Reformation Apocalypticism: Münster’s Monster or Christian Nationalism
“It would be impossible for men to live together, unless they believed one another, as declaring the truth one to another.
Lies destroy the just administration of civil rulers (Prov.17:7; 29:12).
For Augustine, Rome’s fall was but another chapter in the unfolding providence of God—a theme that would become a Calvinistic calling card.
There was no reason to think that the Roman Empire, complete with its stunning collapse, should necessarily be seen as an apocalyptic fulfillment.
It was perhaps merely the latest instance of God “bringing princes to naught and reducing the rulers of this world to nothing. No sooner are they planted, no sooner are they sown … than he blows on them and they wither and a whirlwind sweeps them away like chaff” (Isa. 40:23–24 NIV). (David W. Hall, Calvin in the Public Square: Liberal Democracies, Rights, and Civil Liberties, The Calvin 500 Series (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2009), 5.
He brings princes to naught (Job 12:18; Isa 34:12)
and reduces the
rulers of this world to nothing. (Job 12:19; Am 2:3)
No sooner are
they planted,
no sooner are they sown,
no sooner do they take
root in the ground,
than he blows on them and they wither,
and a
whirlwind sweeps them away like chaff. (Job 24:24; Isa 41:2) TNIV.
In sum, Rome had substituted power for justice.
For Augustine, the task of the state was “remedial and protective,” and “a corrective device for the restraint of self-centered human beings.” He saw the state as a necessary but unnatural institution, insofar as it was erected primarily to restrain sin after the fall. Human governments, according to Augustine, had their origin in the consequences of the fall, not in the order of creation.
Seeing the Edenic fall as the origination of human governments inherently delimited both the successes as well as defeats that Christians might experience in political matters. Such a view necessarily de-emphasizes the political, or restores it to its proper perspective as less than all-dominating. Christians in the fifth century needed this reminder, as do Christians of all centuries.
Too close identification of any earthly polis with the heavenly polis, as both Augustine and Calvin taught, is a danger to avoid.
David W. Hall, Calvin in the Public Square: Liberal Democracies, Rights, and Civil Liberties, The Calvin 500 Series (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2009), 6.
Numerous scholars have traced Calvin’s political ideas. Among the various evaluations, Douglas Kelly identifies the
“sober Calvinian assessment of fallen man’s propensity to seize, increase, and abuse power for personal ends rather than for the welfare of the many.”
He further explains:
“Governmental principles for consent of the governed, and separation and balance of powers are all logical consequences of a most serious and Calvinian view of the biblical doctrine of the fall of man.”
David W. Hall, “Calvin on Human Government and the State,” in A Theological Guide to Calvin’s Institutes: Essays and Analysis, ed. David W. Hall and Peter A. Lillback, The Calvin 500 Series (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2015), 411–412.
To a large degree, historical forces determined the shape millennialism took in the Middle Ages. The early Middle Ages were not without chaos. But as long as Christendom remained a unity and the Catholic Church maintained a strong grip on society, the non-millenarian orthodoxy held sway. Fringe groups with their wild-eyed apocalyptic ideas were kept in check. Augustine’s non-millennialism remained the official position of the Catholic Church throughout the Middle Ages.
But the apocalyptic groups could no longer be corralled. Apocalypticism erupted with a vengeance. Joachim of Fiore’s ideas opened Pandora’s box. And millennial thinking has not been the same since. The critical events of the late Middle Ages—persecution, crop failures, the Black Death, social upheavals, and reform movements—all combined to produce a growing sense of apocalypticism in the late Middle Ages. (Richard Kyle, Apocalyptic Fever: End-Time Prophecies in Modern America (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2012), 34.)THE YEAR IS 1530. Protestant thought sweeps like a tornado across a European terrain that has altered little for a thousand years. Caught in the storm, the influential town of Strasbourg (now in France) is gripped by the same fears rampaging through Germany and the Netherlands. The stage is set for revolution. Melchoir Hoffman, a furrier, mounts the pulpit to preach another of his fiery apocalyptic sermons. The New Revelation is about to be unleashed...
most agree Melchoir Hoffman’s preaching was the most significant factor in launching the radical wing of the Reformation. His emphasis on a literal millennial reign of Jesus Christ on earth gripped the imagination of the Anabaptist movement...
Matthys proclaimed he was none other than Enoch, the second witness of the Book of Revelation. With a flowing black beard, the tall, gaunt figure was now the bearer of prophetic authority. Doubters were confronted with threats and intimidation. Those failing to embrace the second Enoch would be cast into hell with the devil and his angels...
If the reign of Christ was to begin, spiritual corruption from Roman Catholics and Lutherans (and all others failing to embrace Anabaptist doctrine) must be purged from the city.
Dissenters should be executed...controlling even the flow of information. All books except the Scriptures were burned in the cathedral square... Matthys now had the city in his grasp
On Easter Sunday 1534, Matthys descended on Bishop Waldeck like one of the apocalyptic four horsemen—but the ride was short. The bishop’s armed guards came to his defense. Matthys was stabbed with a pike, then decapitated. His head was hoisted on a pole for the citizens lining the city walls to observe.
Obbe Philips, a follower of Hoffman who rejected Matthys’s violence, wrote of Matthys, “He was so violent that even his enemies … were terrified of him, and finally in a tumult, they became too powerful for him, they were so incensed that they did not just kill him … but hacked and chopped him into little pieces.”
The faithful remnant was undeterred. Jan van Leyden picked up the mantle, anointed himself king, and began his messianic reign by running naked through Münster in wild religious ecstasy. He appointed 12 men in charge of the affairs of the city, instigating a reign of terror and wild innovations including polygamy. He indulged himself in excesses while subjecting the citizens to austerity. The new millennial kingdom was to be short lived.
