Posted on 07/04/2010 2:24:16 PM PDT by Christian_Capitalist
....we should not be surprised to find that the Calvinists took a very important part in American Revolution. Calvin emphasized that the sovereignty of God, when applied to the affairs of government proved to be crucial, because God as the Supreme Ruler had all ultimate authority vested in Him, and all other authority flowed from God, as it pleased Him to bestow it.The Scriptures, God's special revelation of Himself to mankind, were taken as the final authority for all of life, as containing eternal principles, which were for all ages, and all peoples. Calvin based his views on these very Scriptures. As we read earlier, in Paul's letter to the Romans, God's Word declares the state to be a divinely established institution.
History is eloquent in declaring that the American republican democracy was born of Christianity and that form of Christianity was Calvinism. The great revolutionary conflict which resulted in the founding of this nation was carried out mainly by Calvinists--many of whom had been trained in the rigidly Presbyterian college of Princeton....
....In fact, most of the early American culture was Reformed or tied strongly to it (just read the New England Primer). Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, a Roman Catholic intellectual and National Review contributor, asserts: “If we call the American statesmen of the late eighteenth century the Founding Fathers of the United States, then the Pilgrims and Puritans were the grandfathers and Calvin the great-grandfather…”
-- from the thread John Calvin: Religious liberty and Political liberty
Related threads:
John Calvin, Calvinism, and the founding of America
Calvin's 500th Birthday Celebrated: Critics and Supporters Agree He was America's Founding Father
AMERICA AND JOHN CALVIN
America's debt to John Calvin
Lessons to be learned from Reformation
Theocracy: the Origin of American Democracy
American Government and Christianity - America's Christian Roots
The Faith of the Founders, How Christian Were They
John Calvin: Religious liberty and Political liberty
Abraham Kuyper on American Liberty
The Man Who Founded America
The Puritans and the founding of America
Perhaps Puritans weren't all that bad
Who were the Puritans?
Bible Battles: King James vs. the Puritans
The Heirs of Puritanism: That's Us!
The real Puritan legacy
In Praise of a Puritan America
Are new 'Puritans' gaining?
Foundations of Faith [Harvard's "Memorial Church" and the university's Puritan roots]
Bounty of Freedom [Puritans, Yankees, the Constitution, and Libertarianism]
The Pilgrims and the founding of America
Thanking the Puritans on Thanksgiving: Pilgrims' politics and American virtue
New World, New Ideas: What the Pilgrims and Puritans believed, about God and man and giving thanks
Pilgrims in Providence
A time for thanks
Judge reminds: Faith ‘permeated our culture’ since the Pilgrims
In its 400th year, Jamestown aspires to Plymouth's prominence [huzzah for the Pilgrims!]
Rock of Ages and the rebel pilgrims [understanding the times re Augustus Toplady's famous hymn]
The Protestant Reformation and the Founding of America
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A Moral Vision [Oliver Cromwell, the American Revolution, and Pluralism]
Ping to post #21
I thought that prior to the English civil war Presbyterianism was pretty much a Scottish denomination. Both the Pilgrims and the Puritans came mostly from East Anglia.
HMMMMMMMM.
THX.
You "read somewhere"? Yeah, right. Post your citations.
The fact is, Calvinism is Christianity that includes Romans 9 in its Bible; and most of the Founders were overwhelmingly Calvinists.
Not a single singer of the Declaration of Independence was Baptist. By contrast, 49 out of the 56 Signers of the Declaration were covenanted members of EXPLICITLY Calvinistic denominations, who adhered to EXPLICITLY Calvinist Creeds. (For that matter, back then, even most American Baptists were good "Old School Baptist" Calvinists, not modern apostate "New School Baptist" Free-Willers).
(Taxation over 10% is Tyranny -- 1 Samuel 8:17)
Interesting thread....
Where does that leave someone like me, who is rather calvinistic (small c), since I’m a TULI_ holder? One of these days, I need to write a post or find an article about how dispensationalism was founded by Congregationalists/Presbyterians/Calvinists (Darby, Scofield, and McGee come to mind).
Happy Fourth of July!!!
Happy Presbyterian Rebellion Day!!
Ahh, Lorraine Boettner. Sure to elicit mouth foaming responses from certain quarters.
