In my last post on this subject, I mentioned my education background to show the process I went through to arrive at my opinion. Upon realizing I must base my life on the scriptures of the Christian and Hebrew bibles (testaments), I began to question much of my secular education. For example, I was unsure that I had been taught the whole story about the founding fathers of America. So I went about studying the original writings, along with some modern commentary, which I also didn't fully trust, to get their perspective.
Today, it seems there are only two competing views about interpreting the nature of the U.S. Constitution - Christian versus secular. I don't think it's that simple. Even a cursory read of the U.S. Constitution should create doubt about the Christian nature of the Constitution. Being a Christian, I originally wanted to uncover a Christian-based origination for the Constitution. However, first of all, it was hard to take a secular document like the U.S. Constitution, which makes no mention of the bible, Christianity, or even God and turn it into a Christian document.
Second, what is a Christian founding document? What would it look like? That is, what elements would it have, even if it didn't explicitly reference the bible? Even though I had read the bible through several times, I wasn't sure of the answers to the questions. I just knew that the U.S. Constitution didn't really fit the bill as far as this amateur was concerned. I also could not find any explanations of what a Christian or biblical founding document should look like. There seemed to be many Christians criticizing the governments and culture of our day, but mere criticism of isolated political policies wasn't enough to explain how to found a Christian government.
Third, part of my research involved reading the Federalist Papers, the Anti-Federalist Papers, and other writings by the founders. I expected to find an abundance of Christian references, and I did. But I also found a mix of a wealth of philosophical, historical, and common sense thinking in the writings of even the most outspoken Christians of the time.
You have to understand how disappointing this was to me. I had converted, believing not that the bible contained answers to life, but that it was the only answer to life. There's a big difference. If the founders did not believe that, then they had changed in their viewpoint of the bible in the two and a half centuries since the Protestant Reformation. They certainly had changed since the Apostles nearly 1,800 years earlier. They had apparently imbibed of the elixir of the Enlightenment more than I had hoped. They were a mix of bible and human thought more than what the promoters of the Christian Constitution believed. They were more Christian in their thinking than what I had been taught in school.
The reason I'm saying all this is because I don't believe I came to the question with a pre-conceived notion. I didn't accept what I'd been taught in secular American history, but if I did have a preconception, I assumed that there would be a more explicit biblical motivation. That assumption was based upon hope, not self-deception.
But then you have to decide what is a biblical republic. I'm not sure the Christian community has ever settled on that. It could depend greatly on one's view of biblical law and whether it applies in whole or in part to civil government today. Personally, I assume that any part of the Old Testament applies today unless explicitly revoked somehow in scripture. Gary North and Ray Sutton, from whom I've gleaned much of my insight into this question, have established five (5) elements of a covenant (some would say contract, but that's too weak a description for an agreement requiring an oath). The U.S. Constitution is a covenant amongst the people. The U.S. Constitution requires an oath for someone to serve as an official in state, local, or federal government.
Why would the U.S. Constitution require an oath, which historically has applied a severe sanction by God upon the person who violates the oath? Marriages begin with oaths. Ministers are installed by an oath. The state, the family, and the church are the three key institutions of society. All three require an oath. What elements make up a covenant institution like civil government helps immensely in analyzing what type of institution it is, that is, secular or Christian, Buddhist or Muslim, atheist or deist, etc.
As explained by North and Sutton, the five elements for a covenant are:
1. Historical Prologue/Statement of Origin of Authority
2. Statement of Hierarchy
3. Law
4. Sanctions
5. Continuity/Inheritance
Therefore, to determine whether the United States Constitution were a Christian governing document or not, one must analyze it as to each of those five levels.
See the Blog Posts, "The Importance of Swearing" in this Blog and "Oaths" in Biblical Judicial System Blog.
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