Ben Witherington III (Professor of New Testament Interpretation at Asbury Theological Seminary) has a blog, and he just reviewed David Holmes new book, The Faiths of the Founding Fathers by David L. Holmes (Oxford University Press, 2006).
Here's a provocative quote from his review:
"The upshot of all this is of course that America's leadership at its inception was religiously pluralistic (in a Judeo-Christian kind of way; not like modern world religions kind of pluralism). In short there is no encouragement here either for the secular humanist theory of America's origins or for that matter for the 'our first leaders were mostly orthodox Christians' theory either. Sorry Timothy La Haye, and other Evangelical revisionist historians, but you need fact check as bad as Dan Brown did."
technorati: politics, emerging church, social action
3 comments:
awesome review...
I think the last bit on the justification for the rebellion was the most important bit and raised some serious questions that US Christians need to take seriously... Here's where I summarized the 18th ctry political ideology that was behind the revolution. I think comparing it to the Politics of Jesus would be interesting...
dlw
Bob,
This is unrelated but I thought you would want to know:
Blogger is getting new features:
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The article is really excellent but it completely overlooked one of the most important aspects of our countries founding and that was the role of Freemasonry and the large part it played.
Washington,Franklin and most of our founders where Freemasons this cannot be denied.
Washington and a huge number of Presidents since have been Freemasons also.
Jefferson was a Unitarian and like Thomas Paine he completely denied the trinity and the deity of Christ thinking it was a fabrication for the church to gain some kind of political power.
It was a 3 headed hydra I believe Jefferson called it.
Freemasonry is full of oaths, religious symbols and rituals all of which make for a strange blend of occultic esoteric ecumenicalism and an ultimate outright denial of Jesus "ALONE" as Lord and savior of mankind.
Please read Thomas Paines"Origins of Freemasonry" on the link below its a real insightful eye opener to these free thinking "COMMON SENSE" deists and what they really thought about "NATURES GOD".
http://freemasonry.bcy.ca/history/
paine_t.html
I'm still looking in the bible for where it says Jesus promised us "life,liberty and the pursuit of happiness".
In fact HE promised quite the opposite,HE promised a life of persecution from a fallen world who for the most part has rejected him.
"If anyone wishes to come after me" He said, "he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me" (Lk 9:23).
People like to worship men and their written words much more than God and HIS written WORD.The words of dead men instead of the WORD of the (LIVING) God.
Instead people worship the Constitution and the Bill of rights and the men who wrote them as if our salvation lies in those.
The Constitution is a peice of swiss cheese,already almost basically dead and full of holes and meaningless amendments and is being used for political correctness of every kind imaginable.It is also about to be replaced by a facist "WORLD CONSTITUTION" and "WORLD BILL OF RIGHTS".
http://www.worldparliamentgov.net/
"Heaven and earth shall pass away but my words shall not pass away" (Matthew 24)
Like Jesus said "why do we continually search for the living among the dead",salvation is in HIM and in HIM alone.
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