Dispensationalism really has been traced back to the early church.
And, of course, it’s in the Scriptures!
LOL.
Pride goeth before a fall.
You got the pride part covered.
Bancroft, who far though he was from being Calvinistic in his own personal convictions, simply calls Calvin "the father of America," and adds: "He who will not honor the memory and respect the influence of Calvin knows but little of the origin of American liberty."
Thanks! And great post in #21.
Factually most of the signers were Anglicans.
Live your fantasy.
By which you mean Episcopalian.
Factually, the Episcopalians of the time affirmed an EXPLICITLY Calvinistic Creed in their Thirty-Nine Articles.
To be a confessing Episcopalian, in good membership standing, at the time, meant being a Calvinist in terms of Predestinarian beliefs. By express creedal confession.
LOL...ok...see your doctor for an anti-hallucinogen. It will work wonders.
You seem to know very little about the religious backdrop of the American Revolution, so instead you just vomit personal denigrations.
It's very childish.
He also refused to free his slaves when he died.
"Whatever the cause, the Calvinists were the only fighting Protestants. It was they whose faith gave them courage to stand up for the Reformation. In England, Scotland, France, Holland, they, and they only, did the work, and but for them the Reformation would have been crushed... If it had not been for Calvinists, Huguenots, Puritans, and whatever you like to call them, the Pope and Philip would have won, and we should either be Papists or Socialists." ~ Sir John Skelton "[Calvinists] are the true heroes of England. They founded England, in spite of the corruption of the Stuarts, by the exercise of duty, by the practice of justice, by obstinate toil, by vindication of right, by resistance to oppression, by the conquest of liberty, by the repression of vice. They founded Scotland; they founded the United States; at this day they are, by their descendants, founding Australia and colonizing the world." ~ French atheist Hippolyte Taine (1828 to 1893) "Calvinism has been the chief source of republican government." ~ Lorraine Boettner "In Calvinism lies the origin and guarantee of our constitutional liberties." ~ Goren van Prinsterer Historian George Bancroft called Calvin "the father of America," and added, "He who will not honor the memory and respect the influence of Calvin knows but little of the origin of American liberty." "John Calvin was the virtual founder of America." ~ German historian Leopold von Ranke "The Revolution of 1776, so far as it was affected by religion, was a Presbyterian measure. It was the natural outgrowth of the principles which the Presbyterianism of the Old World planted in her sons, the English Puritans, the Scotch Covenanters, the French Huguenots, the Dutch Calvinists, and the Presbyterians of Ulster." ~ George Bancroft It is no wonder that King James I once said: "Presbytery agreeth with monarchy like God with the Devil." In England, our First War for Independence was referred to as the "Presbyterian Rebellion." A Hessian captain (one of the 30,000 German mercenaries used by England) wrote in 1778, "Call this war by whatever name you may, only call it not an American rebellion; it is nothing more or less than a Scots-Irish Presbyterian rebellion." Another monarchist wrote to King George III: "I fix all of the blame for these extraordinary proceedings on the Presbyterians. They have been the chief and principle instruments in all of these flaming measures. They always do and ever will act against government from that restless and turbulent anti-monarchical spirit which has always distinguished them everywhere." In a letter from New York dated November 1776, the Earl of Dartmouth was informed by one of his representatives: "Presbyterianism is really at the bottom of this whole conspiracy, has supplied it with Vigour, and will never rest, till something is decided on it." John D. Sergeant, a member of the Continental Congress from New Jersey, credited the Scots-Irish with being the main pillar of support for the Revolution in Pennsylvania. A New Englander, not supportive of the Presbyterians, agreed, calling the Scots-Irish "the most God-provoking democrats this side of Hell." Prime Minister Horace Walpole rose in Parliament to say: "There is no use crying about it. Cousin America has eloped with a Presbyterian parson," referring to John Witherspoon, president of Princeton University (the "seminary of sedition"), and the only minister to sign the Declaration of Independence. Witherspoon was not only one of the founding fathers, he was the instructor of the founding fathers. Nine of the 55 delegates at the Constitutional Convention had been students of Witherspoon's. In fact, David Barton notes that 87 of the 243 founding fathers graduated from Presbyterian Princeton, so it is hardly surprising that the founders created a republic. "When Cornwallis was driven back to ultimate retreat