The Christian Heritage of the United States: A Forgotten Narrative
In today’s rapidly changing America, it is important to revisit the foundations upon which America was built. Americans once universally recognized the protestant Christian origins of this nation, yet today the spurious myths around so-called “deism” and “separation of church and state” have made serious inroads into the American narrative. Even the Christian character of undoubtedly godly men like George Washington and Patrick Henry has been cast aside by the revisionism of leftist ideologues and political pundits. It is disheartening to witness the extent to which historical figures who embraced the Biblical faith and shaped our nation’s values are now subject to reinterpretation and distortion. I’ve even met families whose college-aged children refuse to celebrate Thanksgiving, influenced by a skewed perspective that portrays the pilgrims as inherently evil.
During the late ’90s and early 2000s, there was nothing more exciting to me than the underground Christian music scene. In 1997, at age 12, I started devouring all the Christian punk music I could find. One of my favorite bands was called Blaster the Rocket Man. They were perhaps the most unique of any other band. Their lyrics centered on horror and sci-fi themes – like werewolves, vampires, and aliens – but from an explicitly Christian worldview. In Blaster’s songs, monsters could be saved from their monstrosities if they put their faith in Jesus. It was very Kuyperian if you think about it: Every square inch belongs to Jesus…even the horror genre.
One of Blaster’s albums was called The Monster Who Ate Jesus. That title might seem sacrilegious on the surface, but I’ve always taken it as a reference to the Lord’s Supper (eucharist, communion). In one of the band’s earlier songs, “American Werewolf,” the only way for the werewolf to end his curse was to eat and drink Christ’s body and blood. I was reminded of this concept while watching Monster, the Netflix show about Jeffrey Dahmer. (Warning: mature audiences only.)
Dahmer was one of the most notorious serial killers in US history, nicknamed the Milwaukee Cannibal. From the late ’70s to the early ’90s, Dahmer drugged, raped, killed, and ate his victims (mostly gay black men). Most people – Christian or not – find these crimes utterly reprehensible. Dahmer’s level of depravity cannot be overstated.
And yet, one of the most fascinating things about Dahmer is that he claimed to become a Christian in prison. Mind you, jailhouse conversions aren’t that fascinating. Many people claim to find Jesus behind bars and many of those conversions are dishonest and/or short-lived. What’s always fascinated me about Dahmer was that he never used his faith to try to get out of prison. In fact, he wanted to be executed, which is the biblical penalty for rapists and murderers (Genesis 9:6, Deuteronomy 22:25-27).
“When he arose, he took the young child and his mother by night, and departed into Egypt: And was there until the death of Herod: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Out of Egypt have I called my son.”
The prophetic witness of the Old Testament is a central theme of the gospel writers and appears throughout St. Matthew’s work as evidence of Jesus’s status as the Messiah. Through textual quotations, allusions, and implicit references St. Matthew offers his Hebrew audience dozens of examples of how Jesus fits the messianic qualifications of their own Scriptural tradition. Yet, St. Matthew often handles these references in ways that seem out of context with their original narratives. Established stories and characters are recast from their historical plots to take on symbolic or even typological meaning in the life of Jesus. While St. Matthew’s interpretation of the Old Testament is under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, it is unlikely that his contemporaries or even the prophets themselves always understood how their words pointed to a future Messiah. One example is the fulfillment of “Out of Egypt have I called my son” cited by St. Matthew from the Book of Hosea. St. Matthew understood how the phrase fulfilled Scripture in terms of messianic prophecy, but also informs our interpretive lens for the Old Testament.
Prophecy and Providence
Basic to the idea of Biblical prophecy is the doctrine of providence by which we understand the divine governance of God in history. God fulfills his purposes as he unfolds the natural years of human history. Dutch-American theologian Louis Berkhof describes providence as, “whereby He rules all things so that they answer to the purpose of their existence.” a God’s sovereign orchestration of history is clearly explained in passages like Psalm 103:18 where we read, “The LORD has established His throne in heaven, And His kingdom rules over all.” The mechanism of messianic prophecy demonstrates the special promises possessed by the Hebrews as they expected the God over their history to also superintend a savior in their future. Contrast this with the writings of Sophocles and his Delphic oracles that entrap man’s future into an Oedipal tragedy.
