ACTS BIBLE
The American Church week 11 · Genesis 1:26-27
Where individual worth comes from, and why a document that names God nowhere still assumes him. Madison, the Federalist Papers, and the fall argued without the vocabulary.
Week one put four hard facts in front of the class and promised that weeks nine and eleven and the bonus section would deal with them. Week nine took the founders' private faith. The Treaty of Tripoli is answered in the bonus section under History, which is where it belongs, because answering it well takes a close reading of one article and its Arabic counterpart rather than a paragraph here. This week owes the other two: a Constitution that names God nowhere, and slavery written into its text.
Neither gets softened here. The first has a good answer. The second does not, and this says so.
Start with the Declaration, because the Constitution assumes it.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.1
One word in that sentence is carrying the whole structure, and it is not "equal." It is unalienable. A right that cannot be transferred or surrendered, not even by the person who holds it, and therefore not removable by anyone else.
Ask where a right like that could come from.
If the government grants rights, the government can revoke them, and whatever it granted was a privilege wearing a better name. If the majority confers them, then fifty-one percent can withdraw them, which is the arrangement every persecuted minority in history has lived under. A right is only unalienable if it was issued by an authority above the one being restrained.
Genesis supplies exactly that. Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them (Genesis 1:26-27).2
Worth stated by the maker rather than by the state. That is the only foundation on which the word unalienable means anything, and it is why the sentence in the Declaration names a Creator rather than a consensus.
Now the objection from week one, taken straight.
The Constitution mentions God nowhere. Its only references touching religion are Article VI banning religious tests and the First Amendment forbidding Congress to establish a church, plus two conventions people misread as confessions: the dating line in the attestation and the clause excepting Sundays from the president's ten days to sign a bill.3
The answer is simpler than the arguments usually made for it. The Declaration and the Constitution are different kinds of document doing different jobs. The Declaration states why a government may exist at all and where authority comes from. The Constitution is the machinery: who does what, how long, checked by whom. Machinery documents do not restate first principles, any more than the wiring diagram of a house argues for the existence of electricity.
Needing the Constitution to be devotional literature is asking the wrong document for the wrong thing. And a critic who treats its silence as a denial has done the same.
But the machinery does assume something about human beings, and the men who built it said so in public.
Madison, in Federalist 51: if men were angels, no government would be necessary; if angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. And then the sentence that explains the whole design: ambition must be made to counteract ambition.4
That is not optimism about republics. It is a low view of the men who will hold every office the document creates, including the good ones, including your favorites. The separation of powers is not an efficiency measure. It is a containment vessel.
Genesis 3 tells you where that view came from, and the founders did not need to cite it because everyone in the room already had it. Man was made in the image of God and then fell into sin, and the fall did not exempt statesmen.
So the document names no God and is unintelligible without one. Take away the premise that men are dangerous and every check in it becomes red tape.
Now the second debt, and there is no room to be clever here.
Three passages. Article I section 2 counts a slave as three fifths of a person for representation. Article I section 9 forbids Congress from ending the slave trade before 1808. Article IV section 2 requires that a person escaping bondage be returned.5
The word slave appears in none of them. The framers wrote "other Persons" and "Person held to Service or Labour." Madison's own notes from 25 August 1787 record the reason: they thought it wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men.6
They knew the thing was wrong enough that naming it in the document would stain the document. And they wrote the protections in anyway, in language chosen to keep the page clean.
Genesis 1:27 is what makes three fifths a lie. Not a fraction of a man. A man, bearing the image of God, or the premise the whole document rests on fails. Paul told the Athenians that God made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth (Acts 17:26), which leaves no room at all for grading the image by ancestry.7
Here is where most classes go wrong in one direction and most critics go wrong in the other, and the mistake is the same mistake.
The question is not whether the founding was clean. No human institution is clean, and this course has spent ten weeks explaining why. If Romans 3 is true, there is no version of 1787 in which sinners assemble and produce something spotless.8 A class that measures America against an unfallen standard has abandoned its own doctrine of man to do it, and a critic who does the same has borrowed a standard he cannot account for.
The right question is the one this course has asked of everything else. Not is it flawed, but does anything correct it.
That is a real test, and it is worth applying to any arrangement including this one.
Start with the fact that gets left out of the American conversation almost entirely.
Slavery is not an American institution and it is not a Western one. It is a human one, present in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, India, the pre-colonial African kingdoms that supplied the Atlantic trade, the Islamic world, and the Americas before any European arrived.9 Hammurabi legislates for it. Aristotle defends it as natural.9 On the Christian account of human nature as corrupted at the root, which is the doctrine of the fall, it follows the way sickness follows a wound.
