Justice shall be done to the memory of my Hamilton.

According to her daughter, this was the compounding yearning of Eliza Hamilton in the fifty years she survived her husband, after his tragic, and dishonorable, death in an “affair of honor.” In the summer of 1804, he took a duel with Aaron Burr Jr., the sitting Vice President and grandson of Jonathan Edwards. Alexander Hamilton, citing Christian conviction, “threw away his shot” by not firing at his opponent. Burr, however, took aim and struck his political rival. Hamilton died 31 hours later on July 12, 1804.

Not only had the controversial circumstances of his death tarnished her Hamilton’s reputation, but so too had an another “affair” made public in 1797. And after Hamilton’s death in 1804, rivals John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both lived another 22 years to strengthen their own founding legacies, and bury Hamilton’s.

Justice Done to Hamilton?

Remarkably, Ron Chernow’s 800-page biography in 2004 — some 150 years after Eliza’s death in 1854 — began the work of doing justice to Hamilton’s memory in the twenty-first century. More than a decade later, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical, inspired by the biography, and with Chernow as historical consultant, sent Hamilton skyrocketing back into broader American awareness — just in time to save his face on the ten-dollar bill.

Of Christian interest, Hamilton appeared to have experienced a remarkable conversion, under Reformed teaching, as a teen when the Great Awakening came to his native West Indies in the early 1770s. Presbyterian minister Hugh Knox, who had studied at the College of New Jersey (where Edwards had been president briefly in 1758) mentored the 17-year-old Hamilton. When a hurricane passed through the Caribbean in August of 1772, Hamilton wrote markedly Christian reflections on the event. Knox read them and, impressed with the teen’s ability, guided them to press in the local paper. Enough readers took notice of the words from “a Youth of this Island” that it became an occasion for Knox to raise money to send Hamilton to New Jersey to study.

Journey into a Far Country

Hamilton soon left the West Indies, never to return, and arrived in New Jersey as the revolutionary spirit was fomenting. With his unusually able brain and pen, he was swept up into the Revolution and found himself at the heart of American politics from 1775–1800, perhaps surpassed only by George Washington in that quarter century. His Christian interests, however, seemed to cool as they were eclipsed by political ambition and zeal for his work as Washington’s aide-de-camp, then in establishing a law practice in New York, and climactically as the nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury from 1789–1795. Alongside James Madison, Hamilton proved to be one of the great intellects of the founding generation. And while being every bit Madison’s match in political thought (if not exceeding him), Hamilton far surpassed Madison, and the other leading founders, in economics.

Yet in his late forties, before dying in the infamous duel at age 49, Hamilton experienced a succession of great humblings, which appear to have prompted him, doubtless with the encouragement of his enduringly faithful evangelical wife, to blow again on the embers of the Christianity of his youth. Chernow, for one, recognizes that Hamilton’s late-life preoccupation “with spiritual matters . . . eliminates all doubt about the sincerity of his late-flowering religious interests” (707).

As the United States celebrates 246 years of independence, and Americans newly remember the ten-dollar founding father, what might Christians learn from the rise and fall, and redemption, of the “wandering and reticent” Alexander Hamilton?

Hamilton’s Tragic Success

Politically speaking, we could identify many important insights from a recovery of Hamilton’s legacy, but far more important, as Christians, whether American or not, is learning from his spiritual journey into the far country. And these are not the kind of lessons we might glean even from a man who professed, say, deism or atheism throughout his life. Rather, Hamilton, by all accounts, evidenced a vibrant Christian faith in his teens and gave clear affirmations of faith in Christ on his deathbed. However, sadly, he was a prodigal of sorts — captured by politics and establishing himself in the world — for much of his twenties and thirties. His meteoric rise to political power appears to have eclipsed the fires of his fledgling teenage faith. Yet he did, it seems, come to himself, once humbled, and eventually return home seeking the arms of a Father.

His Early Faith

His 1772 published letter that proved to be his way out of the West Indies “viewed the hurricane as a divine rebuke to human vanity and pomposity” (Chernow, 37). The storm thundered, according to the 17-year-old Hamilton, “Despise thyself and adore thy God.” Yet Hamilton, in his faith, found safety.

See thy wretched helpless state, and learn to know thyself. Learn to know thy best support. Despise thyself, and adore thy God. . . . [W]hat have I to dread? My staff can never be broken — in Omnipotence I trusted. . . . He who gave the winds to blow, and the lightnings to rage — even him have I always loved and served. His precepts have I observed. His commandments have I obeyed — and his perfections have I adored.

