ACTS BIBLE
The American Church week 1 · Matthew 28:16-20
The assignment came before the country. Where the course is going, the ten questions it is trying to answer, and the objections it owes the room up front.
The deck for this class opens on the last five verses of Matthew, and that is the right place to start, because it settles an order that the next eleven weeks depend on.
Jesus meets the eleven on a mountain in Galilee. He tells them all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to him, and then he gives them a job: go, make disciples of all nations, baptize them, teach them to obey everything he commanded. And then the sentence the church has lived on ever since, "I am with you always, to the end of the age" (Matthew 28:20).
No country is named in that assignment. No century is named. No form of government is named. The church received its orders more than seventeen centuries before there was a United States, and those orders do not expire when a country does.1 That is the frame for this whole course, and it cuts both ways. It means America is not the subject of Scripture. It also means a Christian in America has a job here, in this place, under this government, right now.
Here is the thesis.
What makes America biblically exceptional, and why you have a Christian responsibility to participate in making her more biblically exceptional than ever before.
The first half is a historical claim: something about this country's founding came out of the Bible. The second half is an assignment, and it is addressed to you.
Most classes on this subject only make the first claim, and they make it too loudly. This one is going to make a narrower version of it and then spend most of its energy on the second half. There is a reason for that, and the reason is the last line of the outline for this course: the ideal America we desire may be the America not even present in our homes.
If the country we want is not visible in our own households, then the argument about the founding is not the urgent one.
A course like this can be destroyed by a teenager with a phone in about forty seconds. These four are why, and they come before anything is built on top of them.
The Constitution never mentions God. Not once. The only places religion appears are Article VI, which bans religious tests for federal office, and the First Amendment, which forbids Congress from establishing a church. The two exceptions people reach for are the dating line in the attestation, "in the Year of our Lord," and the clause excepting Sundays from the president's ten days to sign a bill.2 Those are conventions of the calendar and the work week, not confessions of faith, and presenting them as confessions is how a class gets corrected in public.
The Treaty of Tripoli. In 1797 the Senate consented, twenty-three votes to nothing, to a treaty whose eleventh article begins by saying the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion. John Adams signed it. That is not one deist's private letter. That is an official act of the whole government, and it was printed in the newspapers at the time without a public outcry.3
Jefferson took a razor to the Gospels. He cut out the miracles and the resurrection and pasted what was left into a book of the moral teachings of Jesus. It is in the Smithsonian.4 He was the third president and he wrote the Declaration.
Slavery is in the founding document. The three-fifths clause. The protection of the slave trade until 1808. The fugitive slave clause. Those are not later corruptions of the text. They are the text.2
We are going to answer all four. Weeks nine and eleven and the bonus section handle them properly. None of those four is going away, and the version of the argument that survives them is stronger than the version that pretends they are not there.
There is an assumption hiding inside three of those four objections. The assumption is that God works through believers, so if Jefferson kept a razor and Franklin was a deist, the founding cannot have been God's work.
Scripture denies that premise by name and more than once. Cyrus is called God's anointed while God tells him to his face, I call you by your name, though you do not know me (Isaiah 45:4-5).5 Week nine takes that apart properly, with Pharaoh and Assyria and Nebuchadnezzar and the cross, because week nine is where the founders' own convictions are the subject.
Hold it loosely until then. The short version is that a good outcome proves nothing about the man God used to reach it.
The defensible claim is not that the founders were Christians. Some were, some were not, and the list is checkable, which is exactly why that version loses.
The defensible claim is about the ideas. Covenant. Law standing above the ruler. Conscience answering to God before it answers to a magistrate. And underneath all of it, the conviction that man is fallen and therefore power in his hands is dangerous and must be divided. All four of those came out of Scripture, through the Reformation, through the Puritans, into the political thought of the colonies.
Donald Lutz went through the American political writing published between 1760 and 1805 and counted every citation. The Bible came first, ahead of Montesquieu, Blackstone and Locke, and Deuteronomy was the most-quoted book in the sample.6 And Locke, the most-cited philosopher of the period, spends the whole of his First Treatise of Government dismantling the divine right of kings out of the book of Genesis.7
In November 1620, before anyone came ashore, the passengers of the Mayflower signed a document that begins "In the name of God, Amen" and then does the thing this entire course turns on: they "covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick."8 A congregation took the covenant they already used to constitute a church and used it to constitute a government. Nobody has to guess at anyone's private religion to read that.
Question six on the study guide is "Where is Christ in this?" It is the question that keeps this from being a civics lecture, so it gets answered in week one rather than saved for the end.
Romans 3 says there is none righteous, no, not one. That is not a claim about the eighteenth century or about any particular party. It is a claim about every person who has ever held office, and about you. The founders divided power because they believed the man holding it could not be trusted with all of it, and they were right, and Scripture told them so first. Madison writes in Federalist 51 that if men were angels no government would be necessary.9 That is the doctrine of the fall with the theology taken out of the sentence.
The four convictions of this course are underneath all of it.
