America the exceptional
John Quincy Adams expressed the sentiments of many of the Founders when he wrote of the importance of the Bible and Christianity in the nation’s founding.
The highest glory of the American Revolution was this; it connected in one indissoluble bond the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity…From the day of the Declaration…they (the American people), were bound by the laws of God, which they all, and by the laws of their Gospel, which they nearly all, acknowledge as the rules of conduct.[1]
The remarkable strength and vitality of the American church from its very beginning with the Pilgrims in 1620 until the mid-nineteenth century can be attributed to the American church’s success in countering Satan’s twofold attack as previously described. The European reformers had begun the reformation process. The American church’s continued devotion to the Bible as the final authority of truth greatly influenced the formation of the political structure of the United States. As a result, America became most successful nation in the history of the world, and soon after its founding, many nations recognized the exceptional nature of the American Republic.
A Frenchman named Alexis de Tocqueville traveled to the United States in 1831 to find out the reasons for America’s success. For nine months he traveled throughout the nation to observe all facets of life in America and wrote of his findings in Democracy in America.
On my arrival in the United States, it was the religious atmosphere which first struck me. As I extended my stay, I could observe the political consequences which flowed from this novel situation. In France I had seen the spirit of religion moving in the opposite direction to that of the spirit of freedom. In America I found them intimately linked together in joint reign over the same land.
…America is still the country in the world where the Christian religion has retained the greatest real power over people’s souls and nothing shows better how useful and natural religion is to man, since the country where it exerts the greatest sway is also the most enlightened and free.[2]
Tocqueville’s first-hand account provided ample evidence that America’s exceptionalism was the result of the centrality of religion and especially Christianity in American life during the nation’s founding and first fifty years of its history.
How does one judge whether or not a nation is exceptional? Generally, a nation may be judged as exceptional when it is stable, prosperous, and free. Those marks of an exceptional nation are produced when a specific set of ideas and philosophies produce institutions and policies that are conducive to those qualities of stability, prosperity, and freedom. The critical element standing between a nation’s institutions and policies and the qualities a nation exhibits are the ideas and philosophies upon which the nation is guided. The ideas and philosophies that guided America were based on the Bible and Christianity and produced a nation that was the envy of the world.
Before we proceed, it is necessary to repeat an earlier caution. Although the scriptures are the wellspring of all truth, the church must not discard the wisdom and experience of generations of our Christian forefathers nor reject the church’s rich history and knowledge gained over the centuries which are invaluable to a right understanding of scriptures. The successes and failures of the church through the centuries serve to illuminate, explain, and confirm the Bible’s teachings.
As has been shown in previous chapters, Satan’s primary attack on the church centers on undermining the truth and authority of God’s Word and occurs both within and without the church.
The church is attacked from within – doctrinal errors and heresies
The church’s first challenge came almost immediately following its birth and came through challenges to the truth of biblical doctrines (dogma, creed, beliefs, principles, teachings).
Over the entire course of church history, various doctrinal errors and heresies sought to discredit, corrupt, or deny the inerrant Word of God. Over the centuries the church eventually elevated man’s reason to be equal or superior to the authority of the Bible in many areas which led to sin and corruption. The Reformation promised sola scriptura—the Bible alone. But the doctrinal embellishments and practices of the pre-Reformation church clung tenaciously to the reformed churches in Europe. The American colonists were eager to cast off these man-made hindrances and looked to the scriptures alone as to their authority in building “a pure and stainless church” undefiled and unencumbered by centuries of man’s wisdom and corruptions of doctrinal purity. As a result, church authority built on man’s reasoning and opinions no longer dictated church practices and defined doctrine apart from the scriptures.
The church is corrupted from without – mixing of church and state
Beginning in the fourth century, the church abandoned its proper scriptural role in society and relationship with governments and rulers which allowed the church to wield the sword of the state and the state to meddle in church affairs. This mixing of church and state lasted for more than a thousand years and was not entirely cast off by the Protestant reformers.
