The Journal of Christian Reconstruction, Vol. 3, No. 1 - Amazon Web

279 Pages·2005·1.71 MB·English

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A Chalcedon Publication [www.chalcedon.edu] 3/30/07
COPYRIGHT
The Journal of Christian Reconstruction
Volume 3 / Number 1
Summer 1976
Symposium on Christianity and the American Revolution
Gary North, Editor
A CHALCEDON MINISTRY
Electronic Version 1.0 / September 2, 2005
Copyright © 1976 Chalcedon. All rights reserved.
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Opinions expressed in this journal do not necessarily reflect the
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with a relevant, active, historic Christianity, though those views
may have on occasion differed somewhat from Chalcedon’s and
from each other.
A Chalcedon Publication [www.chalcedon.edu] 3/30/07
THE JOURNAL OF CHRISTIAN
RECONSTRUCTION
This journal is dedicated to the fulfillment of the cultural mandate of Genesis
1:28 and 9:1—to subdue the earth to the glory of God. It is published by the
Chalcedon Foundation, an independent Christian educational organization (see
inside back cover). The perspective of the journal is that of orthodox Christian-
ity. It affirms the verbal, plenary inspiration of the original manuscripts (auto-
graphs) of the Bible and the full divinity and full humanity of Jesus Christ—two
natures in union (but without intermixture) in one person.
The editors are convinced that the Christian world is in need of a serious publi-
cation that bridges the gap between the newsletter-magazine and the scholarly
academic journal. The editors are committed to Christian scholarship, but the
journal is aimed at intelligent laymen, working pastors, and others who are
interested in the reconstruction of all spheres of human existence in terms of the
standards of the Old and New Testaments. It is not intended to be another outlet
for professors to professors, but rather a forum for serious discussion within
Christian circles.
The Marxists have been absolutely correct in their claim that theory must be
united with practice, and for this reason they have been successful in their
attempt to erode the foundations of the noncommunist world. The editors agree
with the Marxists on this point, but instead of seeing in revolution the means of
fusing theory and practice, we see the fusion in personal regeneration through
God’s grace in Jesus Christ and in the extension of God’s kingdom. Good princi-
ples should be followed by good practice; eliminate either, and the movement
falters. In the long run, it is the kingdom of God, not Marx’s “kingdom of free-
dom,” which shall reign triumphant. Christianity will emerge victorious, for only
in Christ and His revelation can men find both the principles of conduct and the
means of subduing the earth—the principles of Biblical law.
The Journal of Christian Reconstruction is published twice a year, summer and
winter. Each issue costs $4.00, and a full year costs $7.00. Subscription office: P.O.
Box 158, Vallecito, CA 95251. Editorial office: P.O. Box 1608, Springfield, VA
22151.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Copyright
Contributors
Editor’s Introduction
Gary North . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7
1. SYMPOSIUM ON CHRISTIANITY
AND THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
The Christian Roots of the War for Independence
Archie P. Jones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13
The Political Philosophy of the Founding Fathers
John W. Robbins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .70
The Myth of an American Enlightenment
Rousas John Rushdoony . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .91
1776: Revolution or War for Independence?
J. Murray Murdoch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .97
The Declaration of 1775
The Declaration of Independence as a Conservative Document
Gary North . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .123
The Declaration of Independence
The Franklin Legend
Cecil B. Currey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .154
The Historical Background to the Issue of
Religious Liberty in the Revolutionary Era
Mark Wyndham . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .193
The American Revolution: Typical or Unique?
Edward Coleson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .217
The Rock from Which America Was Hewn
E. L. Hebden Taylor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .224
2. CHRISTIAN RECONSTRUCTION
Historiography: The “Protestant Ethic” Hypothesis
Gary North . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .234
3. DEFENDERS OF THE FAITH
Eusebius of Caesarea
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Table of Contents 5
4. BOOK REVIEWS
America’s Continuing Revolution: An Act of Conservation.
Reviewed by John W. Robbins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265
The Roots of American Order, by Russell Kirk.
Reviewed by John W. Robbins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267
Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, ed. Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave.
Reviewed by John W. Robbins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 270
Publication Schedule Volume 4
The Ministry of Chalcedon
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CONTRIBUTORS
Edward Coleson, Ph.D., is professor of social science at Spring Arbor College in
Spring Arbor, Michigan.
Cecil B. Currey, Ph.D., is associate professor of history at the University of South
Florida in Tampa. He is the author of Road to Revolution and Code 72. He is also
a chaplain in the Air Force.