Scripture is the final authority. When a king, a court, a bishop or a founding document says one thing and the Bible says another, Scripture wins. That conviction is what produced the colonists who would not bow, and it is also the conviction that lets us say plainly that the Constitution protected slavery and was wrong to.
Christ's work at the cross is finished. He lived the perfect life we could not live, under real law, in a real town, paying real taxes to an occupying power, and then died the death we had earned and rose from the grave. That is who met the eleven on the mountain. The debt was paid in full and nothing was left for us to add. No country and no constitution contributes anything to that, which is exactly why a Christian can love his country without needing it to be sinless.
Salvation rests on God's choice, not ours. God chooses, and the Father draws. A nation cannot be born again. Only people can, one at a time, and that has been true under every government that has ever existed.
Salvation is God's work from start to finish. We receive it. We don't author it. No law ever passed has saved anybody, and no law ever will.
That second conviction is where this argument usually goes wrong, because people take the death and leave the life. A Christian is called to live as Christ lived: formed by him, then participating, protecting and teaching, in a household and in a town and in a country.
So legislation is real work and it is Christian work. It restrains evil, it defends the weak, and it decides what our neighbors' children will be taught. What it cannot do is regenerate anybody. A church that gives up on law has abandoned its neighbors. A church that trusts law to do what only the Spirit does has changed gospels. Neither is what Matthew 28 asks of us.
Hold all four and the course changes shape. America is not the gospel. America is a place where the gospel has been unusually free to run, and the question this course is asking is what you owe a place like that.
You cannot legislate his salvation. You can legislate his commands, as a servant of his throne.
Those are two different acts and the difference is the whole course. Salvation is his work inside a soul, and no statute, majority or court can reach it. His commands are already law in the sense that matters most. A magistrate who writes one of them into the code of a state is not inventing a rule; he is administering one that was issued before he was born. Week nine comes at this from the other side, in 1 Samuel 8: the objection to human kings is that the office is already occupied. The fact that makes a tyrant illegitimate is the same fact that makes a Christian legislator a servant rather than an author.
So the thesis of this course stands in two places at once, and it does not stand on either one alone.
First, in your heart. Christ formed in you, spiritually and before anything else, because everything downstream depends on it and nothing downstream can substitute for it.
Then outward, on effecting his commands in a household, a church, a school, a town, a country.
And the two are joined. A nation is downstream of its people. What a country will bear in law, tolerate in public and hand to its children tracks what its people actually are, and people are made one at a time. It runs through souls rather than through the sharpness of our arguments, a majority, or a court.
As a formula that sentence is false, and Scripture refutes it rather than a critic. Josiah turned to the LORD with all his heart and soul and might, and the text says no king before him or after him was like him. The very next verse says the LORD did not turn from the burning of his great wrath, and Judah went into exile anyway (2 Kings 23:25-27).10 The most thorough revival that kingdom ever had did not purchase the outcome.
God is free in both directions, and a discipled people is the soil good law grows in without putting him under obligation on our timetable. Deuteronomy 29:29 draws the line: the secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children.11 The outcome is on his side of it. The obedience is on ours, and it is the part we answer for.
Which is why the household weeks sit in the middle of this course instead of at the end, and why the last word here is that the America we want may not be present in our own homes.
Twelve weeks in three movements: Inheritance, then Household, then Responsibility. The full list is on the course page. The household sits in the middle on purpose, because the road to the Constitution runs through the kitchen table, and if it does not, week eleven is a civics lecture.
Ten questions are the real spine of this course and they are printed on the course page. Three ask about government, three ask what it costs you personally, three are a lament about the country, and the last one is what am I to do. The middle three separate this from a history class.
Scripture forbids that ninth question in the form it is usually asked. Ecclesiastes 7:10 says, "Say not, 'Why were the former days better than these?' For it is not from wisdom that you ask this."
That is a hard verse for a class like this one, and we are keeping it. Nostalgia is not a Christian posture. The colonial church that gave us the Mayflower Compact also hanged four Quakers in Boston and executed twenty people at Salem.12 The generation that wrote the Constitution wrote slavery into it. And church membership at the time of the Revolution was lower than it is today; the Second Great Awakening was still a generation away.13 There was no golden age. There were faithful people in every generation, including this one.
So the answer to whether yesterday was better is not a history lesson. It is repentance, which is available to us this morning and was never available in any year we might wish ourselves back into.
It is not a verdict on any election (God's deliberate choice of who will be saved (class 2 unpacks the word)), party or candidate, and nothing here tells you how to vote.
It is not a claim that America is the subject of Scripture. Read Revelation to the end. The city that comes down out of heaven has people in it from every nation, and no nation's flag is flying over it.
And it is not an argument you are being handed to win a fight with. Every objection in this course is going to be stated fairly, including the ones that cost us, and the men who held the other view are going to be described the way we would want to be described.
what does that change about how you pray for the country?
Where did you first hear it, and who was telling you?
Why do you think it is forbidden, when the past clearly did contain real goods we have lost?
Next class: the Bible itself, and what the founding generation was actually quoting.