Which Document is the Best Defender of American Freedoms

But we were speaking of the Constitution. Human freedom simply never existed, from the death of Christ, until the US Constitution was written.

Also,,,if you follow the US constitution, you are then utterly free *as an individual* to live according to the Bible. This is another of it’s amazing qualities. Throughout history, people who try to use the Bible as a basis of government ALWAYS fall under the despotism of who gets to interpret it. I cannot think of any example otherwise,,unless the definition of “freedom” gets really tortured.

>What is that? I dunno.....
>Ooh, let’s poke it with a stick!

Hey, poking things with a stick can be fun.
See my plan for poking the Federal Government: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2698298/posts
Or a State Government: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2711585/posts [less polished, I admit]

1. Where? The period of the Judges. The kingship was the result of the rejection of God’s law and sin. The direct antecedent, however, is found in the ecclesiology and resistance theology of the Reformation, and most directly from the Puritans. Ranke, Bancroft and many other historians close to the Founding recognized this. The point I was making, however, is not that the Bible provided all of the mechanics, but rather that it provided the underlying worldview. See Eidsmoe’s Christianity and the Constitution, for example. Regarding the mechanics for dealing with man’s “depravity”, Montesquieu was a major influence.

2. Two standard contemporary works that will put the issue in perspective for you are P. Hamburger’s “Separation of Church and State” (Univ. Chicago) and Daniel Driesbach’s “Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation”. The false meaning of the “separation” phrase, which has no Constitutional warrant, was a product of the mid 19th Century anti-Catholic movements (e.g. Know Nothings), and was subsequently adopted and championed by the KKK and the secular humanists in the 20th Century. The opinion in Everson, which is a deliberate distortion of the First Amendment, was written by a Klansman (Hugo Black) known to have virulently anti-Catholic views.

Hmm, A thinking, planning, bitter clinger.

You will not be needed in the new order.

You will be as-simulated.

A Hellenist dictator with papyrus lollipops in his mouth only sees immediate gratification and priviledges, while others see a greater future yet with greater priviledges. The latter’s inheritence through patience makes them furiously jealous.

And you are eternally w-r-o-n-g! Wrong pal.

Could you cite the chapter(s) and verse(s) regarding a republican form of government in the Bible?

Did any of the Founders cite the above passages in their writings on republican government, as they did the Roman Republic?

Perhaps the apparent issue has to do with the distinction between the substance of the ideas behind the Constitution (that a government can be limited by the God-given rights of the people) and the Constitution’s forms.

As I pointed out, the worldview that informed the Constitution was Christian. For the colonists, the entire idea of a people joined together by a compact or Constitution had a foundation in the covenantal traditions in the OT and had its most direct antecedents in Reformed Christianity, which was the overwhelming version of Christianity in the colonies at the time of the Founding and before.

This is why pre-PC historians and scholars such as Ranke, D’Aubigne, Bancroft, and Castelar describe Calvin as the true “father” of America. Interestingly, this was echoed in an oblique way by Prime Minister Horace Walpole during the War for Independence when he sneeringly said “Cousin America has run off with a Presbyterian Parson”. In both England and America the war was seen as round 2 of the English Civil War, which was fought by Reformed Christians to secure the role of Parliament as the governing body of Britain and to destroy absolute monarchy.

Paige Smith, a very well known secular (I believe) historian who taught in the University of California system and who produced the last multivolume history of the US, describes the Constitution as the final expression of Calvinism in America. As I also pointed out there is also ample precedent in the Bible for leaders to be chosen by the people.

This perspective was very much a part of the Reformation. Moreover, in Europe and in the colonies differences in ecclesiology were viewed as joined with and mirroring forms of civil government. The American Congregationalists and Presbyterians during the colonial period and after objected to Catholicism, for example, because of its “monarchical” ecclesiology, which they believed would lead to a monarchical form of civil government.

Let’s look at evidence of colonial influences.

In the Lutz and Hyneman study, which reviewed American books, pamphlets, newspaper articles, and monographs with explicit political content published between 1760 and 1805 for references to other sources, they found that the most cited book was the Bible (34% of all citations). Common law writers, such as Blackstone (whose views of law were explicitly Christian) constituted 11% of the citations. Whig writers (again predominantly Christian), were 18%. Christian writers such as Locke, Pufendorf, Grotius, and Montesquieu were 16% of the references. Peers of the writers were 4%.