The Weight of History
On May 25, 1535, the bishop’s army broke into Münster and quickly captured the city. Killing lasted for two days. When the bodies were finally piled in the cathedral square, the stench was overwhelming. Bernhard Rothman probably perished in the assault, and van Leyden and Knipperdolling were captured, tortured and put to death. The hopes for a New Jerusalem ended in a debacle.
Lutheran and Calvinist pessimism about human attempts to establish a Kingdom of God was reinforced.
Even today they generally continue their suspicion of all forms of both pre- and postmillennialism. The events in Münster had simply been too monstrous.
Anabaptism is a Christian movement which traces its origins to the Radical Reformation. The movement is generally seen as an offshoot of Protestantism.
Protestant fundamentalists regard the Bible as foundational for faith, and believe that if the Bible were found to be flawed, Christianity would collapse. They therefore also feel concerned at the prospect of more than one meaning to a biblical passage, for their foundation would then seem more like shifting sand than solid rock.
While they believe they base Christian faith on Scripture, in practice they base it on reason, or a particular deductive and inductive process by which they require Scripture to pass stringent rational and empirical assessments (Harris 2000).
Their position stems from an epistemological anxiety that we cannot know anything of Christ or God if we cannot first be sure that the Bible is (factually) reliable.(Harriet A. Harris, “Fundamentalism(s),” in The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Studies, ed. J. W. Rogerson and Judith M. Lieu, Oxford Handbooks (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 834.)
Calvin also alluded to the necessity for fixed laws and universal norms, warning that “many are necessarily injured, and no private interest is stable unless the law be without variation;
besides, when there is a liberty of changing laws, license succeeds in place of justice. For those who possess the supreme power, if corrupted by gifts, promulgate first one edict and then another.
Thus justice cannot flourish where change in the laws allows of so much license.” Of the need for resistance against a totalitarian power that wrongly attempts to command the conscience, Calvin noted that
“Daniel could not obey the edict [making public prayer a crime] without committing an atrocious insult against God and declining from piety.”
David W. Hall, “Calvin on Human Government and the State,” in A Theological Guide to Calvin’s Institutes: Essays and Analysis, ed. David W. Hall and Peter A. Lillback, The Calvin 500 Series (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2015), 429–430.
Calvin suggests that perverse rulers are not above the law and that they can be brought to justice by appointed representatives of the people when the need arises. This became the basis upon which the edifice of constitutional democracy was later to be raised.
The magistrate owes submission to the law of God and this is confirmed by means of the ordination or inauguration oath.
If the covenant is broken with the people, it is no longer binding on them in their relation to the sovereign.
Knox had argued that the right of rebellion against tyrannical and idolatrous rulers was not only that of the magistrates, or the nobility, but also of the elect. Rutherford followed suit by affirming that
‘the fountain of power remains most eminently in the people … therefore it is unlimited in the people and bounded and limited in the king, and so less in the king than in the people’.
The king is not above the people, because his power is received from the people and is communicated to him ‘in the manner and the measure that they think good’. The power of a monarch is only relative to an end, that of ‘the safety and good of his people’. They do not ‘break covenant when they put in action that natural power to conserve themselves.’ In fact the power of the ruler is not his, it is only delegated and remains the power of the people.
“a tyrant rules only by his own will and lust, whereas legitimate magistrates rule by counsel and by reason so as to determine how to bring about the greatest public welfare and benefit.” Calvin decried the oppressive custom of government servants
“taking part in the plundering to enrich themselves off the poor.”
In the Declaration of Independence the American people accused the British government of abuses, usurpations, despotism and tyranny. The King had exceeded his just powers. He had forbidden his governors to execute important laws until his assent had been obtained; he had repeatedly dissolved duly elected legislatures; he had made the judiciary dependent on his will; he had erected a harassing bureaucracy; he had made the military superior to the civil power; he had imposed taxes without the consent of the people; he had deprived them of trial by jury and transported them beyond the seas to be tried for pretended offenses.
Evidently the colonists thought that there were some things a government had no right to do.
So also when the Constitution brought into being the United States of America, a bill of rights had to be written into it. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.… The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.… The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. “Natural Law and Revelation,” Christianity Today (Washington, D.C.: Christianity Today, 1957), 20
By marking the beginning of this period with 1648, the Peace of Westphalia, we start the Enlightenment and the Awakenings in the aftermath of the Reformation. This follows a period of considerable violence, but also one of serious decline in religious life among the common people in Europe. The previous period was seen as one of seemingly interminable controversy, such that Christianity is seen as failing to provide a common ground for a livable peace. It did not enable a moral consensus.
The different ways of understanding the Christian faith kept Christians from recognizing other Christian groups as having a right to exist.
Ultimately, the various wars more-or-less associated with confessional strife come to an end. This, however, is not because of the churches, but rather the secular state. In this period, we see secular states and rulers becoming increasingly powerful. The beginning of this period is what is called Absolutism in politics—where the monarchy is more powerful than it had been in any period of Europe going back to ancient times. In the seventeenth century, we see an increasingly powerful state dealing with the mess of religion and its seemingly attendant disorder and violence.
In the Enlightenment, we witness a move toward what Charles Taylor calls the Modern Moral Order as a positive social ideal, as a way of thinking about the best way of ordering society. This is, more particularly, an order of mutual benefit. The highest goal in life should be human flourishing, and society should be structured such that we should benefit from one another.
There are echoes of voluntarism in this primary emphasis on freedom. The focus is not the content of the self but that the self is free, self-ruling. The autonomous self is a law (nomos) unto itself (auto). The modern self is centered around this primacy of will—you can choose and have the power to do this and not that.
Increasingly, the self will be seen as the only domain of meaning and purpose in the world. In fact, in Descartes when he talks about the image of God, what the image of God is for Descartes is the freedom of the will. Even though he is seeing the problems with having a Voluntarist conception of God, his understanding of humanity is after the model of the Voluntarist God. It is a holdover from the earlier version. It is an image of a primarily free being.