That same year, he wrote a Christian hymn, one that Eliza would come to prize and cling to during the half century she outlived him. There he confessed, “O Lamb of God! thrice gracious Lord / Now, now I feel how true thy word.”

His Meteoric Rise — and Fall

However, his way with words was soon put to other purposes. Once in America, his wordsmithing would propel him into revolutionary leadership, then to Washington’s side, and eventually to the most powerful seat in the first executive administration from 1789 until 1795.

Hamilton’s long-standing relationship with Washington proved to be a stabilizing force. In hindsight, his most productive (and least self-destructive) work came when he was most proximate to Washington, leading to the first of four lessons.

1. The right relationships can provide wonderfully fruitful restraints.

Chernow observes, “After Alexander Hamilton left the Treasury Department [in 1795], he lost the strong, restraining hand of George Washington and the invaluable sense of tact and proportion that went with it.” Washington was magnanimous. Few were willing to stomach such personal offenses as he endured without retaliating. The fatherless and insecure Hamilton badly needed this stabilizing presence. “Hamilton had been forced, as Washington’s representative, to take on some of his decorum. Now that he was no longer subordinate to Washington, Hamilton was even quicker to perceive threats, issue challenges, and take a high-handed tone in controversies. Some vital layer of inhibition disappeared” (Chernow, 488).

But it was not only Washington, whose guidance was political, but also Eliza, whose influence was gently but relentlessly spiritual. “As a woman of deep spirituality, Eliza believed firmly in [Christian] instruction for her children,” and it would prove to have effects on her husband as they raised them together, and particularly as his great humblings came in late 1799, throughout 1800, and into 1801. She endured his wandering and, in the end, it appears, won him with her life and conduct (1 Peter 3:1).

2. Ambition to make one’s way in the world can cool the fires of young faith.

In the Parable of the Sower, Jesus tells about seed sown among thorns: “They are those who hear the word, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches and the desires for other things enter in and choke the word, and it proves unfruitful” (Mark 4:18–19).

“Ambition to make one’s way in the world can cool the fires of young faith.”

Hamilton, admirably, was not undone by the deceitfulness of riches — his financial integrity was sterling — but “the cares of the world” and “desires for other things” haunted his extended season of spiritual reticence (from his seeming indifference to Christianity from 1777 to 1792, to his opportunist use of it for party purposes until 1801). Fatherless since age 10, and orphaned at 14, Hamilton seemed bent on proving himself in his new country. The flame and striking warmth of his teenage faith cooled as “cares of this world” began to energize him — first the Revolution, then becoming a respected New York lawyer, then rescuing the fledgling nation from its inadequate Articles of Confederation, and finally trying to preserve his power once Washington left office.

Such a story is not his alone. Countless Christian youths, flames burning bright, have found themselves crashing on the hard rocks, and hard knocks, of adult life. How might it have been different? That leads to a third lesson.

3. Faith does not thrive (and may not survive) apart from the church.

Chernow notes that “Hamilton had been devout when younger, but he seemed more skeptical about organized religion during the Revolution” (132). Perhaps circumstances from his childhood, and particularly his mother’s death, “help to explain a mystifying ambivalence that Hamilton always felt about regular church attendance, despite a pronounced religious bent” (25). Recently, historian and pastor Obbie Tyler Todd has written that Hamilton, from his arrival in America, was a man torn between two denominations (Presbyterian and Episcopal) “while finding no real home in the communion of believers.”

In Hamilton’s case, the ominous absence of the church may be the clearest warning sign we can point to. At 17, Hamilton seemed to thrive under Hugh Knox’s pastoral influence. But without the strengthening and constraining influence of a local church, a faithful evangelical wife was not enough to keep him from wandering, even if she would be vital to his late-life renewal.

4. We can be most vulnerable when we feel strongest.

Hamilton’s 1791 adulterous affair with Maria Reynolds showed how far he had wandered — and reminds us of the delusion of power and success. There once was a great king in Israel who, as a prelude to infidelity, remained in the city when others went to war (2 Samuel 11:1). So too the 36-year-old Hamilton, at the height of his power — and with so much work to do — stayed in New York while his family summered upstate.

