Excerpts from “Defending the Declaration: How the Bible and Christianity Influenced the Writing of the Declaration of Independence”

[Note: Today’s post is taken from a new hardback edition of a book by Dr. Gary Amos. You can buy it here:

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The Rights Theory of America’s Founding Fathers

The kind of rights theory that went into the Declaration of Independence has roots deep in the Western Christian tradition.

Brian Tierney says it best with his conclusions about the link between natural-law and natural-rights theories.

The doctrine of individual rights was not a late medieval aberration from an earlier tradition of objective right or of natural moral law. Still less was it a seventeenth-century invention of Suarez or Hobbes or Locke. Rather, it was a characteristic product of the great age of creative jurisprudence that, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, established the foundations of the Western legal tradition.

If Tierney is right, as I am convinced that he is on this point, then much of what passes for the history of political theory and rights development being taught in colleges and universities in America needs to be tossed in the wastebasket. For example, it is widely taught that natural law and natural rights are contradictory concepts. But this view is simply unhistorical and untenable. And the prevailing notion that all Western rights theory begins in the seventeenth century with Hobbes and Locke is simply laughable, as it always should have been.

The content below was originally paywalled.

Today, the rights theory of the founding fathers and the Declaration of Independence is routinely traced to deism, the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, and from there to ancient Rome and Greece. The great Western achievements made possible by the exercise of these rights are credited to the philosophers of the Enlightenment and the occidental secular tradition. Although the West received the bulk of its political freedoms and scientific vision from the impact of Christianity and the church, the church rarely gets credit for its role in the development of Western political freedoms or science.

Unlike men of the Enlightenment who acted on the ideals of Christianity while denying their source, modern society is trying to act on occidental secular concepts, as well as attribute Western achievements to them. That is why Western society is in the same early stages of dysfunction that preceded the fall of Greece and Rome. Having denied both the source and the rationale for the best in Western culture, we are quickly moving into the twilight era of Western freedom and the ultimate demise of free Christian society.

We are living in a time of a renewed struggle between Jerusalem and Athens. The secular occidental worldview based on power, communalism, and elite classes has come to dominate education, government, and church. It offers a religion of statism, salvation by government as opposed to the Biblical concept of salvation by a God who is no respecter of persons. The secular worldview smothers individual freedoms in its quest to force people to be free.

Why should Americans care that the Biblical roots of our culture have been exchanged for a wholesale commitment to the prevailing secular occidental philosophy? Secular occidental philosophy and politics are based on pagan notions of power, whereas Biblical politics is based on concepts of authority. In the secular view, nothing is ever impermissible because no lines are drawn that cannot be crossed.

Whoever wields power can determine the content of laws, the extent, and even the existence of other people’s freedoms. Biblical philosophy, on the other hand, admits to predetermined lines of authority which the civil government is not permitted to cross. Personal rights and freedoms are God-given and inalienable; they do not exist merely for civil convenience or at the discretion of those who hold civil power. This is why only Biblical ethics maintain a proper balance between order in public life and individual freedom. Occidental secularism knows nothing of God-given inalienable rights limiting a government’s civil authority. Instead, it recognizes only conditional “civil liberties,” liberties granted by the civil government at its own convenience – and terminated at its own convenience. It can exalt individualism until society is on the brink of anarchy and then crush the individual for the sake of establishing state control. In the hands of a shrewd elite, it can do both at the same time.

The American Revolution is not over.

The ideals enshrined in the Declaration for which the founders fought and died – ideals of law, justice, equality, liberty, inalienable rights, self-government – are barely understood in America today, much less in the rest of the world. We have all but forgotten what the words mean and what America is all about.

We think the American Revolution ended with the peace treaty of 1783. But it had not ended for Americans of African descent whose equal creation and inalienable rights under God were systematically denied for two-hundred years. It had not ended when Abraham Lincoln heard Jefferson Davis and southern secessionists deny the ideals of the Declaration and deny that it had any relevance for American law. And it had not ended when Martin Luther King stood in Washington D.C., among monuments to the founding fathers, to declare with them that “all men are created equal.”

The American Revolution was more than a contest with England. It was and is a war of ideas, a contest for the hearts and minds of men. It was and is a war to defend a vision about law, rights, justice, and the God-given dignity of man. The vision was inspired over time by the words of the Bible and the teachings of Christianity but applies to all men everywhere regardless of their faith.

At different times in different lands, men saw different parts of the vision. Parts of it were even put into practice in some of their countries, but never before 1776 had all of its ideas been implemented at one time. The American Revolution is unique because it began by declaring all these ideas as part of the foundation of a nation. A new political order was born on the earth.

Now, however, the Declaration’s ideas are scoffed at by philosophers, misrepresented by historians, attacked by clergymen, ridiculed by law professors, held in contempt by power hungry politicians, and ignored by the people. As long as this continues, the American Revolution is not over.

We understand that the communist revolution did not end in the 1920’s. It is a world revolution driven by a vision for world domination. Many such ideologies are abroad today. But we fail to see that the American Revolution is also a world revolution, guided by a view of the world and man which exchanges the iron heel of statism for the rod and staff of justice.

So, it is important, particularly for Christians, to know that the Declaration stands in the Judeo-Christian stream of political theory. Its legacy must be defended, since it is different both in degree and in kind from its secular counterpart, the French Revolution. Its legacy must be proclaimed, since political liberty is a corollary of spiritual liberty in Christ.

The American Revolution, then, will not be finished until in Tiennanmen Square, Red Square, and in all the town squares of the nations, freedom rings as it did in July, 1776.