Scholar James Livingston summed it up well:
The Enlightenment represents the loosening of the state and society from ecclesiastical control and the emergence of a culture largely secular in character. The theories and sanctions of modern social and political life are no longer derived from biblical revelation or Church authority but independently arrived at by natural reason and social experience. An essential feature of the Enlightenment and of our modern culture since the eighteenth century is the growing separation of Western civilization from the authority of Church and theological dogma. (James C. Livingston, Modern Christian Thought From the Enlightenment to Vatican II ) Dan Story, Christianity on the Offense: Responding to the Beliefs and Assumptions of Spiritual Seekers (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 1998), 142.
When Thomas Jefferson, as a man of the Enlightenment who rejected the divine authority of Holy Scripture and called the Gospel writers ‘groveling authors’ who displayed ‘vulgar ignorance’ and transmuted ‘superstitions, fanaticisms, and fabrications’ and the apostles a ‘band of dupes and imposters’, and who cited...
belief in the Trinity as proof that ‘man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous’,
referred in the Declaration of Independence to the separate and equal station to which ‘the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God’ (a deist reference) entitle a people to assume, and when he declared certain ‘truths to be self-evident’, the first such truth being that ‘all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights’ (in the original draft Jefferson’s phrase was ‘are created equal and independent; that from that equal creation they are …’; a committee prevailed upon him to alter it to the present phrase), he was hardly providing adequate justification for the American revolution.
For what are these laws of nature which support his ‘self-evident truths’, and how are they to be universally and unambiguously discerned? They cannot be so discerned. Hence his ‘self-evident truths’, grounded as they are only in Enlightenment theory, are more an assertion than the conclusion of a logically impeccable, demonstrable argument.
The first question that must be addressed is this: Is natural law theory, grounded as it is in the presumption of the ‘inwardly written law’, sufficient to ground ethical behavior? Natural law theory contends that ‘there is, by the very virtue of human nature, an order or a disposition which human reason can discover.… The unwritten law, or Natural Law, is nothing more than that’ (J. Maritain).
This law of nature is considered superior to the statutes of the state; it is a norm for legislation; and a state is under obligation to confine its legislation within the limits prescribed by nature. But can human reason discover in human nature an order of morality that sets the norms for statutory law?
Are Thomas Jefferson’s ‘unalienable rights’, for example, ‘self-evident’ in the laws of nature, as he claimed?
He himself owned slaves. DNA testing has shown that he may have fathered the fifth child of one of these slaves, Sally Hemings by name. And the United States Constitution, as originally written, did not recognize slaves as full persons.
Can limitations on governments, can the protection of minorities against the actions of majorities, can individual rights and liberties be established and maintained on natural law? Can these things be established and maintained by an observation of nature? Robert L. Reymond, Paul, Missionary Theologian (Scotland: Christian Focus Publications, 2000), 486–487.
Immanuel Kant famously wrote in his Critique of Practical Reason: “Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” These are the two starting points for a natural theology both the natural law evident in the “starry heavens above”, and the moral law within, require a law-giver.
Christopher Ben Simpson, Modern Christian Theology (London; Oxford; New York; New Delhi; Sydney: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016), 45-46,49,54
Locke’s outlook shaped the religious thought of the eighteenth century. Be they Deist or orthodox, most thinkers of the century after Locke agreed that reason was to be given priority even in matters of faith, that revelation could not contradict reason, and that reason provided the essential foundation to religious belief
John Locke (1632-1704). Locke, a powerful thinker whose writings influenced America’s founders, was an opponent of what was called the “divine right of kings,” the idea, common in some European nations, that the king was anointed by God and thus his actions could not be questioned.
Locke would have none of that. He believed in a right to revolution and in his 1690 work Second Treatise of Government observed, “And where the body of the people, or any single man, is deprived of their right, or is under the exercise of a power without right, and have no appeal on earth, then they have a liberty to appeal to heaven, whenever they judge the cause of sufficient moment.”
It’s a nice rhetorical flourish, but not much more. And it’s ironic to see Locke embraced by Christian Nationalists. As church-state scholar Leo Pfeffer noted in his book Church, State and Freedom, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison took Locke’s limited view of religious toleration and made it much more expansive, crafting what we know today as the separation of church and state.
As part of the era’s great fears about the potential for governmental tyranny, more and more Americans were affirming that religion was a matter of conscience between God and the individual and should be exempt from the meddling of government at any level.
A growing number were also speaking out about the spiritual reasons demanding separation between church and state. Such a one was the leader of New England’s Baptists, Isaac Backus (1724–1806). During the Revolution, which he supported, Backus asked Massachusetts and Connecticut why they maintained establishments of religion that forced Baptists and other non-Congregationalists to support forms of Christianity that these others conscientiously opposed.
If the colonists were fighting Britain for liberty, Backus asked, why do the colonies themselves not grant religious liberty to their own residents?
The conversion of the population in the early United States by Methodists, Baptists, and like-minded innovators is one of the great stories in American Christian history. In 1790 something like only 10 percent of Americans professed membership in a Christian church. By the time of the Civil War, the proportion had multiplied several times. The active labors of the revivalists was the reason why
The problem with revivalism for the life of the mind, however, lay precisely in its ant traditionalism. Revivals called people to Christ as a way of escaping tradition, including traditional learning
This dismissal of tradition was no better illustrated than in a memorable comment by two Kentucky revivalists early in the nineteenth century. When quotations from Calvin were used to argue against Robert Marshall and J. Thompson, they replied, “We are not personally acquainted with the writings of John Calvin, nor are we certain how nearly we agree with his views of divine truth; neither do we care.”
Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1994), 63-65.
For the Calvinist these views are totally inadequate and unsatisfactory for the understanding of American life. They all approach the problem of our history either in terms of the aspirations and achievements of man as a sovereign and self-sufficient entity or in terms of a geographical environment which blindly directs and governs human destiny, robbing it of all purpose and meaning.