Lutz and Hyneman note that the Biblical references were disproportionately from Deuteronomy because of its legal content. This is reflective of earlier colonial practice in which colonies often annotated their statutes with Biblical references to justify the law in question.

This is easily seen in a volume containing the early colonial laws, “constitutions”, compacts, and charters published by Liberty Fund. You will also find that Christianity and its principles figure prominently in the state constitutional ratification convention debates.

On the other hand, Lutz and Hyneman found that references to classical writers constituted only 2% of the references during the period, while secular “Enlightenment” writers such as Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, etc. were 6% of the references.

If we turn to education, virtually the entirety of the founding generation was taught to read using the New England Primer (Hamilton is a likely exception). That primer explicitly taught children a Christian worldview and catechism - even in the ABCs (e.g.”In Adam’s fall we sinned all.”)

Although many believe that the biggest pre-war controversy between England and the colonies was taxation, Dr. Archie Jones and others have pointed out that far more attention was given to the “Episcopal Controversy” in the colonial press than issues of taxation. It might seem odd that I keep coming back to ecclesiology, but the colonists, particularly in New England, saw civil government and church government through the same lens. Church government in the colonies was “republican”, in varying forms. Colonial civil governments also followed that pattern.

As I am sure you know, part of the pre-war controversy had to do, of course, with Britain’s attempt to strip republican forms of colonial civil government of their power. This was seen as paralleling the attempt by Britain to subvert republican forms of church government by imposing an episcopal form of church government on the colonies.

In a deeper sense, the famous New England “town meeting” was a church meeting. The meetings took place in churches, and typically only Christians held the franchise. In fact, for a good deal of Massachusetts’ colonial history only Congregationalists were allowed to vote in civil elections.

The restrictions on the franchise are not surprising because at the time of the Revolution all states had either established Christian denominations or Christian religious settlements. In fact, the Congregational church was not fully disestablished in Massachusetts until 1833.

This diverse pattern of establishments and settlements was the precise reason for the First Amendment’s Religion Clauses. The point was that the states did not want the federal government to which they had ceded very limited powers to interfere with state arrangements regarding Christianity and religion. In particular, they didn’t want the federal government to try to establish a national denomination such as Britain’s Church of England. This, also, is a reflection of the colonist’s memory of the Tudors, Stuarts, and the English Civil War.

Now, the exact mechanics of the federal government were obviously not taken from the Bible or from any other single source. Pieces of our system were taken from various sources, and Montesqueiu’s work was viewed as a very helpful resource for trying to get an empirical/historical grasp of how institutions and their structures contribute to (not determine)social outcomes.

Nevertheless the driving force behind the efforts of those who were trying to figure out how to prevent the federal government from becoming despotic was a Calvinistic or Reformed view of human nature, as Eidsmoe and many other writers have pointed out. Our sin nature was seen as leading any man or group of men entrusted with great power toward despotism. This is why the division of powers within the federal government, between the federal and state governments, and within state governments was viewed as so important.

But when someone asks whether the Bible or the Constituion is the best defender of our freedom, I would suggest that the Constitution establishes institutions and powers. How they are used - indeed whether they are used in a manner consistent with the Constitution itself - depends on something far deeper: the beliefs, the values, and character of the people.

This is why John Adams warned: “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion.”

Like other Founders and those in the Founding generation, Adams firmly believed that the U.S. Constitution would not be able to sustain our liberties if the American people abandon virtue and religion:

“Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

To take another example, William Paterson, a signer of the Constitution from New Jersey and Supreme Court Justice appointed by Washington, also understood the importance of promoting religion among the citizenry. “Religion and
morality are necessary to good government, good order, and good laws,” he wrote, “for when the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice.”

The point Adams and many others were making is that sustaining the form of government created under the Constitution depended on the Christian character of the people. A people who lose their ability for personal Christian self-government will ultimately lose their free form of civil government. I believe the Founding generation (and other Reformed Christians) were right about this, and this is why I come out on the side of the Bible in the question that was asked.

In fact, I would suggest that in our post-Christian culture we have effctively lost the Constitution. The forms survive, but the substance is gone, much like the Roman Republic in the days of Caesar Augustus and after. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Caligula’s horse were to be elected to the Senate...wait, I think he has already been elected President.

That is a bit of a no-brainer. With the Bible we could create a new Constitution, without the bible no Constitution we could create would be as good.