That summer a 23-year-old woman approached him telling of an abusive husband and asking for help. Later, in the notorious Reynolds Pamphlet, his extended public confession in 1797, written to vindicate his financial reputation, he would write that he came to her door with monetary assistance and, “Some conversation ensued from which it was quickly apparent that other than pecuniary consolation would be acceptable.” This is the first of several 1790s instances about which Chernow, even as the cool-headed biographer, appears stunned by Hamilton’s folly:

Such stellar success might have bred an intoxicating sense of invincibility. But his vigorous reign had also made him the enfant terrible of the early republic, and a substantial minority of the country was mobilized against him. This should have made him especially watchful of his reputation. Instead, in one of history’s most mystifying cases of bad judgment, he entered into a sordid affair with a married woman named Maria Reynolds that, if it did not blacken his name forever, certainly sullied it. From the lofty heights of statesmanship, Hamilton fell back into something reminiscent of the squalid world of his West Indian boyhood. (362)

For Christians, the stakes are far greater than political reputation. Hamilton knew better — not only as a man and stateman, but as one who had professed faith in Christ. Perhaps he thought, for six years, that he had gotten away with it (politically speaking), with only the checks it took to pay off her husband’s blackmail. But the whispers were proclaimed from rooftops in 1797 and threatened not only to undo his future prospects, but also his past work.

Quiet Uptown: His Redemption

The late Adams administration held one humbling after another. Adams broke from his cabinet (and Hamilton) and sought peace with France in October of 1799. Two months later, Washington died suddenly. By February 1810, it became clear the Federalist party was turning from Hamilton to Adams. Then, by the end of April, Burr and his opposing coalition won control of New York. In a matter of months, Hamilton’s political power and influence crumbled.

To top it all off, in the election of 1800, his old cabinet rival Jefferson won the presidency — and with Burr as vice president. As Douglass Adair and Marvin Harvey wrote in 1955, “Perhaps never in all American political history has there been a fall from power so rapid, so complete, so final as Hamilton’s in the period from October, 1799 to November, 1800” (“Was Alexander Hamilton a Christian Statesman?” 322). Devasted, he began to consider again the God of his youth. Then it was in late November 1801 that he endured his greatest trial, when his 19-year-old son, Philip, was shot in a duel and died 14 hours later. Later he wrote to a friend that Philip’s death was “beyond comparison the most afflicting of my life.”

Yet by late 1801, as part of “his late-flowering religious interests,” Hamilton was taking solace in Christianity and Philip’s profession of faith. “It was the will of heaven and [Philip] is now out of the reach of the seductions and calamities of a world full of folly, full of vice, full of danger, of least value in proportion as it is best known. I firmly trust also that he has safely reached the haven of eternal repose and felicity.”

“Hamilton’s spiritual renewal is too pronounced to ignore, whether in a biography or on Broadway.”

“Hamilton’s spiritual renewal” is too pronounced to ignore, whether in a biography or on Broadway. His re-awakening appears to have preceded (and prepared him for) Philip’s death, even if Miranda captures it in the aftermath of his loss, in the culminating song “Quiet Uptown”:

I take the children to church on Sunday,A sign of the cross at the door,And I pray.That never used to happen before.

What may be a “grace too powerful to name” on Broadway is precisely the name we know as powerful, and we name: Jesus.

In July of 1804, on the night before his own deadly duel, he would write,

This letter, my very dear Eliza, will not be delivered to you unless I shall first have terminated my earthly career to begin, as I humbly hope from redeeming grace and divine mercy, a happy immortality. . . . The consolations of [Christianity], my beloved, can alone support you and these you have a right to enjoy. Fly to the bosom of your God and be comforted. With my last idea, I shall cherish the sweet hope of meeting you in a better world. Adieu best of wives and best of women.

Tender Reliance on Christ

Todd’s recent work focuses on those final 31 hours after the duel, and Hamilton’s clear affirmations of (what Chernow calls) “his late-flowering religious interests.” Not only did Hamilton there confirm, in general, “I am a sinner: I look to his mercy,” but more specifically, “I have a tender reliance on the mercy of the Almighty, through the merits of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

His end-of-life confessions were as clear as his teenage faith was warm. But for those of us who grieve his long, tragic journey into the far country of seeming political success and pride, we redouble our resolve to live now for what matters eternally, and welcome God’s humbling hand if we realize ourselves to have cooled and wandered.

Puritan Roots and Prayers

Lest Hamilton’s late-life Christian faith contribute to a distorted impression of the nation’s founding, we’re wise to concede that this, meager as it is, may be one of the clearer affirmations of evangelical faith among the inner circle of the founders. You will not find such in Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, or Madison. (One exception, among others, is Hamilton’s longtime friend and collaborator, and first Supreme Court Chief Justice, John Jay.) And this is not to make much of Hamilton’s reticent and late-flowering faith, but to own how unevangelical was the nation’s founding.