These schools of historical thought which look to either man himself or to nature as a frame of reference for their interpretations of the human past either explicitly or implicitly assume the sovereignty, perfectibility and self-sufficiency of man and seek the meaning of the stream of events without any reference to the Christian position. For their members humanism and scientific naturalism furnish all the necessary presuppositions for a philosophy of history. The world-and-life view found in the Scriptures is frankly rejected as having no possible value in the solution of such problems.
Puritanism, the prevailing philosophical and theological system not only in New England but in the life of many other colonies founded during the seventeenth century, is the key which both unlocks the door to the meaning of the colonial era and also brings to light the real nature of the American Revolution. Puritanism was essentially a world-and-life view, derived from the Scriptures, which determined not only the religious life of much of the seventeenth century, but which had much to say concerning the political, social, economic, educational and aesthetic activities of that period as well.
The intellectual history of the colonial era is largely the story of the gradual decline of this world-and-life view and the ensuing triumph of the philosophy of the Age of Reason. Those historians who have taken note of the decline of Puritanism as the prevailing influence in colonial life have failed for the most part, however, to take into account both the nature and the result of the rise of Deism; they fail to give adequate attention to the scope of that intellectual revolt. Some of them have been scarcely able to conceal their glee that the bastions of Calvinism in the New World had fallen and that the allegedly dark and gloomy philosophy of the Mathers and Jonathan Edwards had given place to the cheery optimism of deistic Unitarianism.
It must be followed by a deeper recognition of the changes which took place in the eighteenth century mind and of the far-reaching consequences of the American Revolution of 1776, which was far more than a mere political revolt and separation from Great Britain.
This eighteenth century revolt against Calvinism as a theology inevitably brought with it a repudiation of the world-and-life view inherent in Puritanism. The political, social, and economic philosophies which were derived from Puritanism could not long find nourishment in the arid soils of Deism and so they withered away and died at the roots.
It is not too much to say that the American Revolution of 1776 could not take place until the intellectual revolution in the colonial mind was a reality. Professor R. D. Mosier is profoundly correct when he insists that the absolutism of the God of Calvinism proved to be no less objectionable to the eighteenth century than the absolutism of the King of England and that Deism was opposed to any monarch on earth or in heaven.
In other words, the democratic philosophy of the eighteenth century by its very nature must oppose all sovereignty which claimed any transcendence over man.
The Enlightenment would limit God by natural law and political monarchy by the social contract. In admitting that political and religious radicalism went hand in hand, and that this revolutionary age demanded that both the absolute God of orthodox Christianity and the absolute king of England must henceforth rule by the consent of the governed, Mosier is setting forth the sharp antithesis which existed between the democratic philosophy which inspired the American Revolution and the political thought inherent in Puritanism. It is quite clear that the American Revolution was not only a revolt against the mother country, but also against the very foundations of the political system of England and the colonial regime as it had existed before 1776.
The denial of Calvinism led to the ultimate surrender of much of that which theology had contributed to colonial culture. Because the war against England led to far more than a mere political separation, because it was essentially the work of those who sought to reconstruct the whole of American life in terms of the democratic philosophy, the events of this era are of profound importance for the interpretation of the whole of our national development.
The leaders of the Revolution used and sanctified the philosophy of the Age of the Enlightenment and made it an important part of the American heritage.
The eighteenth century negation of the Puritan legacy was thus given a permanent status in the American scene and was destined to become an increasingly important factor in the political, social, and economic life of the American people who were, for the most part, unaware of the inherent tension existing between the legacy they had received from Puritanism and that which came to them from the Enlightenment. The philosophy of life derived from Deism has claimed the devotion of countless numbers who have had only a slight conception of the meaning of the movement to which they have given their allegiance.
That species of political liberalism which Jefferson and his colleagues represented rested upon a series of postulates which were quite contrary to historic Calvinism and which, if not checked, would inevitably result in a kind of government not in harmony with the Christian world-and-life view and equally opposed to the purposes of the Philadelphia Convention and its finished work. The assumptions that man is inherently good and potentially perfectible and that progress is not only possible, but almost inevitable lie at the very heart of the Jeffersonian political tradition and have inspired most of the important reform movements in our history even down to our own day.
This hostility toward the Biblical view of man and evil has not always been clearly visible to all those who enlisted under the banners of reform, but such is not the case with those who have been leaders. It is not too much to say that those national leaders of various reform movements who have enthusiastically championed the Jeffersonian tradition have done so with a full awareness and recognition of what was involved in taking such a stand.
There can be little doubt that the great majority of the reformers of the age of Jackson were seeking a type of democratic society which was based on postulates distinctly hostile to Christian orthodoxy. They were fully persuaded that man was innately good, and that if he were given that freedom which was his by natural right, he could eventually perfect himself and that society of which he was a part. It is interesting to note that the abolitionists were using social evolution as a theory several decades before Darwin invaded this country.
It is not the purpose of this essay to assess or evaluate all of the factors which brought about the secession of the South and the ensuing war, but it is quite apparent that there is much justification and support for the view so frequently expressed by Southern leadership of that day that the South was waging a war in behalf of orthodoxy and conservatism against Northern heresy and radicalism. Not only is this interpretation the clue to the position assumed by John C. Calhoun, but it was frequently expressed by leading Calvinists in Southern Presbyterianism.
The northern people, from the commencement of American history, have failed to seize the true idea of a republic. They have confounded it with democracy, from which it is as generically different as from monarchy itself. Republicanism with them is only democracy writ smaller, a merely mechanical device for condensing the masses and rendering practicable the government of the mob. They have pushed the doctrine to the verge of ungodliness and atheism in making the voice of the people the voice of God; in exalting the will of a numerical majority above the force of constitution and covenants, and in creating in the despotism of the mob the vilest and most irresponsible tyranny ever known in the annals of mankind.…
The “crowd” is the most dangerous and unstable of social institutions.
