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THE REFORMATION AT 500, AND THE CASE OF TWO “GEORGES”
The vital link between Galatians and the US Constitution
Marcus Sanford, November, 2017, ask@interplans.net
Most of us can remember the basic line about why the American colonies wanted freedom from England: oppressive government. It is correct, but it is a bit too simple.
In Europe, before there was much of an issue about oppressive government, there was a protest against oppressive religion. If you enjoy protests, you may like to know that the name of the dissenting party of Luther, etc., became known as Protestant Christian. November 2017 is the 500th anniversary of its birth.
Luther spent hours in the New Testament letter Galatians unearthing oppressive religion in a setting in antiquity—1st century Turkey. There was a sort of neo-Judaism that was spoiling the apostles’ original message—and spoiling believers faith.
The message of Galatians about the individual's freedom from others 2nd-hand authority over them as Christians was the topic of a sermon in 1775 Philadelphia by Jacob Duche. It was the Judaizers who sought to make people 2nd-class believers unless their way of doing the law was kept. Realizing the similarity in how the colonists were being treated as 2nd-class, Duche preached how important it was to preserve civic freedom, and view it as a direct, unmediated benefit from God, not 2nd-hand through a state authority.
This was a necessary civic corollary to spiritual freedom in Christ. It may even be a case, said Duche, where physical effort and struggle would be required to shrug off those who wanted to comptrol the freedom of others from a distance of 3540 miles, London to Philadelphia, 4 months by vessel. Our term for that today would be a low-speed connection.
In the audience that day was Thomas Paine who, by the afternoon, had pretty much written out his pamphlet COMMON SENSE in his head and partly on paper, to initiate independence for the colonies. It had most of the features of the Constitution in it in short form.
I'm not sure Paine was cautious enough about mistakes that the individual could make but the inspiration of the Reformation imprinted and clarified freedom in both cases--in spiritual life and about state authority. God, not the state, was the source of the individual’s rights.
In other words, there is no America without Galatians.
But it does not take religion as we know it to oppress. There are other entities and doctrines which can. The Left’s intellectuals and movers in government, media, education and entertainment are entirely unaware of this. They have generated an anti-religious climate, to be sure. But it is not as though there has to be religion as we know it to crush the individual.
The Colonists knew this. The enemy was personified in a person, George III, and the solution was personified in a citizen-deemed-leader, George Washington. King George, as shown brilliantly by the series TURN (as in Turncoats during the Revolution), was as wreckless with debt as he was insistent about entitlement. I’m reminded of Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama. His way was God’s, he thought. We had guessed that.
The reason for the Left’s incessant war on faith is because individual freedom in America is based on rights granted by a Creator. It is an ideology, but it has violent ideas to impose.
So the Left regards the Creator and faith as irrational, matched only by its irrational view of guns. Never mind a massive state; those guns might just up and massacre us all!
It is entirely plausible that the Crown’s (the oppressive “George”) sense of entitlement is what stands behind the arch-tool that seeks to demolish the Creator’s place—the theory of evolution. Evolutionary law and language about law was imposed on America soon after the Civil War. Today, American high school students get no required training in geology after 9th grade, so that uniformitarian’s favorite myth (to quote Wikipedia, ‘that there is no evidence of a global flood anywhere’) is never the slightest of issues.
The Left otherwise hates America, that is, calls it racist and oppressive. Obama likened America to a Nazi state, in the same way that SNL’s audience recently laughed at Kim’s comments about Trump, in the same way that eugenicists in the UK in 1920 said that eating pork was as awful as WW1. That’s why this month, a plaque marking Washington’s (the “George” of freedom) usual church seat is being removed. Some people might be offended to know he had slave employees.
As usual, the Left cannot see that even if imperfectly practiced, the doctrine that an individual’s rights are in God will result in free people, while placing them in the hands of state authority will expose them to whatever the god-less state authority sees fit.
The oppressive “George” believed its right to oppress was based in God. The Left seeks to be that god in a worldview where there is no one outside its control. Today there is far too little fear of “One mind, one state, all equal.”
No, that’s not a line from the Constitution.
Marcus Sanford’s books and scripts are at Amazon.com. A scope of work video is at ‘All Lives Matter’—Marcus Sanford at youtube.com.
