Sermon from January 8, 2006
Arthur Glasser, a missionary in mid-twentieth century, once told the story of a Japanese Christian, who said, "I love two Js, Jesus and Japan, and I don't know which I love more." He put his finger on a decision that all Christians need to make.

For example, what could be more American than to believe that in the "unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?" And what could be more Christian than to do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves – Philippians 2:3?

If I approach life by asserting my "unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," then it may be harder for me to consider someone else better than myself. Being an American would govern my being a Christian. On the other hand, if I approach life by doing nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility considering other better than myself, then I might be more willing to accept limits on my pursuit of happiness. Being a Christian would govern my being an American.

What has fueled this tension in me is a book I read last fall called America's God. Professor Mark Noll of Wheaton College wrote it. It is a book about ideas that brought the Puritans to Massachusetts and ideas that brought about the American Revolution. At the heart of those ideas was a revolt against the past. It was a revolt against the ideas of the past, which we call tradition, and it was a revolt against any institution that transmitted the ideas of the past, including the Church.

The story I want to tell is how this revolt against the past affected the Church in this country from the arrival of Puritans to Massachusetts in 1620 to Lincoln's second inaugural address in 1865. As you can imagine, it created terrible internal tensions. Let me illustrate the tensions.

Different Ideas of Freedom
One source of the tension was freedom. The freedom we read about in the Bible originates in an act of God. Israel's exodus from Egypt is the dominant Old Testament example of this kind of freedom. Exodus 6:6: "I am the LORD, and I will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians. I will free you from being slaves to them, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment."

Israel did not rise up against Egypt and throw off their bondage by force. Moses was even rebuked for using force against one Egyptian. The glory of the exodus was that God set His people free, when liberation seemed impossible.

The New Testament reflects this kind of freedom in Romans 8:2-3. The apostle wrote this: The law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death. For what the law was powerless to do ... God did by sending his own Son. The same idea is applied to nature in Romans 8:20-21: The creation was subjected to frustration ... in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.

Whether it is the exodus from Egypt or our deliverance from sin or the creation's liberation from decay, Christian freedom has to do with God's intervention into a situation that makes human action impossible. A very different idea of freedom found its voice in Philadelphia in 1776.

Listen to the fiery language of the American Declaration of Independence. "The history of the present King of Great Britain (George III) is a history of repeated injuiries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States."

It is freedom from political tyranny that we Americans cherish, and our ancestors thought it was worth a revolution against England to have it. We appeal to the preservation of this freedom to justify most of our wars. It is a freedom we seized for ourselves in mortal combat, and we hold it by force of arms, if necessary.

The tension I talked about comes into play, doesn't it? If the patriot's dream of liberty shapes my approach to life, it may distort and even hide from me the biblical idea of freedom. If the biblical idea of freedom shapes my approach to life, it may deeply affect my political actions.

The churches of our nation, when it was young, embraced the patriot's dream of freedom from political tyranny, even if by force. It was easy for church leaders to lose sight of the biblical picture of freedom, and they often did, when the revolt against the past clouded their judgment. Another tension was also at work in the soul of the Church in the years prior to the Civil War.

Self-Evident Truth or Revelation
I want you to hear several passages from Romans 1-2. In Romans 1:19-20 the apostle wrote this: What may be known about God is plain to them, because God made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities ... have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made. In Romans 2:14 Paul wrote that Gentiles, who do not have the law (of Moses) do by nature things required by the law. It sounds like human beings have a naturally -given intuition of God and of right and wrong.

On the other hand, the same Romans 1:21-22 says that their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools. Yes, something of the knowledge of God and of right and wrong is naturally in the soul of every person; but there is also something else – call it sin or the dark side or the gravitational pull of the destroyer – that leaves our knowledge of God and of right and wrong twisted in some way.

The ideas that made a difference in the Revolutionary War era neglected the dark side. They emphasized the naturally-given intuition of right and wrong. The second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence begins famously: "We hold these truths to be self-evident...." The magic word there is self-evident. It means that something is obvious; no one needs to prove it. Once stated, anyone of good will and sound mind will acknowledge it at once.

Americans learned this idea from English and Scottish philosophers. They called it Scottish commonsense philosophy. The idea was that born into every human being was "a naturally given intuition of beauty, and of right and wrong, from which it was possible to construct entire systems of ethics, political economy, and even theology," (Noll, 566).

In other words the past was irrelevant. John Doe didn't need king, bishop, priest or legislator to tell him what is best. He could figure it out for himself and probably get it right. This deep self-sufficiency led some Americans to jettison the Bible. More significantly, as we shall see, most Americans revered the Bible, and this deep self-sufficiency made them confident that they could discover for themselves what the meaning of the Bible and the answers it gave to every situation life might throw at them.

The tension I talked about comes into play again, doesn't it? If belief in my self-sufficiency shapes my approach to life, it may foster a deep suspicion of those in authority and blind me to my own ignorance and capacity for evil. If the biblical idea of human nature shapes my approach to life, it may cause me to be less sure of my own wisdom and virtue.