It has no history and no clear leader. Roman governors learned how to manipulate the crowds (mobs, multitudes) to extract the judgment desired. The governors were in turn frequently ruled and overruled by crowds. As of the present no New Testament scholar has appreciated how paradigmatically significant for the reconstruction of the history of, and for the appreciation of the social dynamics within, Jesus’ world are the sociological studies of “crowds.” James H. Charlesworth, Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls: With Internationally Renowned Experts (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1992).
This assertion of the self-sufficiency of man to solve his problems with reference to the past is quite indicative of the temper of Progressivism in America. It reflects an attitude which won an increasing adherence during the first half of the present century. In the political life of the nation it brought in its wake the conviction and assurance that modern man was quite able to solve his problems within the framework of the evolutionary philosophy without any reference to the political traditions of the Founding Fathers or to the outmoded doctrines of Calvinism.
As a consequence this Progressive movement in its political, economic and educational programs has shown a deep seated antagonism to orthodox Christianity and to that world-and-life view found in the Scriptures. The classical Christian outlook on God and man was not only rejected, but was regarded as a positive barrier to sound social and political advances. In the name of progress orthodoxy was to be banished from the American scene, and in its place there would be adopted an evolutionary philosophy which promised the realization of a thoroughly secularized democratic state in which the voice of the common people would speak with greater authority than the voice of God.
Unless contemporary conservatism becomes truly orthodox by a return to the Biblical view of man and his political activity, it must surely lose the battle of the century to a victorious democracy which will, if it is not checked, sweep the American people into some form of despotism which they do not want. Charles Gregg Singer, “An Approach to a Theological Interpretation of American History,” Westminster Theological Journal 20, no. 1 (1957): 41,45.
America is deeply populist, meaning that the wisdom of the common person is superior to that of the so-called experts. Some aspects of millennialism—especially its dispensational premillennial version—reverberate strongly with the popular culture.
Richard Kyle, Apocalyptic Fever: End-Time Prophecies in Modern America (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2012), 19.
Because evangelicals so thoroughly assumed the harmony of Christian faith and democratic America, they did not think comprehensively and foundationally about very real problems. Issues like the nagging political conflict between northern and southern states called out for fresh Christian thinking. Many other questions did too. How would this new land react to the growing numbers of immigrants? Was it a genuinely free country, or a land hospitable only to northern European Protestants?
Even before the Civil War, outsiders from Catholic Ireland and from Asia had been made to feel unwelcome in “the land of the free.” And this was to say nothing of the black population, whose bondage remained a gross contradiction to the lofty sentiments of the Declaration of Independence. Did American democracy have a place for one if one was black? Content as they were with the democratic assumptions of the United States, evangelicals gave very little thought to such matters.
Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1994), 74.
The gift of logical reason was given by God to man in order that he might order the revelation of God for himself. It was not given him that he might by means of it legislate as to what is possible and what is actual. When man makes a “system” for himself of the content of revelation given him in Scripture, this system is subject to, not independent of, Scripture. Thus the idea of system employed by the Christian is quite different from the idea of system as employed in modern philosophy. Cornelius Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology (The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company: Phillipsburg, NJ, 1979), 256.
A fourth variety of Enlightenment, however, received a very different reception in Protestant America. This didactic Enlightenment, which has recently been the subject of fresh scholarly attention, was largely a product of Scotland. There three generations of philosophers and moralists—among whom Francis Hutcheson, Thomas Reid, Adam Smith, and Dugald Stewart were the leaders—struggled to restore intellectual confidence and social cohesion to the Enlightenment ideal.
They achieved these goals by arguing that all humans possessed, by nature, a common set of capacities—both epistemological and ethical—through which they could grasp the basic realities of nature and morality. Moreover, these human capacities could be studied as scientifically as Newton studied the physical world.
Such rigorous study, especially of consciousness, would yield laws for human behavior and ethics every bit as scientific as Newton’s conclusions about nature. In the United States this Scottish form of Enlightenment came to dominate intellectual life for more than the first half-century of the nation’s history.
A wealth of outstanding writing has recently illuminated the way in which evangelicals made the Enlightenment their own. But still there is something of a mystery about it. How did a Protestant tradition rooted in the Reformation and recently renewed by the revivalism of John Wesley, George Whitefield, and Jonathan Edwards come to express itself so thoroughly in the language of the Enlightenment? Protestant traditions from the Reformation as well as the major themes of the revival had stressed human incapacities more than natural human abilities, and both had stressed the evil effects of sin on the mind more than confidence in human reason.
Jonathan Edwards, America’s most important evangelical thinker of the eighteenth century, had called into question the notion of human nature that was so important to the ethics of the Scottish Enlightenment. He also resisted the Enlightenment tendency to let the scientific procedures practiced by Newton dictate an ideal way of working in theology and all other fields.
Along with Edwards, all major evangelical leaders of the mid-eighteenth century defended the Reformation’s view of human nature and denied that people had a “natural” moral sense by which they could understand what was both true and in their best interest. Yet this idea of humanity was critical for the didactic Enlightenment, and by the early nineteenth century it became a widely accepted assumption of America’s evangelicals.
The particularly Enlightenment character of this reasoning was its trust in objectivity, its devotion to a principle of privileged scientific inquiry. Protestant commitment to this form of the Enlightenment was thoroughgoing because it seemed to work so well—it could justify the rebellion, it did establish social order through a Constitution infused with the principles of moral philosophy, and it did make way for nearly a century’s triumphant vindication of traditional Protestantism.
Evangelical commitment to this form of the Enlightenment became deeply ingrained, not only because it was so successful, but also because it was so intuitive, so instinctual, so much a part of second nature. For much of the history of the United States, evangelicals denied that they had a philosophy. They were merely pursuing common sense. The utility of this kind of Enlightenment reasoning was apparent.
