Every Leaf, Line, and Letter

Evangelicals and the Bible from the 1730s to the Present

Timothy Larsen

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780830841769
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

"I was filled with a pining desire to see Christ's own words in the Bible.... I got along to the window where my Bible was and I opened it and... every leaf, line, and letter smiled in my face." —The Spiritual Travels of Nathan Cole, 1765From its earliest days, Christians in the movement known as evangelicalism have had "a particular regard for the Bible, " to borrow a phrase from David Bebbington, the historian who framed its most influential definition. But this "biblicism" has taken many different forms from the 1730s to the 2020s. How has the eternal Word of God been received across various races, age groups, genders, nations, and eras?This collection of historical studies focuses on evangelicals' defining uses—and abuses—of Scripture, from Great Britain to the Global South, from the high pulpit to the Sunday School classroom, from private devotions to public causes.Contributors: - David Bebbington, University of Stirling- Kristina Benham, Baylor University- Catherine Brekus, Harvard Divinity School- Malcolm Foley, Truett Seminary- Bruce Hindmarsh, Regent College, Vancouver- Thomas S. Kidd, Baylor University- Timothy Larsen, Wheaton College- K. Elise Leal, Whitworth University- John Maiden, The Open University, UK- Mark A. Noll, University of Notre Dame- Mary Riso, Gordon College- Brian Stanley, University of Edinburgh- Jonathan Yeager, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

1

British Exodus, American Empire

Evangelical Preachers and the Biblicisms of Revolution

Kristina Benham

IN 1760, ON A DAY OF THANKSGIVING, David Hall, an itinerant preacher and minister of Sutton, Massachusetts, preached a sermon titled “Israel’s Triumph,” a response of praise and thanksgiving for God’s providential victory in favor of British forces in Canada during the Seven Years’ War. He took as his text the song of praise by the Israelites after the drowning of Pharaoh in the Red Sea, comparing the British colonies and empire to the people of God in opposition to their French Catholic enemies. “A vast and fertile country is now subject to the British Sovereignty. . . . And the Lord shall hasten the day when the Gospel shall run and be glorified; that it may prevail from the east to the western ocean; and from the rivers to the utmost limits of our North America.”1 Sixteen years later, on July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress set up a committee that included Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams to propose a seal for the brand new American nation. Though their version was never adopted, the committee later reported on a design including a depiction of the presence of God in a pillar of fire and Moses standing at the Red Sea as the waters overwhelmed the monarch Pharaoh.2 Just months before Adams had written to his wife, Abigail, that he heard a sermon by Presbyterian minister George Duffield of Philadelphia, former assistant to Great Awakening preacher Gilbert Tennent and then chaplain to the Continental Congress. The sermon Adams heard compared the actions of King George to Pharaoh’s oppression of the Israelites. Adams admitted to feeling awe at participating in what Duffield concluded was God’s providential design to drive the American colonies to independence.3 At the accomplishment of peace in 1783 and on a day of thanksgiving appointed by Congress, Duffield again made the comparison between the exodus and American deliverance. This “American Zion” was a nation that had been born at once and had “brought forth her children, more numerous than the tribes of Jacob, to possess the land, from the north to the south, and from the east to the yet unexplored, far distant west.”4

In the years between these points, the exodus narrative became one of the most important ways that Americans applied biblical knowledge to understanding their transition from British colonies to a new nation. While reviving a deep English tradition of Hebraic nationalism, Americans set themselves up for a providential interpretation of deliverance from British rule. In the exodus they at first sought a principled, nonrebellious defense of resistance, but they tapped into a ready revolutionary potential that was unleashed with the opening of war and the Declaration of Independence. Providential applications, however, could take multiple forms, and the years of resistance and revolution provoked competing national providential applications of the exodus narrative. Before independence, uses of the exodus to explain oppression and warn both rulers and subjects of God’s judgment appealed to a timeless principle of judicial providence. This interpretation could be used to criticize British rulers and hope for God’s intervention, but it could also be used to turn criticism on American society itself, especially to address chattel slavery. While these interpretations continued to hold broad appeal, the experience of civil war and the declaration and peaceful settlement of independence led Americans to the application of a historical providence in God’s deliverance of his particular people and divine purpose for their new nation.5 This chapter makes three claims. (1) The exodus was a particularly important biblical narrative for the process of revolution and independence. (2) The ways Americans used the exodus in their revolutionary context changed significantly over a very short span of time. (3) There were distinct, and sometimes competing, categories of religious-political interpretation, or biblicism, involved in the American Revolution and the exodus narrative: biblically identifying political oppression, warnings, and lessons about God’s judgment (against Americans and British alike), hoping in or claiming providential victory, and identifying the new American nation as the people of God.