The churches of our nation, when it was young, embraced Scottish commonsense philosophy. It was easy for church leaders to lose sight of something fundamentally flawed in human nature, and they often did.

Nevertheless, between July 4, 1776 and the firing on Fort Sumter on April 10, 1861 the Church in America tried valiantly to blend the patriot ideas of freedom and self-sufficiency with the biblical ideas of what it means to be truly human and truly free.

They succeeded well enough to make the nation a Protestant, Christian nation and to dominate its culture. Mark Noll says: "Evangelical Protestants in the early republic succeeded, not only in winning individuals to Christianity, but in creating a Christian civilization, becaue they could demonstrate how their form of the faith might vivify, ennoble, and lend transcendent value to the most influential (ideologies) of the nation," (437). But something unexpected came with their success.

All of the Bible, but Only the Bible, for All of Life
The American Revolution embodied a giant change in the way people looked at the world. On one hand, it was change from a deferential attitude toward hereditary authority, such as aristocracy, and ecclesiastical authority, the Church. On the other hand, it was change to a democratic, anti-hierarchical organization of life. In other words there was a revolt against the authority of the past, no matter what form it took – family, church, or government.

However, in the Christian civilization that evangelical Protestants built in this country there was one exception to this revolt against the past. One authority from the past survived. It not only survived, it had a power equal to and perhaps greater than that of king and pope and general. It was the Bible.

I have three quotations that illustrate the authority of the Bible in American life prior to the Civil War. But they also illustrate the revolt against the past and the commonsense philosophy that innate good sense enabled every person to read the Bible for himself without deferring to any other authority.

Alexander Campbell, a founder of what we know today as Disciples of Christ and the Churches of Christ, said one time: "'I have endeavored to read the Scriptures as though no one has read them before me,'" (Noll, 380).

Charles Finney, a legendary name in American evangelism said in answer to a theological question: "'I do not recollect to have ever read upon the subject except what I had found in the Bible,'" (Noll, 383).

English Methodist, James Dixon, said in 1848: "'Whatever doctrine can be proved from holy scripture without tradition is to be received unhesitatingly ... and nothing that cannot so be proved shall be deemed an essential point of Christian belief,'" (Noll, 376).

The Bible was supreme, and people didn't need help in understanding it. It "was a plain book whose meanings could be reliably ascertained through the exercise of an ordinary person's intelligence," (Noll, 418).

The Pastoral Center of Gravity
This national reliance on the Bible alone almost worked. It did work for nearly a hundred years. Its achievements were massive. Perhaps those very achievements hit its fatal inconsistency. Let me show you how slavery revealed the inconsistency.

Henry Ward Beecher, a Presbyterian pastor in Brooklyn, NY, was nationally known as a great preacher. In January, 1861 he offered the following statement about the Bible. Tucked into his golden rhetoric, unawares, was the fatal inconsistency of evangelical reliance on the Bible separated from tradition. Here is what he said.

"'Now what has been the history of the Book but this: that wherever you have had an untrammeled Bible, you have had a untrammeled people; and that wherever you have had a trammeled Bible, you have had a trammeled people? Where you have had a Bible that priests interpreted, you have had a king: where you have had a Bible that the common people interpreted; where the family has been the church; where father and mother have been God's ordained priests; where they have read its pages freely from beginning to end without gloss or commentary, without the church to tell them how, but with the illumination of God's Spirit in their hearts; where the Bible has been in the household, and read without hindrancy by parents and children together – there you have had an indomitable yeomanry, a state that would not have a tyrant on the throne, a government that would not have a slave or a serf in the field.'" (Noll, 397).

Well, the nation had a "Bible that the common people interpreted ... without gloss or commentary, without the church to tell them how." But, Breecher's rhetoric notwithstanding, that nation also had slaves, one person in eight, according to President Lincoln's second inaugural address.

The South's leading theologian, James Henley Thronwell of Columbia, SC, spoke for most people in the South and many in the North, when he said: "'That the relation betwixt the slave and his master is not inconsistent with the word of God, we have long since settled,'" (Noll, 393). Biblical arguments for slavery were so persuasive in South and North that people who argued for emancipation were charged with abandoning the Bible.

The Bible alone was not enough, and there was no recognized church authority to adjudicate between conflicting interpretations of Scripture about slavery; nothing was left to do that but armies and bullets and the bloodiest war in the nation's history.

The Civil War rebuked the Church's revolt against the past and spoke a resounding no to the self-sufficiency that had shaped the soul of the American Church and the nation itself. Lincoln put it this way: "Both (North & South) read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid agains the other ... The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes."

I love this book. But we aren't sufficient to read it in such a way as to discover the truth of God without commentary and without the church to help us. This book is not for our eyes in isolation from other eyes and other ages. The past has a place at the table of interpretation. It takes the whole Church, past, present, and future to read it right. The name of that communal reading is tradition. But if the past, if tradition, has a place at the table of interpretation, that means also that the authority of the Church is back at the table, because the Church is the only institution that transmits the collective understanding of Scripture from generation to generation, down through the ages. If we love the book, we will love the Church.