Replies

Fascinating article Gamecock. One cannot discount the contributions of the Calvinists. The remark about Methodists is a bit of cheap shot, since there just weren't that many at the time, but we can overlook that.

From 1706 to the opening of the revolutionary struggle the only body in existence which stood for our present national political organization was the General Synod of the American Presbyterian Church. It alone among ecclesiastical and political colonial organizations exercised authority, derived from the colonists themselves, over bodies of Americans scattered through all the colonies from New England to Georgia.

I question this as a Virginian more than as a non-Calvinist. It ignores the Virginia House of Burgesses established in 1619. Granted, they were subject to the veto power of the Governor and up the line. But they were authorized to make laws concerning the governing of the colonies. And, in their present form as the Virginia General Assembly, they remain the oldest continuous law-making body in the New World.

George Washington and Patrick Henry were members of this body.

Fascinating article Gamecock. One cannot discount the contributions of the Calvinists.

If I can find it, I will post (or at least link to) an article about the Dutch Calvnist influence on the Declaration of Independence itself. In looking for it, I did come up with this gem...

The Religious Backdrop of the Declaration of Independence

...although the fashionable eighteenth century Deism may have pervaded some intellectual circles, the prevailing spirit of Americans before and after the War of Independence was essentially Calvinistic."

This article is an exercise in logical fallacies.

Just because people who attended Presbyterian Churches in America were a predominant factor in the revolution against England does not in any way mean that it was the soteriology of the revolutionaries that led to the revolution. That jump is simply not proven in the article at all. It is a pro hoc ergo proctor hoc argument, ie, The revolutionaries were principally Calvinist, therefore Calvinism was the principal cause of the revolution.

Using that logic we could just as easily state that Lutheranism was responsible for the Holocaust.

From 1706 to the opening of the revolutionary struggle the only body in existence which stood for our present national political organization was the General Synod of the American Presbyterian Church. It alone among ecclesiastical and political colonial organizations exercised authority, derived from the colonists themselves, over bodies of Americans scattered through all the colonies from New England to Georgia. ~~ I question this as a Virginian more than as a non-Calvinist. It ignores the Virginia House of Burgesses established in 1619. Granted, they were subject to the veto power of the Governor and up the line. But they were authorized to make laws concerning the governing of the colonies. And, in their present form as the Virginia General Assembly, they remain the oldest continuous law-making body in the New World. George Washington and Patrick Henry were members of this body.

Boettner's point is that the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church was the only model of a trans-colonial, All-American national organization over-arching all the individual Colonies as a distinctly-American National "Government" (in ecclesiastical matters, at least for Americans who were Presbyterian). I don't believe that a Massachusetts Presbyterian would have been governed in any significant respect by the Civil Laws of the Virginia House of Burgesses; but both a Massachusetts Presbyterian and a Virginia Presbyterian were equally governed by the Church Law of the General Assembly.