It was, most obviously, a mainstay of political argument.
What weight could the traditional authority of the king in Parliament carry against the “self-evident truths,” the “unalienable rights,” or “the laws of nature” proclaimed by the Declaration of Independence?
What need was there for a careful rebuttal of authorities, or even a careful perusal of Scripture, to justify rebellion, if it was transparent to the moral sense that such a rebellion was necessary?
Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1994), 84-88.
Closely related to the evangelical reliance upon scientific reason was dependence upon intuitive common sense, which was everywhere considered the basis for reliable knowledge. Nothing worked better at squelching the deism that Tom Paine promoted, said the lay activist Elias Boudinot, than simply “the rules of common sense.” Timothy Dwight praised common sense as “the most valuable faculty … of man” and regularly used it to begin and sustain arguments. The same faith in intuition served the New Haven Theology as it counterattacked the Unitarians and modified Edwards’s theory of the will. To accomplish the latter, Nathaniel William Taylor urged,
“Let a man look into his own breast, and he cannot but perceive … inward freedom—for if freedom be not in the mind it is nowhere. And liberty in the mind implies self-determination.”
In a word, the basic principle of the Scottish philosophy—that people could reason naturally from the evidence of their own consciousness to the existence of God and the validity of traditional morality—had become very widespread by the early nineteenth century. Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1994), 92,93.
Common Sense Philosophy was for a time (until about 1850) a distinctively national philosophy. It had a great appeal to many Scottish ministers who liked its emphasis on intuitive principles and self-evident truth. Both moderates and evangelicals in the Church of Scotland readily espoused it and saw it as a powerful tool against skepticism.
They held that God planted self-evident truth in man. Indeed, some went on to say that God was one of the self-evident truths.
That God exists is a self-evident truth that any rational person, not blinded by prejudice, would accept.
Therein is the weakness of the theory. Where in all the world is there an unregenerate man not blinded by his own sin? Totally depraved men have their understanding darkened. The light that is in them is darkness. The principles the Realists sought to establish were real enough, but not self-evident to the depraved and darkened mind of fallen man.
Alan Cairns, Dictionary of Theological Terms (Belfast; Greenville, SC: Ambassador Emerald International, 2002), 102.
The colonists’ reasons for migration were varied, but John Winthrop’s leadership gave the movement a unified vision and a sense of Christian mission. As the Arabella neared Massachusetts Bay, Winthrop enunciated his vision in his famous lay sermon
“A Modell of Christian Charity.”
He compared the Puritan journey from England with Israel’s exodus from Egypt. They were escaping a land where a godless state governed the church and where the sins of centuries dominated the people’s thinking and way of life.
They would build a new England in the New World—the Promised Land. Their success or failure would depend upon whether they were faithful to God’s covenant. Winthrop saw the Puritan migration to the New World as a chance to build a society governed by God’s true people and God’s principles for holy living. Might not New England become the very kingdom of God?
In support of Winthrop’s vision, the civil magistrates attempted to maintain both moral purity and theological conformity among the people. This led to the civil government’s domination of the New England church, one of the very reasons they had left England.
The demand for theological conformity also led to the exiling of a number of well-known figures, including Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams. Despite the eventual failure of Winthrop’s “kingdom experiment,” his belief that America had a moral and spiritual mission to the world endures to this day in American political thought.(M.R. Norton, “Winthrop, John,” ed. J.D. Douglas and Philip W. Comfort, Who’s Who in Christian History (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1992), 730–731.)
Several American colonies followed the European example of having an established church, but when the new nation gained independence, none had sufficient power to become the dominant national religion.
This contributed to the provisions for religious liberty and the separation of church and state guaranteed by the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution.
Both as cause and effect, it provided for the denominational pattern of tolerance and freedom for every religious group as long as it does not subvert the state or violate the rights of others.
Immigrants from nations with established Anglican, Reformed, Catholic, Lutheran or Orthodox churches were no longer part of a dominant national religion but of only a minority religious body coexisting with hundreds of others. Since there was no established “church,” “sects” could not be defined as splinters from it.(Daniel G. Reid et al., Dictionary of Christianity in America (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1990).)
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson was inaugurated the third president of the United States on March 4, 1801, following one of the most bitterly contested presidential elections in American history.
In the days before the election, the Gazette of the United States, a leading Federalist newspaper, posed the “grand question” of whether Americans should vote for “GOD—AND A RELIGIOUS PRESIDENT [John Adams]; or impiously declare for JEFFERSON—AND NO GOD!!!”
Jefferson’s Federalist foes did not invent the stinging accusation that he was an infidel. Years before, his ardent advocacy for disestablishment in Virginia had led many pious Americans to conclude that Jefferson was, if not an enemy of religion, at least indifferent towards organized religion’s vital role in civic life.
The publication of his Notes on the State of Virginia in the mid-1780s exacerbated these fears. He wrote,
“It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
This passage came back to haunt him in the 1800 campaign. Detractors said this proved he was an infidel or, worse, an atheist.
In an influential pamphlet published in 1800, William Linn, a Dutch Reformed clergyman, warned that a vote for Jefferson “must be construed into no less than rebellion against God.”
He added ominously that the promotion of an infidel to high office would encourage public immorality and lead to the “destruction of all social order and happiness.”
Jefferson’s “favorite wish,” Mitchell charged, is-
“to see a government administered without any religious principle among either rulers or ruled.”
He repudiated the notion gaining currency among Jeffersonians that “Religion has nothing to do with politics.”
Jeffersonian partisans denied that their candidate was an atheist and advanced a separationist policy that would eventually exert much influence on American politics.
“Religion and government are equally necessary,” said Tunis Wortman, “but their interests should be kept separate and distinct.
No legitimate connection can ever subsist between them. Upon no plan, no system, can they become united, without endangering the purity and usefulness of both—the church will corrupt the state, and the state pollute the church.”
