ACTS BIBLE
The American Church week 2 · 2 Timothy 3:14-17
Where the ideas came from before they were American. Lutz counted the citations in the political writing of 1760 to 1805 and the Bible came first.
Last week ended on a claim and a number. The claim was that the ideas under the American founding came out of Scripture rather than out of the private faith of any particular founder. The number was Donald Lutz's: across the American political writing of 1760 to 1805, the Bible was the most-cited source in the sample.1
This week we look at the book itself, and we start by making the strongest case against our own use of that number.
Paul is in prison and near the end. He writes to a younger man he trained, and he tells him where to stand when things come apart.
"But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus" (2 Timothy 3:14-15).
Two things in that sentence set up the whole week.
The first is from childhood. Timothy did not get the Scriptures from a seminary. He got them from his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice (2 Timothy 1:5), at home, before he could evaluate them.2 Week five is built on that.
The second is what Paul says the book is able to do. It makes you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. Not wise for governing. Not wise for founding a republic. That is the purpose sentence, and any class that treats the Bible mainly as a source document for constitutional history has already lost the plot of it.
Then Paul says the rest: all Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, reproof, correction and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work (2 Timothy 3:16-17). Every good work. That includes the work of a magistrate, a juror, a school board member and a voter. The book aims at salvation first and then it equips for everything after.
The Lutz number has a serious problem in it.
In 1776 the Bible was the common property of English-speaking people the way Shakespeare and the King James cadence were. A pamphleteer reached for Scripture the way a modern writer reaches for a proverb. Citation density measures what was in the shared vocabulary, not what was in anybody's heart. Jefferson quoted Scripture all his life and also cut the miracles out of his own copy with a razor.3 Tom Paine wrote Common Sense, which argues against monarchy from 1 Samuel 8 at length, and then wrote The Age of Reason, which attacks Christianity as thoroughly as anything published in that century.4 The same man, the same Bible, opposite ends.
Lutz's own data makes the point sharper. A large share of the biblical citations in his sample come from printed sermons, and sermons cite the Bible the way medical journals cite anatomy. The sermons are not the whole record. In the constitutional debates of 1787 and 1788 specifically, the writers reach far more often for Montesquieu and Blackstone than for Moses.1
So the honest form of the claim is not "the founders quoted the Bible, therefore America is Christian." Anyone can check that and it does not hold.
What survives is smaller and harder to dismiss.
A shared vocabulary is not nothing. Argument requires common ground, and in that generation the common ground was a book. When Otis or Mayhew or Witherspoon wanted to say a ruler could go too far, they did not have to establish a premise first. They could quote, and the room already knew the passage.5 That is a real feature of a culture and it is one we no longer have.
The objection above says that in 1787 the delegates reached past Moses for Montesquieu and Blackstone.1 Who were Montesquieu and Blackstone reaching for?
Blackstone answers in his own introduction, and there is no ambiguity in it. Every American lawyer of that generation read the Commentaries; Edmund Burke told Parliament in 1775 that nearly as many copies had sold in the colonies as in England.6 Here is what those readers found on the way in:
the law of nature, being co-eval with mankind and dictated by God
himself, is of course superior in obligation to any other. It is
binding over all the globe, in all countries, and at all times: no
human laws are of any validity, if contrary to this.7
He then names the second foundation. The revealed law, he says, is found only in the holy Scriptures, and upon those two, nature and revelation, depend all human laws, so that no human law should be suffered to contradict either.7
A delegate citing Blackstone was not stepping outside the biblical stream. He was citing the man who wrote that a statute contrary to the law God dictated has no validity at all. That is the entire argument of this course, stated by a lawyer, in the book they were all holding.
Montesquieu is a more complicated witness, and getting him right matters. He was a French Catholic, educated by the Oratorians, and he devoted two books of The Spirit of the Laws to arguing that Christianity moderates political power and that a Christian people resists despotism.8 He was also read as dangerous by his own church, which put the book on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1751, and scholars still argue over how orthodox he privately was.8 So he is not a witness for anybody's piety.
He is a witness for the premise. His argument for dividing power rests on a sentence about human nature: constant experience shows that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go.9 That is Romans 3 with the citation removed. Separation of powers is a doctrine of sin applied to architecture.
The limit on this argument, because it can be pushed too far. Blackstone's natural-law preface was attacked in his own lifetime by Jeremy Bentham, who thought it was pious scaffolding over an ordinary positive-law system, meaning one whose rules bind only because a legislature laid them down, and serious scholars still debate how much work those opening pages actually do in the doctrine that follows.10 The claim to make is not that Blackstone and Montesquieu were evangelicals. It is that the intellectual chain the founders pulled on was Christian at every link a critic points to, which makes "they cited Montesquieu instead of Moses" a much weaker objection than it first sounds.
And the particular book they reached for most is the part that should interest us.
Not Romans. Not the Gospels. Deuteronomy.1
Open Deuteronomy 17 and read verses 14 through 20, which is where Israel is told what to do when it eventually asks for a king. God does not refuse. He legislates the office.