On July 4, we remember a nation founded far more in step with the life Hamilton lived in his twenties and thirties, than his teenage profession and late-life renewal. However, from its dawning, the nation has not been able to shake its Puritan roots that grew up together with its deep Enlightenment influences. We do celebrate a nation that, however secular its founding, provided the soil in which the Second Great Awakening could grow and flourish in the first half of the nineteenth century and change the landscape, a nation still enduring under the world’s oldest active codified constitution, a nation we pray will again see future awakenings, even as it still today, with every new dawn, provides space for countless personal conversions to the true God, in Jesus Christ.

ABSTRACT: Ten years after the English Parliament published the Westminster Confession, a group of Reformed ministers, including John Owen and Thomas Goodwin, met to draft a new confession: the 1658 Savoy Declaration. Using Westminster as their guide, they honed and clarified doctrinal statements and also attached thirty articles on congregational polity. Unlike the original draft of Westminster, however, they did not include polity within the confession itself, convinced that such matters should be left to Christian liberty. In doing so, Savoy not only improved upon Westminster but also took a stand that speaks a timely word to Christians today.

For our ongoing series of feature articles for pastors and Christian leaders, we asked Michael Lawrence (PhD, University of Cambridge), lead pastor of Hinson Baptist Church in Portland, Oregon, to tell the story of the 1658 Savoy Declaration.

On October 14, 1658, Thomas Goodwin and a deputation of English congregational ministers presented a confession of faith and church order to the new Protector of England, Oliver Cromwell’s son, Richard. Known to history as the Savoy Declaration of Faith and Order, it has been both neglected and misunderstood. On the one hand, with the demise of Richard’s Protectorate six months later, the instability of successive parliaments in 1659–1660, and the restoration of both Charles II in 1660 and the Church of England in 1662, whatever import was intended by its authors was quickly overtaken by events. On the other hand, from the beginning, its detractors, Presbyterian and radical alike, sought to marginalize the declaration as a narrow attempt to either enforce congregationalism or interfere with liberty of conscience.

But in fact, the Savoy Declaration should probably be considered “the high water mark of English Calvinism.”1 That the authors attached a clear and convincing explanation of congregational polity was a bonus that would not be lost on Baptists, who would use this document as a basis for their own confessions in 1677 and 1682.

Ripe for Reform

The story of the Savoy Declaration is part of the long and tortured attempt to “settle” the church of England as a thoroughly Protestant and Calvinist church. While Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556) had accomplished much after Henry VIII’s break with Rome through the Thirty-Nine Articles, many thought the church but “halfly-reformed.” Under Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I, Puritans in both church and government had agitated and worked for more biblical forms of church government and worship. At the same time, Reformed theology continued to refine its understanding of the import of the covenants, the significance of the federal headship of Christ in the believer’s justification, and the dangers of both Arminianism and Amyraldianism. The Thirty-Nine Articles were ripe for both theological and ecclesiological reform, but Puritan hopes were repeatedly dashed and blocked by their Tudor monarchs.

Their first real chance at further institutional reform came when the Long Parliament summoned the Westminster Assembly of Divines in June 1643. What began as a “minor tweaking” of the Thirty-Nine Articles would become, for a variety of political and theological reasons, a completely “new confessional statement.”2 What we know today as the Westminster Confession of Faith, together with its Larger and Shorter Catechisms, is considered by some to be the pinnacle of confessional standards in the English language. But the English certainly didn’t think that at the time. When Parliament finally published the confession in 1648 (without formally adopting it), they omitted the two chapters that would have established a presbyterian form of church government, and they also made other changes related to marriage, the magistrate, and the conscience.3 Clearly, more work needed to be done if agreement on a new foundation for the church was to be established.

Among the Assembly’s major conflicts were disagreements over both the church’s polity and the role of the government in relation to the church. While the Erastians saw the church as part of the government, and the Presbyterians understood the church to stand alongside the government (and ultimately over it, since the king could be excommunicated!), a group known as “the Dissenting Brethren argued for a middle way.”4 These early congregationalists included Thomas Goodwin, William Bridge, Sydrach Simpson, and Philip Nye. While they were unsuccessful in their arguments at the Assembly, it would be this group, with the addition of John Owen, who would continue to press for church reform.