Although Jefferson’s beliefs drew the most attention, John Adams was not immune from political smears on account of religion.
When President Adams recommended a national “day of solemn humiliation, fasting, and prayer”
in March 1799, political adversaries depicted him as a tool of establishmentarians intent on legally uniting a specific church with the new federal government.
This allegation alarmed religious dissenters, such as the Baptists, who feared persecution by a state church. “A general suspicion prevailed,”
Adams recounted a decade later,
“that the Presbyterian Church [which was presumed to be behind the national day of prayer] was ambitious and aimed at an establishment as a national church.”
Although disclaiming any involvement in such a scheme, Adams ruefully reported that he “was represented as a Presbyterian and at the head of this political and ecclesiastical project.
The secret whisper ran through all the sects,
“Let us have Jefferson, Madison, Burr, anybody, whether they be philosophers, Deists, or even atheists, rather than a Presbyterian President.”
Adams thought the controversy, which drove dissenters into Jefferson’s camp, cost him the election.
An anguished Jefferson compared his persecution at the hands of critics—especially among the New England clergy—with the crucified Christ:
“from the clergy I expect no mercy. They crucified their Savior, who preached that their kingdom was not of this world; and all who practice on that precept must expect the extreme of their wrath.
“The laws of the present day withhold their hands from blood; but lies and slander still remain to them.”
The Danbury Baptists were a beleaguered religious minority in a state where Congregationalism was the established church. They celebrated Jefferson’s advocacy for religious liberty and chastised those who criticized him
“because he will not, dares not assume the prerogative of Jehovah and make Laws to govern the Kingdom of Christ.”
They expressed a heartfelt desire “that the sentiments of our beloved President, which have had such genial Effect already, like the radiant beams of the Sun, will shine & prevail through all these States and all the world till Hierarchy and tyranny be destroyed from the Earth.”
Daniel L. Dreisbach, “The Wall of Separation,” Christian History Magazine-Issue 99: Faith & the American Presidency (Carol Stream, IL: Christianity Today, 2008).
Presbyterian General Assembly, Philadelphia was the chosen city was ironic: it was the cradle both of American Presbyterianism (being the location of the first presbytery in 1706 and the site of the first General Assembly in 1789) and of the nation (in which city both the Declaration of Independence, 1776, and the Constitution, 1789, were adopted). It was also quite a patriotic city and made it difficult to resist patriotic demands on the 1861 General Assembly to issue a strongly pro-Union statement.
Hodge made it abundantly clear in his writing and in the debate on the floor of the General Assembly over the Gardiner Spring Resolutions that he was a fervent Lincoln supporter and an ardent Union man.
Nevertheless, because he firmly believed that the Gardiner Spring Resolutions decided a political question, something no assembly should do, Hodge, and those who joined him in protest, put it like this:
We make this protest, not because we do not acknowledge loyalty to our country to be a moral and religious duty, according to the word of God, which requires us to be subject to the powers that be; nor because we deny the right of the Assembly to enjoin that, and all other like duties, on the ministers and churches under its care-
but because we deny the right of the General Assembly to decide the political question, to what government the allegiance of Presbyterians as citizens is due, and its rights to make that decision a condition of membership in our Church.
As for the demands of the 1865 General Assembly exceeding those of the civil government itself, that is startlingly true. Hodge wrote,
The United States authorities require of those who participated in the rebellion, no expression of contrition, no renunciation of political theories, no avowal of approbation of the measures of the government for the preservation of the Union and abrogation of slavery, but the simple promise of obedience to the laws and allegiance to the government.
This is another indication that the ecclesiastical sphere was as politicized, if not more so, than the civil one. Hodge concluded,
“It seems rather incongruous that a church court should assume to be more loyal than the government which it desires to support.”
Alan D. Strange, Empowered Witness: Politics, Culture, and the Spiritual Mission of the Church (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2023), 62,84–85.
According to Lincoln in his Second Inaugural, the principle of “government of the people, by the people, for the people” was the “last, best hope of the earth,” a hope which Americans fighting to save the Union might “nobly save or meanly lose.”
How might they lose it? The context of Lincoln’s address gives on explanation. Lincoln had noted that both North and South “read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other.”
Clearly, the prayers of both could not be answered because “the Almighty has his own purposes” which men might not understand, even after endeavoring to do their best in the light afforded them. This being so, there should be no room for pride or boasting on the part of the North, and victory, if it came, must be met.
“with malice toward none; with charity for all.”
Lincoln’s insight, birthed in the pain of a civil war, is an example of the “nation under God” type of civil religion to which the Church can say “Yes.”
To be “under God” does not mean to wrap the nation’s acts in a righteous mantle; it does not mean confusing the trappings of religion (whether it is “In God We Trust” on our coins or prayer in public schools) as the same as authentic faith.
There may well be a place for religious imagery, including mottos on coins and prayer in the schools, as we negotiate that fine line between Church and State in our society, but even if such symbols are accepted in our society~ the civil religion represented by Lincoln reminds us that we should be humble in our judgments about our individual or national grasp of God’s will.
Toleration of other’s faith commitments is required not only because we must live together in a pluralistic society, but also because we are imperfect and stand equally under God’s scrutiny.
T. Furman Hewitt, “Civil Religion: Alive—And Sometimes Dangerous,” Faith and Mission 4, no. 2 (1986): 59.
Theologians such as Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer saw in the rise of Hitler’s Germany a counterfeit eschatology that could not be opposed by the “God-consciousness” kingdom of Protestant liberalism.
Hitler’s “thousand-year Reich” was a thinly veiled pagan reinterpretation of the “thousand-year reign” of Christ pictured in the Apocalypse. In the Barmen Declaration of 1934, Barth opposed the
“German Christian” movement that sought to co-opt Christian churches for the Nazi state.
(Russell D. Moore, “Personal and Cosmic Eschatology,” in A Theology for the Church (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2014),689- 690.)
