Gregg Frazer's "thesis" on the political theology of the American founding, in my opinion, took the level of scholarly analysis to a "higher level." His book has its strengths and weaknesses. But it's certainly a must read for anyone who wants to seriously study the issue.
I just noticed that University of Kansas Press now features a free chapter of the book in PDF form. Check it out.
2 comments:
Now I know where you got your key founders bit. If I remember correctly, Frazer didn't invent the term. I have a book where someone mentioned it in the fifties or around there.
Frazer is speculating big-time with this rationalist nonsense. AH, JW, GW, JM, TJ and JA, called themselves Christians, not rationalists; the first 4 took communion, identifying with Christ (JW had to take communion growing up as his dad was an elder in a Calvinist church); AH wrote that he rejected enlightenment rationalism.
Corporately, and nationally, they claimed Christ was Nature's God and affirmed the Lord's vicarious atonement, His Deity, Godhead, resurrection, Mediation and intercession between God and man and all miracles by Christ and the apostles:
"The Congress...desirous...to have people of all ranks and degrees duly impressed with a solemn sense of God's superintending providence, and of their duty devoutly to rely.... on His aid and direction... do earnestly recommend...a day of humiliation, fasting, and prayer; that we may with united hearts confess and bewail our manifold sins and transgressions and, by a sincere repentance and amendment of life,...and through the Merits and mediation of Jesus Christ, obtain His pardon and forgiveness."
--Journals of Congress (1905), Vol. IV, pp. 208-209, May 17, 1776.
Merits through the Cross is where the forgiveness begins. The rest of the merits is the complete new testament, for mediation is explained by the apostles.
Still reading WAY too much into the record than what is warranted.
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