gave him the promised son, he loved him above all else.
When God asks him to sacrifice that son on a mountain (Genesis 22:2), he is asked to choose between the gift and the Giver—a choice that is impossible for us. We know that God has given us life, yet we cling to it as the only thing we have. When Abraham is willing to hand over his son (vv. 9–10), God shows him that His grace lies in the fact that He has provided a substitute: a ram is offered in his place (v. 13).
We are not saved by gazing at the stars, but by looking to the God who reveals Himself in Christ Jesus, for man may conquer the moon, but not his own heart.
Many years later on another mountain, which is not of the moon either, another Son is put to death on a cross. Only on that mountain there was no voice from heaven announcing his deliverance, but he cried out: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
The Father then paid the debt we all owe to God, in the deepest silence. We must therefore no longer view the universe as something empty or impersonal. It shows us that “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8:32).
That is why we are not saved by gazing at the stars, but by looking to the God who reveals himself in Christ Jesus. Man may conquer the moon, but not his own heart. The greatest adventure of life is not travelling into space, but trusting in the living God, who reveals Himself in mountains even more transcendent than those of the moon. The God who speaks on Sinai is the One who tells us on Calvary that His love is higher than the heavens and will never forsake us. For the Sun of Righteousness has overcome all injustice and will never be extinguished.