“We reject the false doctrine, as though there were areas of our life in which we would not belong to Jesus Christ, but to other lords—areas in which we would not need justification and sanctification through him.”
Less than two weeks later two prominent Lutheran theologians at Erlangen—Althaus and Werner Elert—put together a document that was intended to express the “voice of genuine Lutheranism.” Called the Ansbach Proposal (Ratschlag), it was signed by six other persons.
It is formulated as a response to the Barmen Declaration.
The natural orders establish our entire natural existence and are the means by which God creates and preserves our earthly life. Christians are thankful for every order because they are tools for realizing the divine purposes. Recognizing this fact,
we give thanks to God the Lord for bestowing the Führer (i.e. Adolf Hitler) as “a pious and faithful chief of state”
upon our people in their time of need, just as we thank God for desiring to grant us “good government,” a government with “discipline and honor,” in the form of the National-Socialist state.
For this reason, we recognize that we are held responsible before God to assist the Führer in his work through our respective vocations and professions.
Backed up by thinking like this, many if not most German Lutherans remained loyal to Hitler to the end. He was still the authority ordained by God in the sense of Romans. 13.
Also by accepting the doctrine of the orders one could arrive at the position articulated by Friedrich Gogarten:
“The claim of the church upon man does not negate the claims of the state. For the church claims man in his eternal life while the state may claim the totality of his earthly existence.”
Or, as Stapel crudely put it:
“Everything concerning justice and morality belongs to the totalitarian state. Everything that concerns the kingdom of heaven belongs to the church.”
Richard V. Pierard, “The Lutheran Two-Kingdoms Doctrine and Subservience to the State in Modern Germany,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 29, no. 2 (1986): 202.
Liberty today more than ever needs to be defended from totalitarian encroachments. Not only is there the brutality of reducing a populace to the level of abject slavery, with a controlled church to applaud its atheistic rulers; but also in western lands the burdens and budgets, the regulations and controls, become constantly more onerous. The tenth article of the bill of rights is almost a dead letter.
Can limitations on governments, can the protection of minorities from majority action, can individual rights and liberties be rationally maintained? Or does democracy mean mob rule?
“Natural Law and Revelation,” Christianity Today (Washington, D.C.: Christianity Today, 1957), 20.
Religious freedom means not only that the state cannot establish a Church, but that Christians individually and collectively retain the “freedom to distinguish between penultimate human powers [i.e., government] and ultimate divine powers ”
(Eric Gritsch, “An American Dilemma: God and the Constitution,” Report from the Capitol, 41 (July-August 1986).
The government is not God; government stands under divine scrutiny no matter what policy or party dominates; government should not be identified, even tacitly, as an extension of the Church.
Christians who cherish true religious freedom cannot agree to the creation of a theocracy even were they to have overwhelming numerical superiority.
We are not and never have been a “Christian” nation in a formal sense, but rather a nation with a religious self-understanding where Christians are free to worship and evangelize and influence from within that nation.
At its best, the civil religion reminds us that we have not only freedom of and for religion (we are free to speak our opinions and we are free from the tyranny of a state which would tell us what to believe), we have freedom from religion if we wish it.
The noble American experiment of a “free Church in a free state” is, however, a “fragile possession” which depends upon the good will and informed opinion of people, government and Churches.
Unfortunately, there are those among us who would gladly tell us what to believe and how to act. As one television preacher said:
“I have a divine mandate to go right into the halls of Congress and fight for laws that will save America. He [God] has called me to take this action
(Cited in Paul D. Simmons, “Religious Liberty Under Fire,” Report from the Capitol 41 (March 1986).
A civil religion which either idolizes the State or puts a particular religious community or set of beliefs in control of the State is oppressive; it forgets the nature of the social contract in America, and it borders on idolatry and pride.
A civil religion which is more true to the American experience as well as to Christian teaching remembers that the State is a penultimate authority and that the great danger to democracy and the pursuit of truth, including religious truth, is any tendency to “suppress dissent, control… thought and freedom of expression, muzzle… minds and ban books.”
T. Furman Hewitt, “Civil Religion: Alive—And Sometimes Dangerous,” Faith and Mission 4, no. 2 (1986): 57.
One of the most characteristic tactics of what Peck calls evil people is scapegoating.
The proud have to keep themselves “above reproach,” and so they must “lash out at anyone who does reproach them.
They sacrifice others to preserve their self-image of perfection” (Peck 1998: 73). This sometimes takes the form of imposing burdens on others.
Peck defines “evil” as “the exercise of political power—that is, the imposition of one’s will upon others by overt or covert coercion—in order to avoid spiritual growth”.
The proud “attack others instead of facing their own failures.
Spiritual growth requires the acknowledgment of one’s need to grow. If we cannot make that acknowledgement, we have no option except to eradicate the evidence of our own imperfection.”
Unlike “psychopaths,” evil people do have a sense of sin and imperfection, but “they are continually engaged in sweeping the evidence of their evil under the rug of their consciousness … Evil originates not in the absence of guilt but in the effort to escape it” (Peck 1998: 76).
The disguise, the cover-up, is sometimes more obvious than the evil itself.
The face of God is salvation. The Aaronic benediction is a promise of the Lord’s face and countenance upon us. It is a good thing to be before the face of God. When God shines his face on us, he lifts up our faces so that we can be face to face with him. It can be a good thing. Being before his face is also a position of exposure and scrutiny.
That is what the kings want to avoid. They want to avoid the saving pain of judgment and self-examination.
Peter J. Leithart, Revelation, ed. Michael Allen and Scott R. Swain, vol. 1, The International Theological Commentary on the Holy Scripture of the Old and New Testaments (London; Oxford; New York; New Delhi; Sydney: Bloomsbury; Bloomsbury T&T Clark: An Imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2018), 317.
is this what Christian Nationalism looks like? Lord have Mercy
Comments
Post a Comment