John Jay

John Jay, the first Supreme Court Chief Justice of the United States, said that we, being a Christian nation would prefer Christian leaders. Jay's views are anathema today. Lawyers, judges and the guru's of American pop culture are doing all in their power to destroy what little memory still exists of our land's Christian foundations.

The Supreme Court knew of our Christian foundations long after John Jay had gone to be with the LORD. Here is an excerpt from the 1892 decision of the Church of the Holy Trinity verses the United States:

This is a religious people. This is historically true. From the discovery of this continent to the present hour, there is a single voice making this affirmation...We find everywhere a clear recognition of the same truth... These, and many other matters which might be noticed, add a volume of unofficial declaration to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation. (Read the whole decision here: Holy Trinity Church vs. the United States )

I would encourage everyone who can read the complete decision to do so.

Justice David Brewer, who wrote the decision, gives a litany of historical facts of our Christian history. Part of the reason for our current moral decline is this -- at the turn of the century many mainline churches traded the Gospel of Christ for a social gospel, and left the historic faith. On the other side of the coin, most of those churches that remained faithful to the Gospel, became pietistic and retreated from culture. They reduced the Gospel to personal believe-ism. In doing this they gave the culture over to the enemies of the Gospel.

If Christians reduce their faith to personal salvation, and don't apply the Scriptures to all aspects of life, then the culture in which they live must cease to be Christian. America is a prime example of this.

If we return to the holistic and culture changing faith of our ancestors; we will see true revival and a re-Christianisation of the U.S.(by God's grace). It took several generations to sink this low. It may take several more to fix things. Let us labour and pray for reformation so our children and grandchildren might live in a Christian land!

Soli Deo Gloria,
Kenith

Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556)

Thomas Cranmer was a man with many faults and failings. He was a very “human” individual. He was born in 1489 the second son of a minor landowner and like so many sons of that day he would receive no inheritance from his father because he was not the eldest son. Because of this, he was destined to become a priest and he entered Cambridge in 1510. His path toward being a clergyman ended however when he decided to marry. His wife died giving birth, after that he returned to Cambridge and the priesthood.

Cranmer was noticed by King Henry VIII who sent him to Rome to argue before the Pope the case for Henry’s divorce from his wife (Catherine). Cranmer was unsuccessful in this venture but Henry soon appointed him ambassador to Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain Charles V.

In 1532 Thomas Cranmer went to Germany to learn more of the Protestant movement. While in Germany he married the daughter of a Lutheran theologian (remember he is at this time a priest).

In 1533 Cranmer, keeping his marriage a secret, was made Archbishop of Canterbury. Three days later he declared Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon to be null and void so Henry could marry Ann Boleyn.

After that Cranmer adopts Protestant (mostly reformed) ideas and works for reform in the Church of England. The Book of Common Prayer and the 39 Articles are mostly his doing. Cranmer had many faults, but he served and supported the Reformation in England for many years.

Mary Tudor (Bloody Mary) became queen of England in 1553 after the death of her Protestant half brother Edward VI. Mary, like her mother (the divorced Catherine of Aragon), was a devout Roman Catholic and she was determined to crush the Reformation in England. She had numerous Protestants burnt at the stake and caused many others to flee to the continent. When the pressure was on Archbishop Cranmer, he signed a recantation of His Reformed views. But soon after he regained his internal strength and recanted of his recantation.

Mary ordered him burned at the stake. When the fire was lit around him Thomas Cranmer thrust his hand with which he had signed his recantation into the fire that it might be consumed first.

Thomas Cranmer died a true martyr for the faith. He was very human and had many failings. He reminds me of Peter who under pressure denied the faith, but like Peter was restored to faith and died in the service of the Lord. Cranmer was martyred (burned at the stake) on March 21, 1556.

Dominus vobiscum,
Kenith

Christianity and Democracy

Most Americans today assume that we live in a democracy. Our political leaders and most commentators in the elite media usually refer to American civil government as a democracy, but A democracy is not the system of government that the founders intended to give us. Democracy is not the form of government we were given at either the state or federal level.

James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, said this about democracy in his famous Federalist #10:

Hence it is, that Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; an have in general been as short in their lives, as they have been violent in their deaths.

The federal government is supposed to be a confederated republic of independent states, and the states too are supposed to have republican forms of government and not a democratic style of government. Madison and the founders were living at a time when the Christian view of the fall (i.e. Adam's) was still believed, and they understood that human nature was, at its core, corrupted by sin. In their view a pure democracy would imply that people, were by nature, basically good.

A belief in the basic goodness of man is an alien idea to the Bible, which teaches that we all inherit original sin, and we compound this sinful nature by our own sinful thoughts, words and deeds. Because of this we are all in need of a saviour and Christ alone is the means of forgiveness for our sin and reconciliation with God the Father.

The Americans back then believed that everyone with political power needed to have that power checked. The understood that the people to needed to have their power checked. "Vox populi vox dei" can never exist where the Christian worldview prevails.

A biblical view of human depravity, from a Calvinistic vantage point, was held by early Americans. This Calvinistic/Christian understanding made a checks and balance system a politically necessity. The founders did see that a limited aspect of the democratic process was useful in a republic, because it gives the people a check on their leaders.

Deo Vindice,
Kenith

Saint Athanasius

I have, over the years, read a fair amount of the ancient writings of the Romans, Greeks and other ancient peoples (both Christian and pagan) and unlike most people I enjoy reading that kind of stuff

One of the works I read some time back was On The Incarnation by Saint Athanasius. Athanasius was born around 296 AD in Egypt which was then part of the Roman Empire, and he died on 2 May, 373 AD. Though his name is unfamiliar to many modern Christians, he is one of the most important Christians in all church history excluding the Apostles.

There is (was) a famous saying about him that went like this "Athanasius contra mundum" or in English "Athanasius against the world." Athanasius was a minister of the Gospel in the Church of Alexandria, Egypt and he suffered greatly for his faith in our incarnate and risen Saviour, Jesus Christ.

Not long after the Roman Emperor Constantine made the Christian faith a legal religion within the empire, he and a number of the emperors who followed him abandoned the orthodox faith for a terrible anti-Christian heresy called Arianism. This anti-Christian faith derived its name from another minister by the name of Arius. Arius taught a malicious heresy in which he denied that Jesus was God incarnate and instead he taught that Jesus was himself created (Jehovah’s witnesses are modern Arians) . A great council of the Church was called to look into the teachings of Arius. At this Council of Nicea both Arius and his views were declared to be anathema.

The Roman emperor Constantine's kinsman, Eusebius of Nicodemia, was a minister and he was also a follower of Arius. Eusebius swayed the emperor away from the biblical position to the Arian view. Constantine and those who followed him used their power to defend and promote the deadly heresy. Many Christians crumbled under this pressure. But Athanasius never wavered. It seemed, at times, as though this small Egyptian (he was nicknamed the Black Dwarf) was the only one in the Church unwilling to bow before the crushing, imperial might of Rome. He was, because of his faithfulness to the truth, exiled five times from Alexandria, where he was bishop. This happened to him because he would not accept the false teachings of Arius which the emperors insisted on.

Athanasius stood for the faith even though it meant his life would be in grave danger. He would spend much of his adult years in exile far from his home, far from the church and people he loved because he would not bow and compromise his faith in Jesus Christ.

Throughout the Scriptures God calls on His people, time and again, to “remember,” but we live in an age of forgetfulness. Most Christians today have no knowledge of who Athanasius is, what he did or why. We are far poorer in many ways, because we commit the sin of forgetfulness. We need to know Bible history (which few Christians do) and the history of Christ’s Church of which we are apart.

Much of what we take for granted today and think to be doctrinally clear cut is only so because we sit on the shoulders of giants in the faith like Saint Athanasius. We should know these things.

Dominus vobiscum,
Kenith

Faith of Our Founders

The paragraph below is from John Adams to Samuel Miller (a Presbyterian minister). Notice what he says about Calvinist and Calvinism. Adams was not orthodox, but he is right about Calvinism's influence, and this is true not only of New England, but of almost all of early America.

"You know not the gratification you have given me by your kind, frank, and candid letter. I must be a very unnatural son to entertain any prejudices against the Calvinists, or Calvinism, according to your confession of faith; for my father and mother, my uncles and aunts, and all my predecessors, from our common ancestor, who landed in this country two hundred years ago, wanting five months, were of that persuasion. Indeed, I have never known any better people than the Calvinists." July 8, 1820

The American War for Independence can not be understood if the dominant theology of the American Colonists is ignored. That theology was Covenant theology and Calvinism. The New England Congregationalists, the Scots and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, Dutch and German Reformed, the French Huguenots that settled in the Carolinas, the small but growing Baptist, and the Anglicans (Episcopalians) all had Calvinistic Creeds. These groups made up the vast majority of early Americans.

It has been noted by the Austrian born Roman Catholic scholar Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, that Calvinistic thinking was so dominant in Colonial America and the early republic that even the Roman Catholics of Maryland, while they were officially Thomists in their thinking, acted and thought in Calvinistic ways.

If we want to see a return to the Christian culture of early America, we must work to point our Christian neighbours to the theological foundations of early America. We must point them to biblical Calvinism and Covenant theology.

Semper Reformanda,
Kenith Andry

Sam Adams

Samuel Adams is one of America's founding fathers from New England. Adams was a descendent of the Puritans that first settled that country, and he was a member of the Congregational Church. At the time Sam Adams lived there was already a move, on the part of his region of America, away from the historic doctrines of the Christian faith.

The seeds of Unitarianism and Deism had been laid in New England during the eighteenth, and they would lead those people into all kinds of anti-Christian "isms" in the nineteenth century.

Sam Adams would have none of that; he held to the historic Christian faith and was, like the great majority of early American Christians, a Calvinist in his theology. Adams knew that true virtue and true knowledge were to be found in the Holy Scriptures. He also believed these things to be vital for both political and religious liberty. He said:

"If Virtue & Knowledge are diffused among the People, they will never be enslaved. This will be their great Security." Samuel Adams to James Warren. February 12, 1779

Samuel Adams understood that liberty was dependent, not on the virtue and knowledge of the leaders only, but of the people themselves. He knew that our leaders would reflect us. If we, as average people, don't live virtuous lives; we will not elect moral leaders. If we are not knowledgeable in things like history, our form of government, sound biblical doctrine, etc...we can be easily tricked by shysters in politics and religion.

In our day, as a general rule, Americans care little for history, political theory, and certainly the study of doctrine is, in many Christian circles, considered boring and "un" if not anti-Spiritual. I think our times bare Sam Adams out as a man that knew what he was talking about. Its ok if some folks think these items unimportant, but when the majority of people think this way then those people are in serious trouble.

We need to work to fix these problems in our own lives, so that we can pass on Virtue and Knowledge to our children.

Soli Deo Gloria,
Kenith