and surrender at Yorktown, all of the colonels of the Colonial Army but one were Presbyterian elders. More than one-half of all the soldiers and officers of the American Army during the Revolution were Presbyterians." ~ J.R. Sizoo "From 1706 to the opening of the revolutionary struggle, the only body in existence which stood for our present national political organization [republicanism] was the General Synod of the American Presbyterian Church... The Congregational Churches of New England had no connection with each other, and had no power apart from the civil government. The Episcopal Church was without organization in the colonies, was dependent for support and a ministry on the Established Church of England, and was filled with an intense loyalty to the British monarchy. The Reformed Dutch Church did not become an efficient and independent organization until 1771, and the German Reformed Church did not attain to that condition until 1793. The Baptist Churches were separate organizations, the Methodists were practically unknown, and the Quakers were non-combatants." ~ Dr. W.H. Roberts Only the Presbyterian Church lined up solidly behind the colonists, and without them independence would not have been possible. Oh, and that Declaration of Independence written by Thomas Jefferson? It came along a full year after Scots-Irish Presbyterians in Charlotte, North Carolina, wrote their own declaration of independence. The Mecklenburg Declaration, written on May 20, 1775, "by unanimous resolution declared the people free and independent, and that all laws and commissions from the king were henceforth null and void," as Lorraine Boettner writes. Jefferson's biographer notes: "Everyone must be persuaded that one of these papers must have been borrowed from the other." George Bancroft observes that the Mecklenburg assembly consisted of "twenty-seven staunch Calvinists, one-third of whom were ruling elders in the Presbyterian church, including the President and Secretary, and one was a Presbyterian minister." Ephraim Brevard, who drafted the document, and after whom Brevard, NC, is named, was a Presbyterian ruling elder and a Princeton graduate. (Mecklenburg is far more desirable than anything inspired by John Locke. It is interesting to note that these Charlotte Presbyterians, who had been under the guidance of Alexander Craighead, later rejected the non-covenantal national Constitution.) "[Patrick Henry's] mother drilled him in Presbyterian or Calvinistic theology, which provided the backbone for the American resistance to British tyranny. As one author has noted, Calvinism 'has been able to inspire and sustain the bravest efforts ever made by man to break the yoke of unjust authority...' It has 'borne ever an inflexible front to illusion and mendacity, and has preferred rather to be ground to powder, like flint, than to bend before violence, or melt under enervating temptation.' By the time of the American Revolution, approximately two-thirds of the colonial population had been 'trained in the school of Calvin.' Henry, through his mother, was a spiritual descendant of Calvin and represented the liberating element of a Reformed theology and world-view." ~ Isaac Backus One example among many in the "Black Regiment" (of parsons) was the Rev. James Caldwell of the First Presbyterian Church of Elizabethtown, New Jersey. Caldwell also served as chaplain to the Continental Army. A Redcoat murdered his wife by firing into his home. Leaving his children in the care of the townsfolk, Caldwell rejoined the fight, which had moved to Springfield. When wadding for ammunition ran low, Caldwell ran to the First Presbyterian Church of Springfield and returned with as many hymnals as he could carry. Tearing out the pages, he yelled, "Put Watts into 'em, boys! Give 'em Watts!" He was killed in battle one year later. This was a man who carried pistols with him to church and laid them on the pulpit before he began the sermon. One of the nine orphaned Caldwell children became a U.S. Supreme Court clerk and worked for the cause of African colonization. A town in Liberia is named Caldwell in his memory. War hero Lafayette, George Washington's close friend, and the man who incidentally was given the honor of naming a cousin of mine from 5 generations ago (Carolina Lafayette Seabrook), took another of the Caldwell children home with him to France. During the feudal era, bishops rode to war at the head of armies. There was a time in America when this was still the case.It is estimated that two-thirds of the 3 million Americans at the time of the Revolutionary War were Reformed Protestants, and even that leaves out the many Episcopalians, who had a Reformed confession in the Thirty-Nine Articles, and the descendants of the French Huguenots. Presbyterians, above all, were responsible for convincing the colonists to revolt even though, prior to the war, about 40% of the population was pro-British.
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