Assembly at Savoy Palace

With the execution of Charles I and the establishment of the Commonwealth in 1649, the Church of England ceased to exist, but the churches of England remained. Functioning presbyteries existed in and around London and Lancashire County. Congregational and Baptist churches were throughout the land. Some parish churches continued as if nothing had happened. Other groups effectively became a church within a church, depending on the convictions of their pastor. And a host of sects, radicals, and heresies burst into view, not least the Quakers and the anti-Trinitarian Socinians.

Amid this confusion, the Dissenting Brethren were part of repeated attempts to provide these churches, and the nation, with both a structure and a confession that could unite the “godly” and protect against error. Goodwin, president of Magdalen College, Oxford, and Owen, vice-chancellor of Oxford, collaborated with other leading clergy to produce a series of foundational confessional documents, beginning with The Principles of Christian Religion (1652) and The New Confession (1654). The documents were meant to serve as the basis for approving or rejecting ministers, while at the same time leaving room for liberty of conscience concerning lesser matters and allowing for a diversity of church polity. While fairly broad at first, as time went on and heresy and disorder multiplied, each successive confession became more exact in its doctrinal definitions and more Calvinist in its formulations.5

The last of these confessional efforts was The Savoy Declaration (1658). Unlike the first two, this was the work of congregational ministers alone. Spearheaded by Philip Nye with Cromwell’s approval, around two hundred divines gathered at the Savoy Palace in London from September 29 to October 12. While the bulk of the company dealt with various complaints and cases, a committee composed of Goodwin, Owen, Nye, Bridge, William Greenhill, and Joseph Caryl — all Westminster Assembly alumni except for Owen — drew up the articles of confession.6 But they did not start from scratch. On the first day of the assembly, the body decided to start with the Westminster Confession of Faith, as published by Parliament in 1648, and revise from there. Each morning, the committee would present its work to the larger synod for debate and approval.7 In addition to the confession, they also put forward a “Church-order” consisting of thirty articles outlining congregational polity, the roles and limits of voluntary associations of churches, and the relationship to other true churches that are not congregational.8

It may be tempting to interpret the Savoy Declaration as a grab for power and an attempt to impose congregational polity on the nation. But that would be a mistake. Without doubt, the statement on church polity is “denominational” in its argument for congregationalism.9 Oliver Cromwell died before the synod was done, and his son Richard, who received the deputation, was sympathetic to the Presbyterians. Considering shifting political winds, there was need to make a case for their inclusion. But it’s also clear that the Savoyans viewed their statement on polity as secondary. In the preface, often attributed to Owen but more likely written by the committee, they state,

We have endeavoured throughout, to hold to such Truths in this our Confession, as are more properly termed matters of Faith; and what is of Church-order, we dispose in certain Propositions by it self. To this course we are led by the example of the Honourable Houses of Parliament, observing what was established, and what omitted by them in that Confession the Assembly presented to them. Who thought it not convenient to have matters of Discipline and Church-Government put into a Confession of Faith, especially such particulars thereof, as then were, and still are controverted and under dispute by men Orthodox and sound in Faith.10

“Unity in faith is as much a work of God as faith itself.”

They then reference the two chapters on presbyterian government, as well as matters pertaining to marriage, divorce, and the magistrate. As they observed, while most people had the copy of the Westminster Confession published in Presbyterian Scotland, they were following the Confession “approved and passed” by the Parliament in England.11

Improving Westminster

In what ways does the Savoy Declaration improve upon Westminster such that it deserves to be called “the high water mark of English Calvinism”? To begin with, the entire confession is explicitly framed within a developed covenantal framework that reflects the maturing thought of Reformed theologians. The fall is explicitly explained within the context of a “Covenant of Works and Life” as opposed to merely the permissive will of God in Westminster.12 The covenant of redemption between the Son and the Father is made the explicit basis for the mediatorial work of Christ in chapter 8.13 The most notable addition is chapter 20, “Of the Gospel, and of the extent of the Grace thereof.” There is nothing comparable to it in Westminster. It begins,

The Covenant of Works being broken by sin, and made unprofitable unto life, God was pleased to give unto the Elect the promise of Christ, the seed of the woman, as the means of calling them, and begetting in them Faith and Repentance: in this promise the Gospel, as to the substance of it, was revealed, and was therein effectual for the conversion and salvation of sinners.