So slavery in 1787 is not the thing requiring explanation. It is the default condition of the species since Genesis 3.9
The anomaly is the other direction. Within a single century a movement appeared that held slavery to be intolerable in principle and set about ending it, and that movement was overwhelmingly Christian: Quakers first, then evangelicals, Wilberforce and Clarkson and the Clapham circle in Britain, and in America the churches of the Second Great Awakening.10 Historians of the subject have made the point plainly, that what needs accounting for is not the existence of slavery but the sudden appearance of people who thought it had to stop.10
That is the frame. The question is not why America had slavery. Every society did. The question is why America stopped, and what it cost.
Now the trajectory, which is checkable rather than rhetorical.
Vermont abolished adult slavery in its 1777 constitution. Pennsylvania passed gradual abolition in 1780, the first such act by a legislature anywhere in the Americas. Massachusetts ended it by judicial reading of its own constitution in the early 1780s.11 In July 1787, while the Convention sat in Philadelphia, the Confederation Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance, whose sixth article bans slavery outright from the entire territory.12
And the 1808 clause is the one people misread. It is a sunset, not a license. It sets the earliest date at which Congress may end the importation, which means everyone in the room understood the trade would be ended and were arguing about when. Congress banned it in 1807, effective 1 January 1808, the first day it constitutionally could.13
Then say the hard half, because the trajectory did not run smooth. The cotton gin, built in 1793 and patented the next year, made the thing enormously profitable and the southern position hardened rather than softened. By 1837 Calhoun was telling the Senate that slavery was a positive good, which is not a foot coming out.14 The correction stalled, reversed in one region, and in the end took a war that killed somewhere between six hundred thousand and three quarters of a million Americans.15
That is the answer to does anything correct it. Something did. It cost more than any other correction in the country's history, and it came out.
Where this argument goes wrong if it is pushed. It is not that everybody did it, therefore nobody is culpable. Men who owned other men are culpable, and several of the men in this course died still owning them. It is also not that the founders were secret abolitionists. Most were not. The claim is about direction and mechanism, not about the personal virtue of the men, and the strongest version of it does not need them to have been better than they were.
The correction was possible because the standard was already inside the documents. The contradiction was internal, and everybody involved could read.
Which is why abolition was argued as fulfillment rather than as revolution. Frederick Douglass stood up in Rochester on 5 July 1852 and asked what the Fourth of July meant to a slave, and he did it by holding the country to its own Declaration rather than by rejecting it.16 Eight years later, in Glasgow, he argued publicly against his own former position and against Garrison's, who had called the Constitution a covenant with death: read properly, Douglass said, the Constitution is an anti-slavery document.17 A man who had been owned changed his mind in public about the paperwork of the country that owned him.
And Lincoln at Gettysburg reached past the Constitution to the older document. Four score and seven years ago is 1776, not 1787.18 He went back to the proposition, because the proposition was the thing the war was about.
The standard that condemned American slavery was American, it was older than the Constitution, and it came out of Genesis.
The image of God is the ground of every right in that document, and it is also the reason none of us can be written off.
Man was made in that image, and Genesis 3 records what he did with it, and every clause in the Constitution designed to check power is an admission of the same fact. The founders built a machine for governing sinners because that is the only kind of citizen available, and they were among them.
Christ is the image the rest of us were made in and lost. He lived the perfect life we could not live, went to the cross, and rose, and the debt was paid in full with nothing left for us to add. No document did that and no amendment can.
Which is the last thing to say about this week, and it is the reason a Christian can hold both halves without flinching. The Thirteenth Amendment freed bodies, and that was a real and costly good, and it did not free one man from sin. Jesus said it to people who were sure they had never been slaves to anyone: everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin, and if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed (John 8:34-36).19
Paul knew the difference and did not confuse the two. He sent Onesimus back to Philemon no longer as a bondservant but as a beloved brother, and he told the Corinthians that the man called in the Lord as a bondservant is the Lord's freedman while the free man is Christ's bondservant (1 Corinthians 7:22).20 Those are not sentences excusing a chain. They are sentences saying the deepest chain is not the one on the wrist, and that it comes off in exactly one place.
An abolition is worth a war. It is still not a resurrection.
God chooses, and the Father draws. Salvation is his work from start to finish; we receive it, we don't author it. Which is worth saying in a week about sovereignty, because individual sovereignty in the civil sense is real and biblical and has a hard limit: a man who owns himself before the government does not own himself before God.
Scripture stays the final authority over this too, and that is what allows us to say a founding document was wrong without flinching, and to love the country anyway.
earth.
government changes its mind?
the page. What does that tell you about what they knew?
discarding it. When is that the right move, and when is it naive?
Next class: the people leaving the church right now, why they say they are leaving, and what the ten questions have been building toward.