The most distinguishing feature of the Reformation Lutheran church was the power given to the state. Luther supported the principle that the state should be above the church. However, Calvinists took the opposite view and denied that the state had any power over the church. Calvin believed the church had power over the state. Both responses were nonbiblical as to God’s design of the roles of church and state in society and the relationship between them. The church must let the state bear the sword of state but at the same time admonish the state when it overreaches its proper biblical position and role in society.[3]
Because the first settlements of New England were small, isolated, and highly motivated by their desire for religious freedom, of necessity they tended toward governance through theocracy. At the beginning of the 1700s, those colonies founded upon religious purposes continued as theocracies but in a less stringent manner. The Great Awakening and the subsequent multiplication of new sects and denominations continued to lessen the influence of church-dominated civil governments which had substantially disappeared by end of the Revolutionary War or soon thereafter. With the ratification of the Constitution, a new relationship between church and state was established and was closer to the biblical model than had ever occurred in the history of the church.
The church is corrupted from without – the humanistic spirit of the world
The church had also been attacked from without as it absorbed many of the tenets of humanism. But, the colonists’ adherence to scripture alone as their source of authority stood as a bulwark against humanistic doctrines and influences. In spite of the American church’s resistance for over two hundred years, humanism became its greatest challenge during the latter half of nineteenth century and continues as such to the present.
To understand the devastating effects of humanism on Christianity and the nation, a brief examination of humanism’s meaning, origins, and history is necessary. This examination is important as it will give a better understanding of the forces of humanism at work in the modern church as well which will be discussed in later chapters. Because humanism has been such a central force in causing the decline of the church, some comments from prior articles bear repeating.
The humanistic spirit is of Satanic origin and has been present within human society since Adam and Eve were driven from the Garden. It is the spirit of rebellion of man against God. The ancient Greeks made it a philosophy, and eventually humanism banished God altogether and placed man at the center of all things.
The Renaissance (generally dated as being the 1300s through the 1500s) was considered a rebirth or revival of learning and a time of transition between the Middle Ages and modern times. Beginning in Italy, it marked the humanistic revival of the classical influence of Greece and Rome that led to the flowering of the arts, literature, and modern science.[4] The Renaissance and post-Renaissance cultures were profoundly affected by the writings of the Greek and Roman philosophers and thinkers who lived many centuries earlier. But along with the advancement of mankind, the humanistic emphasis fundamentally changed the way man thought of himself. He had become the center and focus of life in contrast to the biblical revelation of man’s position and relationship with God.[5]
Elements of this redefinition of man invaded the church as early as the thirteenth century through the thoughts and writings of Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), an outstanding Catholic theologian whose influence still dominates many within the Catholic Church.
Aquinas believed that man revolted against God and was fallen but not completely. He believed the will was fallen but the intellect was not. Therefore, in addition to the Bible, men could rely on human wisdom as well as the teachings of non-Christian philosophers. As a result philosophy was separated from the Bible and freed man to act autonomously.[6]
Aquinas revered the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 B.C.). Through Aquinas’ efforts, elements of Aristotle’s non-Christian philosophy began to be accepted by the church as a source of authority alongside the Bible. In searching for answers to the questions about life, Aristotle emphasized the meaning of individual things (the particulars) as opposed to biblical absolutes and ideals. Because Aquinas’s unfallen human reason was now autonomous and equal to revelation, many of the pronouncements of the church were based on pagan Greek and Roman philosophies, and eventually these became more important than many teachings of the Bible. But man’s fall was complete including his reason. Therefore, if one begins with man’s intellect to determine truth about the particulars (things, actions, e.g., a person’s individual acts) instead of the absolutes found in the Bible, there are no fixed standards for determining values, morals, and laws. In other words, there is no basis for distinguishing between right and wrong.[7]
Humanism’s entry into the church in the thirteenth century led to an increasing distortion of biblical teaching. When the authority of the church became superior to the teaching of the Bible, fallen man was told he was able through his own reasoning to return to right relationship with God by “meriting the merit of Christ.”[8] In time this focus on understanding the meaning of the particulars without benefit of God’s revelation dominated all spheres of life.[9]
Renaissance humanism continued to strengthen and cries for a complete separation of man’s reason from God’s revelation prepared the way for the rise of modern humanism during the Enlightenment in which man declared himself to be a totally independent being and denied God’s existence.[10] France was humanism’s epicenter, but all of Western Europe was affected. The era of Enlightenment is generally considered to have lasted from the late 1600s through all of the 1700s. Although a relatively short period, the Enlightenment has had monumental destructive consequences for the church that continue to the present day. The Enlightenment produced a strong intellectual confidence in the power of human reason which was reflected in its doctrines of progress, rationality, secularism, and political reform.[11]
This witch’s brew distilled from the swirl of the intellectual ferment and political turmoil of the Enlightenment era produced the philosophy of modern humanism in which all authority must be continually questioned, moral values do not arise from fixed ideas of right and wrong, and man is declared not fallen but perfectible and continually progresses through the accumulation of knowledge from scientific advances and human reason.