In late-colonial American history, identifying evangelicalism based on biblicism is far from straightforward. American culture from colonial beginnings through the American Civil War was suffused with biblical principles, references, and arguments. Mark Noll’s synthesis of American Protestantism throughout these periods is closely tied to evangelical reliance on the Bible alone for religious authority.6 More specifically, in American Zion, Eran Shalev examines the distinct version of Hebraic Biblicism developed in America in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, through other lessons and parallels applied to public life from several major points in Hebrew history.7 Historians who have studied, more specifically, the Bible during the American Revolution find that a diverse range of people among the founding generation—from evangelical chaplains to theologically liberal ministers to deist political thinkers—turned to biblical allusions, warnings, parallels, and principles on a regular basis.8 For example, James P. Byrd’s analysis of the most commonly used passages of Scripture during the Revolution emphasizes the military applications of biblical history and New Testament justifications. It is significant to the argument here to note that Byrd found the exodus to be the second most cited biblical passage of the era, and he concludes that “no biblical narrative surpassed the exodus in identifying the major themes, plots, characters, and subplots of the Revolution.”9 This chapter, a close study of the exodus narrative as it was used during the era of the American Revolution, echoes these findings. The types of sources used range widely, including especially newspapers and sermons, but also letters, diaries, poems, and Congressional proclamations and proposals. Evangelical preachers relied on the exodus narrative as a biblical pairing with arguments from natural rights and British constitutional tradition. David Avery, the military chaplain who held his arms aloft in prayer over the Battle of Bunker Hill like Moses over the Israelite battle with Amalek, was one such example.10 But others who were far from evangelicalism also picked up the parallel as relevant to the nation. Charles Chauncy, a Unitarian Congregationalist from Boston, testified to the widespread cry during the Stamp Act crisis, “We shall be made to serve as bond-servants; our lives will be bitter with hard bondage,” which he compared to the plight of the Jews in Egypt before God delivered them.11 Decades later, with the Revolution settled and the new nation surviving constitutional upheaval, the exodus and America as the new Israel lived on. In 1805, in his second inaugural address, Thomas Jefferson appealed to the help of God, whom he described thus: “in whose hands we are, who led our forefathers, as Israel of old, from their native land, and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life; who has covered our infancy with his providence, and our riper years with his wisdom and power.”12

Evangelical preaching, however, had a distinct prominence in these uses of the exodus. Nearly every sermon in this chapter comes from an evangelical preacher (with the possible exception of Phillips Payson, for whom there is little immediate information, and two others who are likely, but not guaranteed, evangelicals: Stephen Johnson and Elijah Fitch). Newspaper sources are much harder to identify, since common practice was to publish controversial issues anonymously and often even to mask the real author as a very different character. Though touching on other specific concerns, newspapers using the exodus followed many of the same arguments as these sermons. Therefore, by following the transition in uses of the exodus during the American Revolution, these sources reveal that biblicism could mean quite different things, especially when applied to national purposes. Admonitions for repentance in the face of national judgment, hope in God’s providential purposes through suffering and victory, and claims to divine national identity are quite different types of interpretation. This is, of course, leaving out entirely the variety of interpretations of the exodus that evangelicals such as Jonathan Edwards or Hannah Heaton or Sarah Osborne used, which were almost entirely focused on personal sanctification, prayers for the spiritual transformation of the people within the nation, typologies of redemption in Christ, or prophecies of the final glorification of the church.13