St. Matthew’s use of messianic prophecies is therefore primarily a matter of demonstrating God’s power in time and not intended to be mere proof texts for qualifying Jesus’s own messianic candidacy. We see in the messianic prophecies God’s fingerprints of providence and signposts of his imminent work in establishing his renewed Kingdom. Dr. Edmund Clowney of Westminster Seminary explains in his popular book Preaching Christ in All of Scripture that the patterns that seem to repeat and find fulfillment in Jesus point to the magnifying work of Israel’s Messiah. “God will not merely repeat his deeds of the past; he will do greater things, climatically greater: a second exodus, involving spiritual deliverance; a new covenant, a new creation, a new people, including Jews and Gentiles; and a greater than Moses, than David, than Elijah.” b We should then expect that the interpretive methodology that St. Matthew will employ in relation to the fulfillment of the Old Testament will cast a greater weight to prophetic statements and allusions that point to the Messiah’s greater role in the destiny of the covenant People.
Greater Fulfillment in the Gospels
The narrative employed in Matthew 2 functions to highlight God’s past faithfulness and connect it to the greater promises that come through or are fulfilled by His Son. St. Matthew’s emphasis on the holy family’s refuge in Egypt employs not only a reference to Old Testament scripture, but invokes the historic symbolism of Moses and Hosea. Harkening back to an Exodus-like story, St. Matthew introduces Herod as a new Pharaoh and Jesus as a new Moses. The Messianic prophecy itself attempts to connect or memorialize a past event in redemptive history to the life and ministry of Jesus. This method of weaving pictures of previous covenantal epochs into the successive stages of Israel’s growth matches the entire pattern described as “covenant renewal” in James B. Jordan’s book Through New Eyes. Jordan explains that, “…time is opportunity.” and the Covenant history builds in a linear-spiral fashion. c The connections between messianic prophecy and their fulfillment point to God’s work at fulfilling his promises through successive covenantal renewals with mankind (e.g. Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David). With each successive Patriarch’s renewal, God reveals more of his glorious plan to be fulfilled in the future Messiah. Here St. Matthew appeals to Jesus as a new stage of covenant renewal.
A car stitches its way down the highway that needles through the shimmering desert. No one but the inhabitants hears the brakes as it slows. It spits two children out in school uniform. “See you later!”
The
car drives off, accelerating quickly into oblivion.
The
two kids look at each other. The sun begins to suck sweat out of them.
It is very hot in the wilderness today.
I
would like to talk about three different ways of teaching.
The
first is indoctrination. You’ve been told to hate it, but it resembles one part
of true education just like a changeling resembles the baby the fae stole.
Indoctrination drills a single lesson, a single position or idea, into the
student’s head. This is the truth and there is no other.
Indoctrination
creates blind humans. They cannot recognize other perspectives. They don’t even
recognize other perspectives as perspectives. To the indoctrinated man,
all other thoughts are insanity. They, and they alone, know the truth.
The
second is teaching the controversy. As the idea of Darwinism gained bastion
status in public schools, Intelligent Design proponents started a campaign
begging public schools to “teach the controversy,” that is, include I.D.
alongside Darwinism in public schools, teaching both sides as equal options.
This was shot down, of course, but since then I’ve heard the phrase advocated
in different education questions, whenever some controversy about some theory
or knowledge comes along. Teach the controversy, maintain neutrality. Show both
sides, and show that you aren’t biased. All existential and fundamental
questions get answered with a shrug. Who’s to say?
Teaching
the controversy is dropping your kids off in the wilderness, and expecting them
to find their own way to civilization. It’s bad parenting, and it certainly isn’t
education. But like indoctrination, there’s a warped resemblance to true
learning in that heat mirage.
The
third is the journey. All education is a journey from falsity to truth, from
wickedness to wisdom, from the fear of everything or nothing to the fear of the
Lord. Take your students on a journey, and show them how difficult the road to
truth is, but for God’s sake don’t let them walk it alone. It is good for them
to know how hard it is to walk through the wilderness. But show them that taking
them with you through it, not by stranding them there.
One
exercise I do with my class involves taking on the character of an atheist and arguing
the problem of evil. I state it both logically and emotionally, as strongly as
I can. I pull no punches. Then I end the class and tell them to come back
tomorrow with an answer. They spend a few minutes in the wilderness. But the
next day they come back, and after I hear their answers, I give them the
logical and emotional answer to the problem of evil. Not everyone is
able to walk the road, but I take them with me. By the end, they know how
desolate that wilderness is, but they have also come out of the
wilderness to the garden city.
So,
yes, teach the controversy. But also teach the answer to the controversy. They
must come through the welter of conflicting ideas to safety on the other side.
So,
yes, tell them that what you believe is the truth, is the truth. But
show them how you get there, remembering that you too can take wrong turns away
from the well-lit path of the Word.
If
you do teach them the controversy, then your students are not indoctrinated –
they have seen the wilderness. They will know how to recognize the tempter who
lives there. But you must also bring them out again to the city, or they will
be vacant, lost souls, swept clean and ready to be possessed by the
schizophrenia of relativism.
Do
you not wonder why so many children are medicated? Why so many mental issues
and therapists and irrational and insane people? Why has the world gone mad?
Because we weaken our children’s mental
immune system through indoctrination, making it incapable of dealing with a new
idea; or make it comfortable with holding contradictory ideas – a functional
insanity. They either do not know any other city besides the indoctrination
they live in, or, if they do make it to the wilderness of controversy, they
stay there, wandering. If my teacher didn’t even care enough to show me the
answer to the contradiction, does it really matter? They shrug their shoulders
and decide that they should just believe whatever they want to believe, since
smart people disagree and there seems to be no way out of the controversy. If
everything is wilderness, why not call it home?
Let your students get dirt on their boots. But don’t make them walk on their own in the wilderness. From the walls of the city of truth, you can see the slums of indoctrination, and the wilderness of controversy alike – both burning in their own way. Show them how far you have come and they will love the city that you have brought them to – and it is that love of truth that makes them truly educated, that prevents them from letting the city become another slum. Someday your children will issue forth from the city as warriors, and take the city to the wilderness. But that’s a journey for another time.
Carson Spratt is a Rhetoric and Humanities teacher at Logos Online School. He lives in Spokane, Washington, with his wife of seven years, Ellie, without whom life would be inconceivable.
Somewhere in the year 2000, I came into contact with a dangerous cargo filled with contrarian literature. I ate it all so quickly that the only questions I had afterward were some variation of “What’s for dinner?” and “May I have more, please?” I still keep eating contrarian literature, and I really hope that the end result is not that I become a curmudgeon, but that I find creative ways to inculcate those blessings into my community.
So, while we are at it, let me undo speculations among some two-kingdom scholars. They consistently claim that while Jesus has authority over all things, his authority does not provide or is intended to provide a tangible change in the cultural milieu. I, as a lovable contrarian, assert the exact opposite: that the kingdom of Jesus is comprehensive, and whatever it touches, it changes.
The kingdom is not limited to one sphere, nor are things heavenly to be severely differentiated from things earthly. And again, not to repeat the obvious, but the earthly city is not Babylon, nor do we live in this perpetual sense of exile and pilgrimage simply existing seeking a city that shall come.
We affirm that the people of God are headed somewhere to take something and claim Someone as Lord over the nations (Rom. 4:13) and that the city has come. Our agenda is to get people to see the ads and RSVP ASAP.
The hill on which Jesus was crucified, Golgotha, plays a
significant role in the story of our salvation. To the east of Jerusalem,
probably located somewhere on the Mt of Olives,* was this hill where the Romans
executed convicted Jews. But the story of this “Place of the Skull”
doesn’t begin with the Romans and their executions. “Golgotha” is
related to the Hebrew term “skull” and has a history among the Jews.
In the Law, God prescribed that when the armies were
numbered that they be numbered “skull by skull” or “head by head” (Cf. Ex
16.16; 38.26; Num 1.2, 18, 20, 22; 3.47). It is quite possible that when the
armies of Yahweh were being numbered, this was the place that they went to be
counted. Now, here at Golgotha, the armies are gathering around Yahweh in the
flesh. The Gospels tell us about the soldiers gathered around for Jesus’
mockery who also accompany him to the cross. We hear many people mocking Jesus
on this hill. These armies are gathering together against Yahweh and against
his Christ, seeking to throw off their authority (Ps 2). They are seeking
to “crush the head,” Jesus. They are treating him as the serpent.
The Lord has come to his temple. He is going to destroy it.
So what?
Large sections of Matthew, Mark, and Luke are taken up with
Jesus teaching his disciples about the destruction of the Temple (Mt 24; Mk 13;
Lk 21). Jesus not only speaks about it, he prophetically acts out the
destruction of the Temple when he turns over the money changers’ tables, drives
everyone out, and shuts down the Temple for a day. The Temple occupies a
central place in the life of God’s people and becomes a focal point of Jesus’
ministry in the transition between the new age and the age to come. But why?
Why take so much time in discussing and focusing on the Temple? Why should we
care about what happens to an ancient building back in the first century? Well,
if Jesus thought it important enough to talk about, and the writers of the
Gospels under the inspiration of the Spirit believed it was important enough to
record among the massive amounts of other information that could have been
recorded (cf. Jn 21.25), then it must be important to the continuing life of
the church.
By now, more than half of my readers have voted. Good. Get on with your life, people! To those whom I’ve had some influence, I am grateful. To those who continue to be as stubborn as I and unchanged, I applaud you. To those still undecided, as R.C. Sproul used to say, “What’s wrong with you people!” And to Evangelicals voting for Biden, I can no longer help you if you’re a part of the anarcho-syndicalist commune. And to all my third-party friends, I see the two of you. Being in the minority on issues is a specialty of my particular denomination. So, two very conservative cheers! Convictions aside, I know all about going against the flow.
I have argued that if we are to pray for those in authority over us (I Tim. 2:2), it follows that we should have some participation in the process. Praying for someone you’ve had no interaction with in the electoral process makes the whole process shallow.
But now that we’ve moved on, let’s talk about that Halloween business for a bit, shall we? After all, Trump is not going to give you candy. Your neighbor is. And herein lies the first case for Halloween: the neighborliness of it. Halloween is an extension of that festive spirit. We should abide by principles that establish more powerful platforms of community life. At this point, my Wendell Berry friends are cheering me on from the balcony.
I can already see from afar and up close the parents who wish to preserve decency and order in the home by keeping demons away. There is a kind of consistent curmudgeon who avoids all festivities. Christmas? Boo! Lent? Ascetic! The Feast of St. Augustine’s cat Felix? A return to sentimentalism! But Halloween, with some of these folks, receives a different kind of wrath. “Halloween?” Paganism mixed with vampiric orgies devouring candy offered to idols!
For the uninitiated, Halloween is a contraction for All Hallows’ Eve. “The word “hallow” means “saint,” in that “hallow” is just an alternative form of the word “holy” (“hallowed be Thy name”).” All Saints’ Day, which liturgical churches celebrate this Sunday, is a festive occasion remembering the faithfulness of God to the sons and daughters of the kingdom who gave their lives and from their labors now rest with Christ. Jesus claimed victory on the cross as an act of triumph (Heb. 2:14; Rom. 16:20). He died and rose so that we might live abundant lives (Jn. 10:10). We affirm and cherish the life we have and the life of the saints gone before us, who now embrace the God-given sabbatical of eternity (Heb. 4).
The Eve of that day is the traditional Halloween. Now, before you bring your Cotton Mather to bear on this question and before you show me some variation of Zechariah’s vision to make a case against offering candies to little kids, and before you claim the ancient Celtic festival as the root of all the world’s evil, let me first lay out my presupposition. And here it is: we practice Halloween at our household because Jesus makes a mockery of evil (Ps. 2, Mat. 23) and because fun is a distinctly Christian virtue. God is a playful God (a powerful Lutheran view, btw), who delights in treating evil with all the playfulness and mockery He can muster. In the divine currency, that’s an infinite supply of it.
I have interacted with anti-Halloween advocates in the Baptist, Presbyterian, Methodist, and other mainline traditions, which means you all are everywhere. But the simple outline above indicates that what we are doing on Halloween is not giving demonic powers a high-five, but we are exercising our ability as judges of angels (I Cor. 6:3) to rule over everything, including candy and captain boomerang. And if the bar of kit-kat needs saving, someone has to do it. Why not your six-year-old?
Jesus is Lord over demons and outfits of superheroes. I would like to add the caveat that if your eight-year-old is dressed like some sexy version of Catwoman, you’re doing it wrong, but I suspect most of you are more self-aware. You can participate in an event with Presbyterian zeal and have a blast without failing basic biblical principles of modesty.
In my estimation, the best way to prepare to celebrate the saints gone before us is by spending the Eve of that day eating candy, being neighborly, dressing up with your favorite outfit, and singing Psalm 2 as a parting hymn or any Luther classic. Everything is Christ’s, and we are his, and everything the world has is ours (Rom. 4:13). They may drink like sailors and eat their candy like gluttons, but we drink in honor of St. Peter and St. Augustine and eat candy for the joy set before us (Heb. 12:2).
When I was growing up, the churches I attended heavily
emphasized the imminent return of Jesus. We even sang the song, “Jesus is
coming soon / morning or night or noon / many will meet their doom / trumpets
will sound / all of the dead shall rise / righteous meet in the skies / going
where no one dies / heavenward bound.” Jesus could come at any time and rapture
all of Christians out of here. Seven years of tribulation would start after
this followed by Jesus returning to finish off the world and establish his
millennial kingdom. We developed ways of thinking about how it would happen and when
it would happen.