Finally, in chapter 21, “the whole Legal administration of the Covenant of Grace,” described as a “yoak,” is removed in the liberty bought by Christ.14 While some of this is implicit in Westminster, and the structure of the covenants is explained in chapter 7, Savoy thinks about redemption in more nuanced and developed terms of covenant theology.

Savoy also takes sides in controversies Westminster sidestepped. In chapter 11, our justification is accomplished by the imputation of not only the “obedience and satisfaction of Christ,” but of “Christ’s active obedience unto the whole Law, and passive obedience in his death for their whole and sole righteousness.” Far from being afraid that the imputation of Christ’s active obedience might encourage antinomianism, Savoy makes it the ground of our faith. In the same chapter, Christ’s death is explained explicitly as a penal substitutionary sacrifice, rather than merely as making “satisfaction.”15 And while not coming down as infralapsarian or supralapsarian, Savoy goes out of its way to place the fall squarely within the eternal decree rather than God’s general providence.16

Throughout, the Declaration never misses a chance to make explicit the effectual call of God, the inability of man, and the priority of union with Christ. It also underlines that the “Doctrine of the Trinity is the foundation of all our Communion with God, and comfortable Dependence upon him.”17 In these final small additions, Savoy is not correcting or improving Westminster, but “obviating some erroneous opinion, that have been more broadly and boldly here of late maintained by the Asserters, then in former times.”18

Guarding Christian Liberty

In all of these revisions and additions, we can see the influence of John Owen and Thomas Goodwin. Owen championed the imputation of Christ’s active and passive obedience for our justification, refuting both the Socinians and Richard Baxter in Vindiciae Evangelicae. Goodwin delighted in exploring the superiority of Christ the Mediator, rooted in the covenant of redemption.19 Owen and Goodwin together represent English scholastic Calvinism at its finest, exalting God’s glory in his sovereign work of salvation.

Both men were also congregationalists, evident not only in Savoy’s appended Church-order, but in the careful reworking of chapter 24, which corresponds to chapter 23 in Westminster, “Of the Civil Magistrate.” It’s in this chapter that their middle way between the Erastians and Presbyterians is evident. Westminster gave the magistrate authority “that unity and peace be preserved in the Church,” “that all blasphemies and heresies be suppressed,” “all corruptions and abuses in worship and discipline prevented,” “and all the ordinances of God duly . . . observed.”20 As a result, while the government was ultimately subject to the church through its discipline, the government was also responsible to establish the church and enforce conformity. In contrast, while Savoy agrees that the magistrate has a responsibility to promote and protect the gospel, and to prevent the publishing and promotion of heresies and errors that “subvert . . . the faith, and inevitably destroy . . . the souls of them that receive them,”

Yet in such difference about the Doctrines of the Gospel, or ways of the worship of God, as may befall men exercising a good conscience, manifesting it in their conversation [i.e., way of life], and holding the foundation, not disturbing others in their ways or worship that differ from them; there is no warrant for the Magistrate under the Gospel to abridge them of their liberty.21

The preface explains the motivation for this change. “There being nothing that tends more to heighten dissentings among Brethren, then to determine and adopt the matter of their difference, under so high a title, as to be an Article of our Faith.”22

The drafters of Savoy believed that their understanding of the government and order of the church was “the Order which Christ himself hath appointed to be observed.”23 They were not pragmatists. They were not following their preferences. They believed that to act otherwise was to sin against Christ. Nevertheless, they also understood that these and other matters were not part of “the foundation” of the faith. And so, while they wanted the magistrate to promote and protect godly religion, they also wanted to protect the liberty of a believer’s conscience from the magistrate and from themselves.

Against Imposition

That liberty reveals one of the most important legacies of the Savoy Declaration. These strict congregational ministers, articulating “the high water mark of English Calvinism,” were concerned first and foremost with what they called “experimental religion,” or what we would call “experiential religion.” They understood the importance of right doctrine and biblical polity. But they also understood that unity in faith is as much a work of God as faith itself. Human imposition, whether by government or church authority, has no place.

In our own day, when some Christians would be tempted to wield the power of government to enforce a more Christian society, we would do well to listen to those who wielded such power in their own. “Whatever is of force or constraint in matters of this nature causeth them to degenerate from the name and nature of Confessions, and turns them from being Confessions of Faith, into exactions and impositions of Faith.”24 Surely that is a timely word for us today.

When someone turns from self to Christ, he trades not only sin for righteousness, hell for heaven, and despair for living hope. He also trades a small life for a large life — a life as large as the world Christ came to redeem.

