ACTS BIBLE
Stoney taught this at Eastview in the first quarter of 2024. This page is the argument underneath it: what is claimed, the best evidence against each claim, and what is left standing afterward.
What makes America biblically exceptional, and why you have a Christian responsibility to participate in making her more biblically exceptional than ever before.
You cannot legislate his salvation. You can legislate his commands, as a servant of his throne.
The students will find the ideal America we desire may be the America not even present in our homes.
What makes America biblically exceptional?
That the American founding is a Christian achievement: its ideas of covenant, law above rulers, conscience, and the fallenness of man that makes power dangerous all come out of Scripture, through the Reformation and the Puritans, into the political thought of the colonies.
The Constitution never names God. Not once. Its only mentions of religion are a ban on religious tests for office and, in the First Amendment, a ban on Congress establishing a church. Then there is the Treaty of Tripoli, whose eleventh article opens by saying the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion. The Senate consented to it 23 to nothing in 1797 and John Adams signed it. Jefferson took a razor to his New Testament and cut the miracles and the resurrection out. And the document that founded the government protected the slave trade until 1808 and counted a man as three fifths of a man.
The claim that survives is about the ideas, not about the creed of any particular founder, and it is the stronger claim because it does not depend on Jefferson being orthodox. Lutz counted every citation in the American political writing of 1760 to 1805 and the Bible came first, ahead of Montesquieu, Blackstone, and Locke, with Deuteronomy the most-quoted book in the sample. Locke himself, the most-cited philosopher of the period, spends his entire First Treatise arguing against the divine right of kings out of Genesis. The Mayflower Compact opens in the name of God and does the thing the whole argument turns on: a group of Christians take the covenant they already understood from church membership and use it to constitute a civil government. That is the exhibit. It is not an inference. And when a critic answers that the ratification debates cite Montesquieu and Blackstone rather than Moses, follow the citation one step further. Blackstone opens the Commentaries by saying the law of nature is dictated by God, that no human law is of any validity if contrary to it, and that revealed law is found only in the holy Scriptures. Every American lawyer of that generation read it. Montesquieu is a more complicated witness, a French Catholic whose book the Church put on the Index, but his case for dividing power rests on the claim that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, which is Romans 3 with the citation removed.
The Treaty of Tripoli was written to a Muslim state to say the United States is not Christendom and is not coming at you the way Europe came at you. Read as what it is, a foreign-policy assurance about the legal character of the federal government, it says something true that the founders meant: the government is not a church.
Why does God want Judges, instead of Kings?
That Scripture is suspicious of concentrated human power and says so directly, and that self-government under law is therefore not merely an English inheritance but a biblical instinct.
God gives Israel the king anyway, and then builds the Messiah's line through him. David is a king. Solomon is a king. The promise in 2 Samuel 7 is a promise about a throne, and Christ is called King of Kings on the last page of the book. Anyone arguing that Scripture prefers republics has to explain why the kingdom of God is a kingdom. The book of Judges is also not an advertisement: it ends with a Levite's concubine cut into twelve pieces and a civil war, under the refrain that everyone did what was right in his own eyes.
The text is not against kingship as such. It is against *this* kingship, held by *these* hands. When Israel asks for a king in 1 Samuel 8, God tells Samuel they have not rejected him, they have rejected me from being king over them, and then has Samuel read out exactly what the king will do: take your sons, take your daughters, take your fields, take a tenth, and you will be his servants. That is a warning about what power does to the man holding it, and it is the same warning Madison makes in Federalist 51 without the theology. The throne in Revelation is not a counterexample; it is the point. The objection to human kings is that the office is already occupied.
Where is Christ in this?
That the First Amendment's refusal to establish a church was a Christian settlement rather than a secular one, and that Baptists in particular fought for it on theological grounds.
It does not read that way now. Two centuries later the establishment clause is the instrument used to take prayer out of schools and monuments off courthouse lawns, and the people using it are usually not arguing for the purity of the church. If the wall was built by Baptists to protect the garden, it is currently being maintained by people who would prefer the garden gone. That is a real cost and pretending otherwise insults anybody who has watched it happen locally.
The men who wanted it first wanted it for the church's sake. Roger Williams was banished from Massachusetts in 1635 for saying the civil magistrate has no authority over conscience, and the church he gathered in Providence was the first Baptist church in the colonies. History-08 already carries him. The Danbury Baptists wrote to Jefferson because they were a religious minority in a Connecticut that still had an established church, and Jefferson's wall answered them. Massachusetts did not disestablish until 1833. The Baptist argument was never that faith is private. It was that a state church produces a congregation full of people who have joined for reasons other than Christ, which is the exact diagnosis the First Great Awakening had to preach against a century later.
A church that wants the state's help is a church that has quit believing the gospel can fill a room on its own. Every awakening in the History course happened in countries where the establishment was already failing.
Was yesterday better than today and is tomorrow going to be worse than today?
That America was once a country where Scripture was assumed in public life, where households were intact and children were catechized, and that it has fallen from that within living memory. Most people in the room have watched some of it happen and do not need to be persuaded that something went.
Scripture forbids the question in the form it is usually asked. Ecclesiastes 7:10 says do not ask why the former days were better than these, because it is not from wisdom that you ask. And the former days will not survive the audit. The New England church descended from the Mayflower Compact executed four Quakers in Boston and twenty people at Salem. The founding generation wrote slavery into the text. And the established churches of the era were full for reasons other than Christ, the emptiness the Awakening had to preach against. A golden age is easier to want than to locate.
Something real has been lost and it can be named without inventing a golden age. Public life once assumed a shared moral vocabulary and no longer does. That is measurable and worth grieving. But the biblical shape of the answer is not restoration of a lost era, it is repentance in the present, which is available to a class this morning in a way that 1787 is not.
Stoney's own closing line does this work and should be the last thing said: the students will find the ideal America we desire may be the America not even present in our homes. That points the knife inward, where Ecclesiastes points it, and it turns a complaint about the country into an examination of the household.