The king may not multiply horses for himself. He may not multiply wives, or silver and gold. And then this: he shall write for himself a copy of this law in a book, and it shall be with him, and he shall read in it all the days of his life, so that his heart may not be lifted up above his brothers.
Count what is in that passage. A written law that exists before the ruler does. An executive explicitly under it. Term-long limits on military power, on personal enrichment, on the household. And a stated reason, which is not efficiency but the danger of a man's heart becoming lifted up above his neighbors.
That is a constitution in outline, written down roughly three thousand years before Philadelphia, and it was the most-quoted book of the founding era. Nobody has to prove that any particular delegate believed it to see that this is the shape they were working in.
Stand back from Deuteronomy 17 and ask the question it provokes. If a magistrate is not administering a law he did not write, as a servant of the body he serves, then what is a courtroom doing?
There is a serious answer that does not need God in it. A court is a mechanism for settling disputes so that a society does not tear itself apart. It needs no standard above the parties, only a procedure both will accept. That is a real theory and intelligent people hold it.
It breaks on one word. A purely procedural court can say a verdict was irregular. It cannot say a verdict was unjust, because injustice means measured against something the procedure did not supply. And no legal system that has ever commanded real loyalty has settled for irregular. Every one of them tells the losing party it ought to accept the outcome because the outcome was right.
The hardest case makes it plain. At Nuremberg the defense was that the defendants had obeyed the law of their own state, which in the narrow sense was true. The tribunal answered that some acts are crimes whether or not a legislature said so.11 That answer is unavailable to anyone who thinks law is only procedure. It requires a standard no parliament wrote and no parliament can repeal.
Scripture names that standard, and it describes the office in exactly these terms. Romans 13 calls the civil ruler God's servant twice in a single verse, and the word is diakonos, the ordinary term for a servant who waits on a table, the root of our word deacon.12 The magistrate bears the sword as staff. He is not the origin of the standard; he administers one issued above him, which is why he can be wrong, and why saying so is not rebellion.
That is why we have laws and courts at all. They are a small, fallible, temporary copy of a real assize, a court that actually sits. Abraham already assumed it when he argued with God over Sodom: shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just? (Genesis 18:25). The copy carries authority because the original exists. Remove the original and a courtroom is power wearing a robe.
The Bible the Pilgrims carried in 1620 was not the King James. It was the Geneva Bible of 1560, produced by English Protestants who had fled to Switzerland, and it was the first English Bible with numbered verses and extensive marginal notes.13 Who those passengers were, why a congregation would leave England at all, and what their governor wrote down, are in the Separatists section under History. Those notes were the point. They explained the text, and in places they explained that a ruler commanding sin may be disobeyed. The note at Exodus 1 calls the Hebrew midwives' refusal to kill the children lawful, while faulting the lie they told to cover it.13
King James understood exactly what that was. At the Hampton Court Conference in 1604 he called the Geneva notes partial, untrue and seditious, and when he authorized a new translation he instructed that it carry no marginal notes beyond plain explanations of the Hebrew and Greek.14 A king commissioned a Bible to get rid of the footnotes.
Which tells you those footnotes were doing political work, and it tells you that the people who sailed to Plymouth were carrying the version he objected to.
One more line, and it runs from the book to the schoolhouse.
In 1647 the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed a law requiring every town of fifty households to appoint someone to teach children to read and write, and every town of a hundred households to establish a grammar school. It is known by its first phrase. "It being one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures."15
The reasoning is stated plainly and it is not civic. They built schools because they believed an unread Bible leaves people at the mercy of whoever will read it to them. Public schooling in the English colonies begins as a literacy program for Scripture.
The primer those children used says the same thing at the level of the alphabet. The New England Primer taught the letters with rhymed couplets, and the first one was "In Adam's Fall, we sinned all."16 A five-year-old learned the letter A and the doctrine of original sin in the same breath. Week seven takes this up properly.
Everything above can be true and still leave a class worse off, if it turns the Bible into an artifact.
Paul says the sacred writings make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. That is the book's own account of itself, and it outranks anything we have said about Deuteronomy and the Geneva notes.
Scripture is our final authority, and this week is the week that conviction is doing obvious work: when a king, a court, or a translation committee says one thing and the text says another, Scripture wins. That is exactly what the Geneva notes claimed and exactly what James objected to.
But the book is not finally about kings. It is about a man who came under the law, kept all of it as none of us has, and then went to a cross to settle a debt he did not owe. His last word there was that it is finished, and nothing was left for us to add. God chooses, and the Father draws, and salvation is his work from start to finish. We receive it; we don't author it.
Human beings have not changed since Deuteronomy 17 warned about a heart lifted up above its brothers. That is the same heart the New England Primer named in its first couplet and the same one every constitution since has been written to restrain. The book that diagnoses it is the book that cures it, and the cure is a person.
legislating the office of a king.
not of ours, what changes about how a Christian argues in public now?
treasury, and gives one reason for all three. Why that reason?
themselves. What is your household's version of that, and is it working?
Next class: the timeline the book gives, from Adam forward, and what the genealogies are actually counting.