The transformation takes time, of course. But in the end, the Spirit-filled soul cannot rest satisfied with self, nor with the affairs of his own kin and city and nation. No, as surely as all nations will one day bow to Christ, so Christ is moving his people to care about all nations.

Have you known Christians whose life seems marked by such largeness — Christians who live for places beyond here, times beyond now, and tribes beyond mine? Their eyes seem fixed on distant frontiers where Christ has not been named (Romans 15:20). They watch, fascinated, as the promise of redemption advances to “the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8). Their heart beats for the day when a better flood than Noah’s will prevail upon the world — when “the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (Habakkuk 2:14).

They are, in a word, world Christians.

What Is a World Christian?

“World Christians,” David Bryant writes, “are day-to-day disciples for whom Christ and his global cause have become the integrating, overriding priority” (In the Gap, 6). Or as D.A. Carson puts it, “they see themselves first and foremost as citizens of the heavenly kingdom” and are therefore “single-minded and sacrificial when it comes to the paramount mandate to evangelize and make disciples” (The Cross and Christian Ministry, 117). World Christians may not personally go to faraway nations (though many do), but faraway nations have gone into them. They send, pray, dream, give, support, and worship like disciples of a worldwide Lord.

And we could use more of them. Our churches today do not have too many world Christians. We do not have too many among us overzealous for cross-cultural missions. We do not have too many who regularly remind us of unreached and unengaged peoples, those for whom Jesus is a strange sound. We do not have too many who plead in our prayer meetings, “Be exalted, O God, above the heavens! Let your glory be over all the earth!” (Psalm 57:5).

Personally, I can remember seasons when I was more of a world Christian than I am now. Maybe you can too. Or maybe your heart has yet to feel the thrill of Christ’s worldwide dominion. Either way, many of us need a fresh wind from that Spirit who ever blows toward the Christless corners of the earth. And perhaps we might feel that wind if we consider some early disciples who formed what we might consider the first world-Christian church: the church of Christ at Antioch. In four marks, these believers display the nature and joy of the world-Christian life.

1. World Relationships

By the eleventh chapter of Acts, the gospel has begun to spread beyond the Jews. The Spirit has fallen on Cornelius and his household in response to Peter’s preaching; God has made common Gentiles clean through faith (Acts 10:15, 44–48). But we have not yet seen a world-Christian church, a true fellowship of nations, until some “men of Cyprus and Cyrene” come to Antioch and speak not just to the Jews but “to the Hellenists also, preaching the Lord Jesus” — resulting in “a great number” of Jesus-worshiping Gentiles (Acts 11:20–21).

For the first time, Jews and Gentiles ate together, prayed together, ministered together, and worshiped together in the same local assembly and on the same spiritual footing. Soon, this church in Antioch would become a missionary-sending base (Acts 13:2–3). But before they sought to spread world Christianity abroad, they lived world Christianity at home. Their world Christianity was first a matter of world relationships, world friendships, world partnerships with local neighbors.

“As surely as all nations will one day bow to Christ, so Christ is moving his people to care about all nations.”

And so with us. Some today may live in an all-but monocultural, monoethnic place (in a small rural town, perhaps), but most of us can find something of the world without going far — often without even leaving our church. Even in my own relatively small church, I’m likely to sit near someone of Haitian, Bahamian, or Russian background on any given Sunday. Perhaps the first question for our own world Christianity, then, is not whether we’re willing to cross an ocean for Christ, but whether we’ll cross an aisle for him.

Will we embrace whatever differences lie between us and seek — by welcome, warmth, hospitality, friendship — to take our fellowship deeper than formalities? Will we cultivate a love for God’s global glory by embracing Christ-centered local diversity? And will we sincerely pray that our church would look a little more like a kingdom of all peoples? World Christianity, like so many other parts of the Christian life, begins at home.

2. World Responsibility

Bryant, in another description of world Christians, speaks not only of caring about God’s global glory, but also of accepting “personal responsibility” to see that glory go forth (In the Gap, 35). World Christians hear the Great Commission as if personally addressed, as if they too were on the Galilean mountain. They live as if the words “disciple all nations” were meant for them.

The Antioch Christians’ world responsibility appears most clearly in their missionary going and sending. In two other ways, however, we see just how sincerely they took this responsibility for God’s global kingdom.

