Posted on 10/05/2014 6:02:28 PM PDT by vabible
As is written and history shows time and again.... when a Godly nation defies God and turns it's back on Him they are invaded.....and it's not always militarily.
“Therefore shall ye lay up these my words in your heart and in your soul; and ye shall bind them for a sign upon your hand, and they shall be for frontlets between your eyes. And ye shall teach them your children, talking of them, when thou sittest in thy house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt write them upon the door-posts of thy house, and upon thy gates;” - Deuteronomy 11:18-20
God blessed Israel with a wonderful Law. But if it was nothing more than a list of “dos and donts”, theirs would be “a surface-level, legalistic, theocratic-government-forced dead moralistic (Jewish) nation.”
What God desired and instructed was a nation of people with the Law written on their hearts.
One can found a nation on Christian principles. One of these principles is that the state owes its authority to God, not to the collective will of the people. For that collective will, uninstructed, inevitably will be enslaved by sin, and submit to the will of the few and powerful.
The Founders adopted as their own the Common Law of England. That law can de traced back to the old Germanic Law, but its codification began with The Roman Mission which began the reestablishment of the Church in England. The fist written law of England and it embraced many principle the Justinian code, which was powerful influenced by Christianity. The Courts of Equity, which were founded to counter the inequities in the Common Law procedures, were headed by the Chancellor, who was until the time of Henry VIII a clergyman. One cannot, of course, force a person to be a true Christian but it ought to prevent others from preventing that person from being a true Christian. In order for this to happen, the law itself must defer to that Divine will as well. A Christian Nation is one that acknowledges the Lord and seeks to do his will, however imperfectly.
dear bibble,
Thanks for taking my statement, and amending it without reference to me, the author.
Those who penned the bible are not alive to yell at you, but I am, and I detest plagiarism.
So, in your statement:
“You can have a Buddhists, Daoists, Confuscianists, Mohammedans, Pagans, Hindus, Sikhs, Voodoun, or any other as-yet-to-be-defined theoologies, such as Mormonism nation. But you cannot have a Christian nation because the Christian faith is founded upon an individual response to the Gospel, not legislated forcefully.”
Are you attempting to define America as NOT being founded as a ‘Christian nation’, or not, which was the premise of the original poster?
I find the answer to be ‘yes’, starting with The Mayflower Compact, (which was a piece of legislation), and running all the way through all of the documents of state.
Do you mean like the Roman Emperors ? Did the Christians rise up and kill people because Caesar's taxes were too high ? No, they submitted to ordinances that did not violate the faith and were martyrs without trying to overthrow the government when the ordinances did violate the faith.
It was founded as, and was assumed by its founders always to remain, a nation comprised overwhelmingly of Christians who would be influenced by their faith in their politics.
However:
* The things that the founders actually DID with Christianity were, by the standards of European politics, and English law, RADICALLY secularizing. No established Church, and zero meaningful subsidy for churches generally. (Religion is FAR more subsidized in 2014 than it was in 1789 because of the deductibility of contributions from taxation — neither income taxes nor deductions therefrom existed.) No prohibition of Jews or Catholics from public office, jury service, certain professions, etc.
* Many of the founders were not at all orthodox Christians — many plainly did not take the Bible seriously at all as divine Word, and many who did were highly heterodox, especially with regard to the divinity of Christ. It should not be inferred that they intended their descendants to be bound by law to beliefs or practices they themselves did not hold to.
* The things we think about as distinctively “Christian” in politics in 2014 were simply not issues in the late 1700s. I don’t think that Christian super-majority character of the nation was expected to have any relevance to illegitimacy, abortion, divorce or homosexuality, or the relative authority of husbands and wives over household and family. Even if we were “founded as Christian nation” is doesn’t actually mean anything in terms of what policies we should endorse or not.
Thanks for your reply. We need to come to agreement what constitutes a Christian nation. From my article, it ISN’T a nation politically ruled by men of the Christian faith, but rather one where the Bible is the “law of the land.”
Yes, the Founding Fathers were mostly Christian, devout men, but that doesn’t make America a Christian nation.
My argument is that the concept of a Christian nation isn’t found in the Bible for this dispensation (Pentecost to 2nd Coming). Rather, the Christian faith is walked out via the Church, which is a non-political entity. The Christian faith cannot be legislated from the State.
Just a guess here, but are you by chance a Libertarian? Your fears of a Christian “theocracy” sure sounds familiar, we hear this sort of things from the Libertarians all the time...and their next of kin, the Democrats.
Unless it be certain types of Roman Catholics who would like America ruled by a Catholic monarch, FReepers do not believe this country is supposed to be a theocracy.
A Biblical based Christian nation, yes, but not a Roman Catholic theocracy like they had in Europe for a thousand years. Our Christian forefathers came to this country (the Mayflower Compact comes to mind) seeking to establish the very opposite of what they had in Europe.
Methinks you would sing a different tune about Christian America if you had been reared in an atheistic Communist nation, or in Hitler’s Germany.
"My argument is that the concept of a Christian nation isn’t found in the Bible for this dispensation (Pentecost to 2nd Coming)."
If I agreed with your complete premise, then I would probably agree with your conclusion.
Deist not Christian
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Because the gods gave mankind reason not religion.........
The United States is not a theocracy, and I for one would never want it to be a theocracy. Theocracies have proven to be very dangerous.
The United States is not secular in nature. It is supposed to be neutral. The 1787 Constitution said positive on the issue of religion vs non-religion, except that the principle was established that there would be no religious test for office. This repudiated the British policy of requiring all office holders or voters to communicate in the Church of England, which barred Catholics and Protestant dissenters as well as non-Christians. The States were left free to impose such barriers. The Bill of Rights went further in forbidding a religious establishment and passing laws that discriminated against anyone on the basis of faith. Hence the United States abandoned the idea of the Confessional State, which was the norm in Europe.
Deism is an almost meaningless term. The Deist conception of God is a kind of updating of Aristotle’s unmoved mover, substituting Newtons’ physics in place of Aristotle’s. No purpose in the universe, only Inertia. Not many people really held to such a view with any rigor.
No purpose in the universe, only Inertia. Not many people really held to such a view with any rigor.
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No, it allows others their freedom to their own belief without compelling anyone to die/kill for their re-introduced religion of men. Christianity is just another ‘Johnny come lately’ cult.
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