in the context of criticizing WorldNetDaily
here. There's some good quotations from Benjamin Rush, a Trinitarian Universalist and liberal Christian for his day. From the original piece quoting Rush:
... Were it possible for St. Paul to rise from his grave at the
present juncture, he would say to the Clergy who are now so active in
settling the political Affairs of the World: “Cease from your political
labors-your kingdom is not of this World. Read my Epistles. In no part
of them will you perceive me aiming to depose a pagan Emperor , or to
place a Christian upon a throne. Christianity disdains to
receive Support from human Governments.” From this, it derives its
preeminence over all the religions that ever have, or ever shall exist
in the World.
The emphasis is Throckmorton's. The
WorldNetDaily piece doesn't reference Rush but does favorably quote David Barton.
On a personal note, I like Tullian
Tchividjian much more than D. James Kennedy.
Update: I just left a comment at
Throckmorton's. I responded to someone who argued Benjamin Rush seemed
to be misrepresenting St. Paul's sentiments. I wrote to a fellow commenter:
I think you've hinted on a problem with the difficulty in
interpreting the Bible. As I read Rush, I see him as mirroring exactly St.
Paul's sentiments on Romans 13. The ruler to whom he instructed
believers to submit to was the pagan psychopath Nero. And there was no
call for revolution in St. Paul's writings.
The irony is the
Founders did revolt and clergy with a "different" understanding of
Romans 13 helped them so do. Now, after the revolution is over, that the
clergy continued to give the too freethinking Jefferson and Rush
trouble, Rush uses St. Paul to tell them to settle down because, after
all St. Paul told believers to live under the legal peace of a pagan
tyrant's rule.
2 comments:
If your preaching on moral questions is not contrivedly truncated, you're going to touch on matters which are also questions of political controversy. No point in going out of your way not to give expositions on such subjects.
In America of the 21st century, many things Rush would have found unimaginable in his Christian republic are now reality.
"We profess to be republicans, and yet we neglect the only means of establishing and perpetuating our republican forms of government; that is, the universal education of our youth in the principles of Christianity by means of the Bible; for this divine book, above all others, favors that equality among mankind, that respect for just laws, and all those sober and frugal virtues which constitute the soul of republicanism."
A Defence of the Use of the Bible in Schools American Tract Society, 1820.
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