Archie P. Jones, M.A., is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Dallas and an
instructor at Texas A&M University.
Gary North, Ph.D., is research assistant for Congressman Ron Paul of Houston.
His latest book, None Dare Call It Witchcraft, was recently published by Arling-
ton House. He is the editor of Foundations of Christian Scholarship: Essays in the
Van Til Perspective, published by Ross House Books, Vallecito, California.
John W. Robbins, Ph.D., is legislative assistant for Congressman Ron Paul of
Houston. He is the author of Answer to Ayn Rand.
Rousas John Rushdoony, M.A., B.D., is president of the Chalcedon Foundation
and the author of numerous books, including This Independent Republic, The
Nature of the American System, The Institutes of Biblical Law, and The Biblical
Philosophy of History.
E. L. Hebden Taylor, M.A., is professor of sociology at Dordt College in Sioux
Center, Iowa. He is the author of The Christian Philosophy of Law, Politics, and the
State and Revolution or Reformation.
Mark Wyndham, Ph.D., recently taught a course in medieval witchcraft at the
University of California, Riverside.
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EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
Gary North
What should we call the events occurring in the American colonies
between 1776 and 1783? The American Revolution? The War for Inde-
pendence? The American Counter-Revolution? The English saw the
period as a true revolution, and so did the colonial loyalists. The
Patriot Party saw it as a war for colonial independence and a return to
traditional English liberties. The revolutionary nature of the period has
been debated by scholars ever since they began to look into the histori-
cal details. The contrast between the French Revolution and the Amer-
ican Revolution has fascinated conservative scholars for almost two
centuries. The American experience lacked the ideology, the elements
of terror, the political centralization, the break with political traditions,
the reshaping of law, the conscript armies, and the mass executions of
the French Revolution. Edmund Burke, the politician-scholar who
served in the English Parliament in the latter part of the eighteenth
century, recognized the differences between the two revolutions. He
acknowledged the legitimacy of the criticisms made by the colonists,
even when such support was politically unpopular, but he was savage
in his critique of the French Revolution. Conservative commentators
have followed Burke’s lead and have described our experience as a con-
servative counterrevolution.
The tasks of the historian are complex, never-ending, and ultimately
religious in nature. He must discover documents, place them in their
historical context (including dating them), assess their authenticity
from internal and external evidence, assess their importance at the
time they were in circulation, classify them, compare them with other
documents, compare the evaluation of other historians with his own
and with each other, and combine his narrative into a coherent, read-
able format that should satisfy the tests of clarity, accuracy, and bal-
ance. This process involves artistry. The writing of history cannot be
assigned to a computer. “Weighing the evidence” is a distinctly non-
computational operation. The historian must constantly shift from one
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8 JOURNAL OF CHRISTIAN RECONSTRUCTION
task to the other: checking his hypothesis with the available docu-
ments; keeping track of the latest findings of his peers, as well as the
findings of past historians; and rethinking his earlier interpretations of
the historical setting and the meaning of the document in question.
The facts of history are not autonomous. They do not “speak for them-
selves.” They are the product of a set of {2} conditions. But which set?
What weight should be given to any particular document? How does
an investigator discover whether he has assigned the proper weight to a
document? Must he overemphasize a neglected or rejected interpreta-
tion in order to correct a prevailing misinterpretation of the period by
other historians?
What criteria can be used to sort out the historical facts and analyze
them? What classifications can be suggested that would enable us to
categorize the period? The contributors to this issue of The Journal of
Christian Reconstruction have offered several helpful approaches to the
solution of this historical problem. We can ask any of the following
questions:
Who were the colonial leaders?
Where did they get their ideas?
What was their basic motivation?
What motivated their followers?
How should we interpret their language?
How did they view the king? How did they view Parliament?
How did they view the colonial legislatures?
How did they view law?
Which thinkers influenced the leaders?
What religious principles did the leaders espouse?
What religious principles did the public espouse?
How did the colonists view the church-state relationship?
How influential was Deism in the colonies?
Did the European Enlightenment influence the colonists?
Was the American Revolution really a revolution?