Everything in the news pointed to this imminent return of
Jesus. The development of the European Common Market, the Illuminati, the
Russian Bear coming from the north, China’s one million (or was it two
million?) foot soldiers, a computer called “The Beast,” threats of computer
chips in the right hand and forehead to buy and sell, Henry Kissinger’s name
somehow adding up to 666, Israel becoming a nation again in 1948, the red
heifer being bred in Jerusalem, talk of rebuilding the temple, and even
unseasonably warm or cold weather (because you don’t know the times or
seasons). Hal Lindsey wrote The Late
Great Planet Earth in the ’70s. There were eighty-eight reasons why Jesus
was coming in 1988. When that didn’t happen, the Gulf War in the early ’90s was
a sure sign. I was working in a Christian bookstore during seminary in the
early ’90s at the time and Armageddon,
Oil, and the Middle East Crisis by John Walvoord was selling like hotcakes.
(You can get it pretty cheap now!) There were movies such as A Thief in the Night and A Distant Thunder that dramatized the
rapture and after-effects used to scare teenagers into a decision. The Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye is
where I started losing touch with that part of the American Christian world,
though I’m certain it remains alive and well. (They must be having a field day
with 2020!)
The disciples had their own version of this when they were
nearing Jerusalem in Luke 19. This is it. All the signs point to the kingdom of
God coming immediately, which means that the old order is done away with and
David’s victorious son is enthroned in Jerusalem. All of that would happen, but
just not the way they envisioned it. Jesus had to instruct his disciples in the
fact that he was not coming soon, at least not in the way that they were
thinking.
To instruct his disciples in the time and manner in which
the kingdom comes, Jesus tells a parable about a nobleman, ten servants, and ten
minas (that’s money not little fish). (Lk 19.11-27) The nobleman (who is, no
doubt, Jesus) goes away to receive a kingdom. He entrusts each of his ten
servants with a mina apiece and expects them to do business and make a profit
while he is gone. He will come back and evaluate what they have done, expecting
that they have been faithful stewards, having made him a profit. Consequently,
he must give them time to do what he expects them to do.
Jesus is working with a deep theme that begins with man’s
creation and runs through all of history. The theme goes something like this:
God creates and establishes his people, gives them commands and
responsibilities, leaves them to do what he says, and eventually returns to
evaluate their work, dispensing rewards and punishments. This is a pattern
established before the fall. God created Adam, placed him in the Garden with
specific commands (work and guard the Garden, don’t eat of the Tree of the
Knowledge of Good and Evil), gave him help to complete his task, left, and
eventually returned to evaluate what Adam did.
This is what God does with Israel over its history. Israel
is created at Sinai, given commands and responsibilities, he leaves them to do
what he says, and eventually, he comes to visit them in the Person of Christ
Jesus to evaluate their work, dispensing rewards and punishments.
Jesus says that this is the pattern that he will continue to
follow with his church. Jesus creates the church through his death,
resurrection, ascension (the time he receives the kingdom; cf. Dan 7.9-14), and
the pouring out of his Spirit at Pentecost. He gives gifts to the church
through the Spirit. While he is gone, seated at the right hand of the Father,
he expects the church to “make a profit,” investing the gifts he has given to
see them multiply. What started with small gifts in the first century must be
multiplied until all of the nations are discipled. (Mt 28.19) Jesus will come
back when the time for this mission is completed, and each of us will stand
before the judgment seat of Christ to give an account of the deeds done in our
body, whether good or evil. (2Cor 5.10) Each of us will give an account for the
stewardship Jesus entrusted to him/her.
This is typified every week in our worship-work pattern. On
the Day of the Lord, the Lord’s Day, we gather in the presence of our King to
be re-created through worship, instructed, and supplied with what we need to go
out and do the work we have been called to do. As images of God, we are to go
out and be productive, taking what the Lord has given us and making more out of
it. But the Lord’s Day is also a day of judgment, an evaluation of the work we
have done the past week; works that we are presenting to him through tithes and
offerings, which include the bread and wine of the Supper. Jesus evaluates our
works dispensing praise as well as rebuke.
These weekly patterns are microcosms of history, reminding
us that we have responsibilities to be faithful stewards of what our Lord has
put in our hands. One day these weekly judgments will give way to the final
judgment. Our desire should be to hear on that day, “Well done, good and
faithful servant!”
We are in the midst of a revolution. Societal structures are
being overturned and a new order of government is taking over. Old symbols of
tyranny are being toppled. The way we live in relationship with one another is
being redefined. Our understandings of what constitutes justice and peace are
being reshaped. Language itself is being transformed. Logic and rationality are
being turned upside down so that not just what we think but how we think are
being radically transformed.
This is what happens in revolution because a revolution is
the overturning of one culture and the creation of another.
There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, ‘Mine!’Abraham Kuyper