The vital link between Galatians and the US Constitution
Marcus Sanford, November, 2017, ask@interplans.net
Most of us can remember the basic line about why the American colonies wanted freedom from England: oppressive government. It is correct, but it is a bit too simple.
In Europe, before there was much of an issue about oppressive government, there was a protest against oppressive religion. If you enjoy protests, you may like to know that the name of the dissenting party of Luther, etc., became known as Protestant Christian. November 2017 is the 500th anniversary of its birth.
Luther spent hours in the New Testament letter Galatians unearthing oppressive religion in a setting in antiquity—1st century Turkey. There was a sort of neo-Judaism that was spoiling the apostles’ original message—and spoiling believers faith.
The message of Galatians about the individual's freedom from others 2nd-hand authority over them as Christians was the topic of a sermon in 1775 Philadelphia by Jacob Duche. It was the Judaizers who sought to make people 2nd-class believers unless their way of doing the law was kept. Realizing the similarity in how the colonists were being treated as 2nd-class, Duche preached how important it was to preserve civic freedom, and view it as a direct, unmediated benefit from God, not 2nd-hand through a state authority.
This was a necessary civic corollary to spiritual freedom in Christ. It may even be a case, said Duche, where physical effort and struggle would be required to shrug off those who wanted to comptrol the freedom of others from a distance of 3540 miles, London to Philadelphia, 4 months by vessel. Our term for that today would be a low-speed connection.
In the audience that day was Thomas Paine who, by the afternoon, had pretty much written out his pamphlet COMMON SENSE in his head and partly on paper, to initiate independence for the colonies. It had most of the features of the Constitution in it in short form.
I'm not sure Paine was cautious enough about mistakes that the individual could make but the inspiration of the Reformation imprinted and clarified freedom in both cases--in spiritual life and about state authority. God, not the state, was the source of the individual’s rights.
In other words, there is no America without Galatians.
But it does not take religion as we know it to oppress. There are other entities and doctrines which can. The Left’s intellectuals and movers in government, media, education and entertainment are entirely unaware of this. They have generated an anti-religious climate, to be sure. But it is not as though there has to be religion as we know it to crush the individual.
The Colonists knew this. The enemy was personified in a person, George III, and the solution was personified in a citizen-deemed-leader, George Washington. King George, as shown brilliantly by the series TURN (as in Turncoats during the Revolution), was as wreckless with debt as he was insistent about entitlement. I’m reminded of Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama. His way was God’s, he thought. We had guessed that.
The reason for the Left’s incessant war on faith is because individual freedom in America is based on rights granted by a Creator. It is an ideology, but it has violent ideas to impose.
So the Left regards the Creator and faith as irrational, matched only by its irrational view of guns. Never mind a massive state; those guns might just up and massacre us all!
It is entirely plausible that the Crown’s (the oppressive “George”) sense of entitlement is what stands behind the arch-tool that seeks to demolish the Creator’s place—the theory of evolution. Evolutionary law and language about law was imposed on America soon after the Civil War. Today, American high school students get no required training in geology after 9th grade, so that uniformitarian’s favorite myth (to quote Wikipedia, ‘that there is no evidence of a global flood anywhere’) is never the slightest of issues.
The Left otherwise hates America, that is, calls it racist and oppressive. Obama likened America to a Nazi state, in the same way that SNL’s audience recently laughed at Kim’s comments about Trump, in the same way that eugenicists in the UK in 1920 said that eating pork was as awful as WW1. That’s why this month, a plaque marking Washington’s (the “George” of freedom) usual church seat is being removed. Some people might be offended to know he had slave employees.
As usual, the Left cannot see that even if imperfectly practiced, the doctrine that an individual’s rights are in God will result in free people, while placing them in the hands of state authority will expose them to whatever the god-less state authority sees fit.
The oppressive “George” believed its right to oppress was based in God. The Left seeks to be that god in a worldview where there is no one outside its control. Today there is far too little fear of “One mind, one state, all equal.”
No, that’s not a line from the Constitution.
Marcus Sanford’s books and scripts are at Amazon.com. A scope of work video is at ‘All Lives Matter’—Marcus Sanford at youtube.com.
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