In 1949, Dr. Corliss Lamont wrote The Philosophy of Humanism in which he defined the humanistic philosophy by listing a number of propositions that gave humanism’s explanation of the universe, man’s nature, and treatment of human problems. The following are some of Dr. Lamont’s key tenets: All forms of the supernatural do not exist. Nature is the totality of being. Man is the evolutionary product of Nature. There is no conscious survival after death. Through reason and the scientific method, man can solve his own problems. Human values are derived from man’s earthy experiences and relationships and therefore are not absolute or universal. Happiness, freedom, and progress in this world are the highest goals of all mankind.[12]
It was the humanism of the French philosophers’ that built the framework for the disaster known as the French Revolution. Shouts of “Liberty! Equality! Fraternity!” became the reality of “monarchy, anarchy, dictatorship” all within the space of a little over a decade. However, it was the ideas and philosophies derived from the Bible and Christianity that guided the American Founders, led to the Constitution, and produced the greatest nation in the history of the world. Historian Paul Johnson wrote of the core difference between the two revolutions.
The essential difference between the two revolutions is that the American Revolution, in its origins, was a religious event, whereas the French Revolution was an anti-religious event. That fact was to shape the American Revolution from start to finish and determine the nature of the independent state it brought into being.[13]
Consequences for the nation if the pillars of Christianity are overthrown
John Jay co-authored the Federalist Papers and was the first Chief-Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. He described the consequences to America should it ever allow the overthrow of the pillars of Christianity upon which the nation was founded.
To the kindly influence of Christianity we owe that degree of civil freedom, and political and social happiness, which mankind now enjoys…Whenever the pillars of Christianity shall be overthrown, our present republican forms of government—and all blessings which flow from them—must fall with them.[14]
Over two hundred years later Jay’s caution appears to have been prophetic for the forces of humanism and secularism have chipped away at the pillars of Christianity for the last 150 years to such an extent that our civil freedoms and republican forms of government are near collapse in twenty-first century America.
Larry G. Johnson
Sources:
[1] Tocqueville, Alexis de, Democracy in America, Gerald E. Bevan, Trans., (London, England: Penguin Books, 2003), pp. 340, 343, 345.
[2] William J. Federer, America’s God and Country, (Coppell, Texas: Fame Publishing, Inc., 1996), p. 18.
[3] B. K. Kuiper, The Church in History, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1951, 1964), p. 184, 200.
[4] “renaissance,” Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, (Springfield, Massachusetts: G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, 1963), p. 725.
[5] Francis A. Schaffer, How Should We Then Live? (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 1976), pp. 40, 51.
[6] Ibid., pp. 51-52.
[7] Ibid., pp. 52, 55.
[8] Ibid., p. 56.
[9] Ibid., pp. 60, 71.
[10]] Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth, (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2004, 2005), p. 101.
[11] Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order, (Washington, D. C.: Regnery-Gateway, 1991), pp. 348-349.
[12] Corliss Lamont, The Philosophy of Humanism, Eighth Edition, (Amherst, New York: Humanist Press, 1997), pp. 13-14.
[13] Paul Johnson, A History of the American People, (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997), pp. 116-117.