Archie Jones presents the case for the War for Independence as a
distinctly Christian enterprise. The fact that the colonial leaders
quoted John Locke—himself an Arminian Christian, not a Deist—or
used the seemingly secular language of “Nature” and “Nature’s God,”
does not prove that the war was basically secular. The events that we
sometimes term a revolution do not compare with those of the French
Revolution of 1789–95. In contrast to the French Revolution, the
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Editor’s Introduction 9
American experience was limited in its scope and its political goals,
and hostile to political centralization. Culturally and religiously, the
colonies were overwhelmingly Protestant. It was a homogeneous soci-
ety. The historic and religious origins of the war were distinctively Cal-
vinistic—covenantal, anti-statist, nonutopian, distrustful of human
nature, and law oriented. Locke was cited by the leaders, but he was
cited selectively. Far more important than Locke was the Great Awak-
ening, the religious revivals that swept over the colonies for two
decades after 1740. The Great Awakening created a sense of national
unity. This, in turn, helped to foster resentment against the expanding
power of the British Parliament. Without {3} Christianity, in short, the
War for Independence would not have been fought.
John Robbins outlines the central doctrines of colonial political phi-
losophy. Foremost was the distrust of human nature. This suspicion led
to a distrust of centralized political power. The Founders were republi-
cans, defenders of representative government, a system of checks and
balances within government, a wide dispersal of political power, and
limited civil government. They believed in natural rights, by which
they meant God-given natural rights, a concept at odds with the natu-
ral rights humanism of the European Enlightenment. The sources of
their political ideas were varied: Greek and Roman history, the modi-
fied logic of Enlightenment rationalism, John Locke, David Hume, and
the writings of Calvinism, both Continental and Puritan. Their com-
mitment to the idea of human evil kept them from indulging in
humanistic utopian schemes.
R. J. Rushdoony continues the theme that the European Enlighten-
ment had no roots in the colonies. Their Deism was mild, when held,
and very few colonists held to the position. Even their Deism was cov-
ered by the language of Protestant orthodoxy. It was Arminianism
rather than Deism which was the primary rival of colonial Calvinism.
The roots of American history of this period were theological.
J. Murray Murdoch surveys recent American historiography and
finds that the Marxists, the New Left historians, and other economic
determinists cannot explain the deeply conservative aspects of the War
for Independence. It was a middle-class movement, not elitist. The war
was primarily a conflict over constitutional issues, the most fundamen-
tal being the relationship of the British Parliament to the colonial legis-
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10 JOURNAL OF CHRISTIAN RECONSTRUCTION
latures, i.e., the locus of political sovereignty. Their cry was the
“traditional rights of Englishmen,” not “crush the accursed thing,” Vol-
taire’s slogan against Christianity. The goal of total separation from
England came quite late—over a year after the fighting had begun.
They wanted only to defend traditional rights against the encroach-
ments of the British Parliament and the British bureaucracy. A “for-
eign” Parliament was not acceptable to the Patriot leaders after 1774.
Murdoch cites the Declaration of the Causes & Necessity of Taking Up
Arms (1775) as an important but neglected source document of the era,
which is reproduced immediately following his introduction.
My own contribution focuses on the language, background, and
implications of the Declaration of Independence, which is reprinted
after my article. Its primary focus was not on the rights of man; instead,
the bulk of the Declaration was concerned with specific abuses by the
king. This, however, was a smoke screen. The real culprit was Parlia-
ment, but for purposes of foreign policy, Jefferson spelled out his objec-
tions against {4} the monarch. The Declaration was above all a foreign
policy document. It was almost immediately forgotten. The Adams-Jef-
ferson presidential campaigns of 1796 and 1800 referred back to the
Declaration, since Jefferson’s Democrats claimed that he was the sole
author, despite the fact that Adams had served as one of the five mem-
bers of the committee which drafted the document. It was again
neglected until the slavery controversy began in 1819, when abolition-
ists appealed to “all men are created equal” to justify their critique of
the Constitution. Far from being a radical document, the Declaration
was conservative: law oriented, specific in its criticisms, and non-uto-
pian. This is why conservative cleric John Witherspoon could sign it.
Cecil Currey summarizes his deliberately neglected book, Code
Number 72, a heavily documented study of the machinations of Ben-
jamin Franklin during his years as a colonial representative in Paris.
The evidence points to a startling conclusion: Franklin may have been
a double agent. At the very least, he was unwilling to take steps that
would have stopped the continual leaks of information from his office
to the British. He employed men who were spies as staff assistants, even
after he had been warned about their British connections. Franklin was
cunning, unscrupulous, and a manipulator. The Franklin legend was
first created by Franklin, step by deliberate step; it has been followed by
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