First, when the church in Antioch heard about a financial need among the saints in Judea (some three hundred miles south of them), “the disciples determined, every one according to his ability, to send relief” (Acts 11:29). Distant news was not a distant care to these Christians, not when it concerned “the brothers” who had supported this church in its infancy by sending them Barnabas (Acts 11:22). Partnership in the gospel collapsed the distance and compelled them to give.

Do we, like them, care deeply about the faraway news of God’s kingdom, especially among our partners in the gospel? Do we treat missionary newsletters as more important than national headlines? And do needs there inspire prayer and generosity here because of the world responsibility we feel?

Second, Antioch not only sent missionaries (as we’ll see below), but they also took seriously the responsibility to support missionaries. If the apostle Paul had a home church, Antioch was it. From Antioch he sailed, and to Antioch he returned — not just once (Acts 14:27–28) or twice (Acts 15:35) but three times (Acts 18:22–23). It was a place he enjoyed spending “no little time” (Acts 14:28). And when he returned, he was not a no-name missionary, barely remembered by the church (“Who was that guy again?”), but a precious partner sent with fasting, sustained with prayer, and received with joy. In Antioch, Paul found a ready audience to hear “all that God had done” (Acts 14:27).

World Christians embrace God’s global mission as part of their calling, part of their personal responsibility. Like civilians in wartime, they do not treat lightly news from the front or the soldiers who come home.

3. World Readiness

When the Holy Spirit moved among the Antioch Christians and said, “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them” (Acts 13:2), we read of no hesitation or resistance: “After fasting and praying they laid their hands on them and sent them off” (Acts 13:3). Can you imagine sending Paul and Barnabas away from your church — Paul, the mighty apostle, and Barnabas, the son of encouragement? For a whole year these men had “met with the church and taught a great many people” (Acts 11:26). But now the Spirit said, “Send them.” And so they did. Antioch was ready.

World Christianity, if embraced deeply, will disrupt some of our dearest relationships. The Spirit will send away our family and friends — indeed, he will ask us to send them away. Or he may send us ourselves, bidding us to be the ones who depart. Either way, world Christianity calls for readiness to send and be sent, even if, as Paul said of Onesimus, we feel like we’re “sending [our] very heart” (Philemon 12).

If two of your best friends, or two of your church’s best leaders, sensed a stirring to go, would you encourage them? If you sensed a stirring yourself, even if in a seemingly crucial ministry position, would you be willing to take the next step? Significantly, Luke notes that the Spirit’s commission came “while they were worshiping the Lord and fasting” (Acts 13:2). Only such a Godward posture can give us the world readiness we need. The Lord Jesus can make up for every loss we incur in his cause, whether by sending or going — and even give a hundredfold more (Matthew 19:29). But readiness for such losses will depend on keeping his fullness before our eyes.

4. World Resolve

Sometime after Paul’s first missionary journey, as he and Barnabas were ministering in Antioch again, “some men came down from Judea” with a teaching that threatened the world-Christian movement: “Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved” (Acts 15:1). In other words, faith in Jesus is not enough for Gentiles to be justified before God; they must also live under Jewish law.

But Antioch wouldn’t buy it. Not only did Paul and Barnabas have “no small dissension and debate” with the Judaizing teachers, but the whole church “appointed [them] to go up to Jerusalem to the apostles and the elders about this question” (Acts 15:2–3). These believers would not give up the gospel so easily. They had been taught Christ too well. More than that, they had tasted and seen the goodness of God’s global purposes and would not build again “the dividing wall of hostility” between Jew and Gentile (Ephesians 2:14). To their relationships, responsibility, and readiness, they added world resolve.

We too have need for such resolve. Even if our world Christianity faces few theological distortions, it faces many practical distractions. We may not be tempted to force circumcision on the nations, but we are likely tempted to forget the nations — and to forget the joy that comes from living for God’s global cause. Our attention is too embattled, our pull toward the here and now too strong, our flesh too in love with the familiar for our world Christianity to remain without resolve.

Perhaps one of the most crucial steps we could take, then, is to embrace habits that keep the nations before our eyes. Read missionary biographies. Befriend believers who make the Great Commission a practical priority. Visit parts of your city filled with neighbors from other nations. Have meals with missions-minded brothers or sisters in your church. Treat missionary newsletters as precious prompts for family devotions and corporate prayer. And along the way, pray that God would make his global glory the passion of your heart.

Because when someone turns from self to Christ, he trades not only sin for righteousness, hell for heaven, and despair for living hope. He also trades a small life for a large life — a life as large as the world Christ came to redeem.