The story of the exodus of Israel from Egypt as Americans used it in the Revolutionary era can be divided into four major interpretations: oppression, divine judgment, providential victory, and the emergence of the people of God. And these interpretations connect directly to the ways that uses of the exodus narrative changed. Americans, at first unwillingly on the road to political independence, increasingly adopted this biblical story as a parallel to their own situation in all of these four ways. In earlier uses of the story during the Stamp Act crisis and the years immediately following, colonists explained what seemed like an inexplicable change in imperial policy with principles of political oppression and navigated the dangerous ideological waters of disobedience to authority with justifications for biblical resistance. They also perceived what seemed like intentional attacks on their rights and resources and the havoc of war as suffering that confirmed the justness of their cause and indicated the judgments of God against them for sins. Suffering, however, was also a tool in God’s hands to bring about his plan for his people, whether repentance, expansion, or independence. Warnings of judgment, however, came most easily for wicked and hard-hearted rulers, whose apparent reckless pride destined them for ruin. And in this judgment colonists encouraged each other to trust in God’s eventual deliverance from oppression. God’s miraculous victory over their enemies became more relevant as the newly independent states fought what started as a civil war against a superior force with no powerful allies. With each step toward victory—independence, the flight of the British from Boston, the alliance with France, and peace on terms of two independent nations—Americans perceived the hand of God. Finally, looking back on what appeared to be stunning victories and the sudden change in form of government and national identity, Americans thought of themselves religiously and politically as like the people of God. The narrative of miraculous intervention and national blessing and expansion which once applied to the British Empire, or regionally to Puritan forebears, now applied to the stunning event of a nation redeemed by God and born in a day.

By the end of the Seven Years’ War, British Americans had already learned through several rounds of European colonial wars some of the national applications of the exodus story that would become central in the Revolutionary era. Ministers often applied the exodus to debates about the justness of war or in celebrations of God’s apparent providential intervention in history. In 1747, Gilbert Tennent, Presbyterian minister of Philadelphia and Great Awakening evangelist, used the song of Moses at the Red Sea to assert God’s approval of just wars. The exodus claim that “the Lord is a Man of War” settled the principle question, since something by which God was named could not contradict his character. Still, Tennent’s argument indicates the conflict over religious and political meanings attached to British imperial goals, and he sought to outline how the approval of God could be identified by those who feared God as opposed to their enemies under the sway of the Antichrist. Just war decidedly excluded wars of ambition and glory for monarchs.14 Likewise, though David Hall’s 1760 thanksgiving sermon used the song in Exodus as a celebration of complete victory in North America, Hall warned his audience against falling into the trap of sinful pride in their victory and not giving glory to God for his deliverance.15 Before the Revolution, uses of the exodus fell more clearly along imperial lines. When these lines began to break apart under new imperial policy and the contradiction of the language of political slavery, Americans began to find many more meanings in the exodus.

The Stamp Act instigated the first major effort for political resistance before the Revolution, and colonists turned to the exodus story to argue through principles of political oppression why resistance was necessary and biblical. Colonists took practical and spiritual cues from this story. The draining of colonial money in a time of great debt left them in a worse position than the Israelites punished by Pharaoh with the task of making bricks without straw provided to them. They argued that at least the Israelites could go out and gather their own straw.16 Throughout resistance and the war, Pharaoh’s taskmasters and making bricks without straw became phrases synonymous with unreasonable and cruel impositions in response to humble petitions by loyal subjects.17 Demonstrating the injustice of British policies and comparing them to the actions of Pharaoh, whose heart was hard against God in his plots to destroy the Israelites, made resistance righteous to colonists. Hebrew history revealed that God favored the people in the face of oppression, and the exodus was a prime example.

Americans used the exodus to understand increasing and unreasonable political burdens as evidence for political op...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Introduction—Thomas S. Kidd
• Part One: The Eighteenth Century
• Part Two: The Nineteenth Century
• Part Three: The Twentieth Century
• Part Four: Into the Twenty-First Century
• Acknowledgments—Thomas S. Kidd
• Contributors
• General Index
• Scripture Index
• Notes
• Praise for Every Leaf, Line, and Letter
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright