http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15657650/our-children-need-to-see-weakness
“Would you please, please come with me? I really want you to be there. All the other moms are going.”
My daughter was pleading with me to volunteer at field day for her kindergarten class. How could I deny such an earnest request? But since I couldn’t navigate the outdoors without assistance, I had to say no once again. She nodded her head understandingly when I explained why — she was used to disappointment. She didn’t know how much I wanted to go, how I longed to connect with her at school, or how guilty I felt that she was missing out.
Before I had children, my disability primarily impacted me. I could choose what I wanted to do, and I taught myself to want only those activities that were physically possible for me. But after I had children, I was faced with more challenging responsibilities and requests, constant reminders of what I couldn’t do. I felt guilty and responsible for what my girls lacked due to my limitations.
Over the years, I’ve met other parents who also feel inadequate — financial constraints, lack of education, limited resources, one all-consuming child, their own emotional battles, familial dysfunction, or a whole litany of other struggles. Like me, they were convinced that their inabilities put their children at a disadvantage.
“God, in his infinite wisdom, has chosen us to be the parents of our children.”
Yet God, in his infinite wisdom, has chosen us to be the parents of our children.
Dependence Can Be a Strength
In my frailty, I rely more on God. I need his power and wisdom because I don’t have power and wisdom in myself. And I have discovered that since “the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men” (1 Corinthians 1:25), I have unimaginable resources at my disposal.
When I ask for wisdom, God generously gives it. When I wait on the Lord, he renews my strength. When I am weary and troubled, he gives me rest. When I turn to God, he gives me everything I need.
My dependence and limitations have become my greatest strengths because they push me to pray before I answer or act. When I could easily do what my children asked, I didn’t seek God’s wisdom or help. I just responded. I didn’t consider alternatives or potential pitfalls. I assumed I had it under control.
The Israelites were once deceived by their Gibeonite neighbors, who claimed to have come from a far-off land and presented torn sacks, dried-out provisions, and worn-out clothes as proof. The Israelites “did not ask counsel from the Lord” (Joshua 9:14) because it seemed obvious what to do. I can relate to their actions, as I look back at the impulsive decisions I made without giving them much thought. Decisions I often regretted later. But when my children asked me for things that were beyond my abilities, I had to ask God for wisdom and help. Just as Jehoshaphat did when he said to the Lord, “We are powerless against this great horde that is coming against us. We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you” (2 Chronicles 20:12).
Weakness Made Me a Better Mom
In my weakness, I begged God for tangible, specific help and saw concrete answers to prayer. The more I asked, the more God answered. The more I needed, the more he provided. The more I sought God, the more easily I found him. I would have missed out on untold blessings had I not been so needy.
My physical condition involves increasing pain and weakness, so I daily crawled to Jesus weary and heavy laden, and he gave me rest. I had to let go of my desire to do things perfectly, to meet everyone else’s needs, to wear myself out to the point of exhaustion. I had once been Martha, pulled apart by much serving, but my disability forced me into the role of Mary (Luke 10:38–42). Yet it was only then that I discovered the richness of sitting at Jesus’s feet, trusting him with all that felt undone.
God used my weakness to make me a better mother, and to forge a deeper character in my children.
When faced with something I couldn’t do, I sometimes wondered if my daughters would have been better off in a different family. But God reassured me that I was handpicked by him to address their unique strengths and struggles. Christ equips and strengthens us for everything our children need (Philippians 4:13, 19), so we need not feel inadequate.
What God Did Through Weakness
While I’d been consumed with what I couldn’t do for my children, I almost missed what God was doing in them because of my weakness. Now I see they are both creative problem-solvers. They show up for people and keep their commitments.
They are also compassionate and caring, noticing what people need and looking out for people with differing abilities. Even as small children, they never stared or asked strangers, “What’s wrong with you?” Once, when my older daughter’s first-grade teacher dropped her papers in class, Katie immediately jumped up from her seat across the room to pick them up. None of the other students even attempted to get up. When the teacher recounted the story, I realized that God was shaping my daughters through my disability in ways I hadn’t even noticed.
My younger daughter saw the blessing of crying out to God one rainy night when I was driving her to her basketball game in a neighboring town. In the stop-and-go traffic, my leg began to give out, and there was no way to get off the road. Tears rolled down my cheeks — I felt inadequate, scared, and overwhelmed yet again.
“Our weakness could be the making of our children’s faith. They learn to rely on God for the things we cannot do.”
When Kristi realized what was happening, she immediately said aloud, “God, please make my mom’s leg feel stronger and the traffic clear up.” We took turns praying back and forth together. Within minutes, we stopped seeing red brake lights, and the cramping in my leg eased as we made it to the game just in time. On the way home, she commented on how God answered our prayers.
Our Cracks Help Them See
Our weaknesses could be the making of our children’s faith. They learn to rely on God for the things we cannot do. They watch us pray. They see our limitations. And they get a front-row seat to see how God provides. As they watch our weak and flawed earthen vessels up close, they see the surpassing power that belongs to God and not to us (2 Corinthians 4:7). In this way, our cracks help them see.
Parenting through weakness can bring God glory. As we rely on God and his grace, he shines through our lives. God’s grace is sufficient for us, and his power is made perfect in weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9). What more could we want?
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Does God Actually Get Angry? Why He Reveals Himself in Human Terms
God reveals himself to his people in the Bible. The opening chapters of Genesis show us that God is relational. Indeed, all true theology is relational theology since God, in his triunity, is a relational God. God relates to his creatures, especially those made in his image, in a manner suitable to their creatureliness. Because God is wise and good, he does not relate to Adam in the garden in a manner that utterly confuses him. Rather, there’s a beautiful simplicity concerning how Adam must live in relation to God, which was friendship with God based upon his gracious condescension.
Now, that does not mean we are not frequently confronted in God’s word, as Job was, with the supreme, infinite majesty of our God. God is infinite in his perfections; he possesses unchangeable omniscience; he enjoys eternal omnipotence. To him alone, we can say with David, “Yours, O Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the victory and the majesty. . . . You are exalted as head above all” (1 Chronicles 29:11). Our God “is clothed with awesome majesty” (Job 37:22).
However, we also find that much of what pertains to us as humans is also attributed to God. We read of God’s “face” (Exodus 33:20), “eyes” (and “eyelids,” Psalm 11:4), “ear” (Isaiah 59:1), “nostrils” (Isaiah 65:5), “mouth” (Deuteronomy 8:3), “lips” (Isaiah 30:27), “tongue” (Isaiah 30:27), “finger” (Exodus 8:19), and many other body parts. What’s more, sometimes we read of God possessing human emotions. He is sometimes jealous or grieved (Deuteronomy 4:24; 32:21; Psalm 78:40; Isaiah 63:10). After Adam sins, God, who has just made the world by acts of divine power, wisdom, and goodness, asks Adam, “Where are you?” (Genesis 3:9).
God Without Passions
What are Christians to make of these declarations of God? Is God eternally unchangeable in his being, or does he, like humans, have the capacity to change? Can God really experience distress or learn something new? What does it mean for God, who is Spirit, to “get angry”? Does God really need to ask Adam where he is, as if he can’t find him?
If we are committed to the biblical and theological view that God is unchangeable (see Psalm 102:26–28), we are affirming that in God there is no change in time (he is eternal) or location (he is omnipresent) or essence (he is pure being). God does not change, nor can he change (Malachi 3:6; Isaiah 14:27; 41:4). Thus, there are no “passions” in God, as if in his essence he can be more or less happy or more or less angry. God is what he always was and will be (James 1:17) in the infinite happiness and bliss we call divine “blessedness.”
An immutable God does not have passions; or, as John Owen famously said, “a mutable god is of the dunghill.” We do not deny that God has affections (for example, wrath or hatred), but affections like wrath in God are either acts of his outward will or they are applied to God figuratively.
Passions refer to an internal emotional change, which are suitable to humans. Think of our blood pressure rising with anger. God’s jealousy — a metaphorical way to speak of him — helps us to understand outward acts of his will. When God wills for the wicked to be punished, sometimes in the most severe way (like the flood in Noah’s time), we can speak of the “anger of the Lord.” Because God is holy and righteous, he must punish sin. When he outwardly executes his punishment, the Scriptures often speak of his fury or wrath. But to suggest that Achan, for example, could upset God so that God is less happy is to make Achan into God and God into Achan (see Joshua 7).
God’s Amazing Stooping
God relates to his image-bearers in a way that does justice to the history of redemption. He condescends and, for our sake, sometimes appropriates to himself “passions” that, while not properly true of his being, are ways of speaking that help us to understand how he will relate to us in terms of his purposes and will.
“God relates to his creatures, especially those made in his image, in a manner suitable to their creatureliness.”
Herman Bavinck (1854–1921) explains the importance of God’s dealings with us in this way: “If God were to speak to us in a divine language, not a creature would understand him. But what spells out his grace is the fact that from the moment of creation God stoops down to his creatures, speaking and appearing to them in human fashion” (Reformed Dogmatics, 1:100). If he did not, we would be left in a cloud of unsearchable darkness concerning who God is and what he is doing in the world.
Now God’s “stooping” and “appearing” are not mere anthropomorphisms in the sense that he is accommodating to us in terms of the language he uses. Rather, the humanlike language used of God in the Old Testament is fulfilled wondrously in the person of Christ in his incarnation.
Anthropomorphic Christ
The Son related to God’s people in the Old Testament by dwelling in their midst (1 Corinthians 10:4). According to Owen, in dwelling with his people, the Son
constantly assumes unto himself human affections, to intimate that a season would come when he would immediately act in that nature. And, indeed, after the fall there is nothing spoken of God in the Old Testament, nothing of his institutions, nothing of the way and manner of dealing with the church, but what has respect unto the future incarnation of Christ. (Works, 1:350)
This is a beautiful way to understand the Old Testament. These anthropomorphisms attributed to God are not only a form of accommodation on his part in terms of his covenantal relationship with his people, but they set the stage for the incarnation of the Son of God. Yet, since the Son is the reason for all things (Colossians 1:16), it goes without saying that anthropomorphic language concerning God is not merely prospective of Jesus but derives from him from the beginning.
Owen adds that it would have been absurd to speak of God continually by way of anthropomorphisms (such as grief, anger, repentance, and so on) unless it was intended that the Son would take to himself “the nature wherein such affections do dwell” (350).
“What is impossible for God, who cannot change, is possible in Christ because of the glory of the incarnation.”
Everything anthropomorphically yet not properly attributed to God is actually properly attributed to Christ as God-man. Jesus, who has arms and eyes, a heart and soul, also grieves (Mark 3:5) and expresses indignation (Mark 10:14). What is impossible for God, who cannot change, is possible in Christ because of the glory of the incarnation. In him we can affirm both God’s unchangeability and his ability to express human passions. The Son of God, as one person with two natures, is both unchangeable and changeable; he experienced an infinite joy in the deity but also, while on earth, an inexpressible sorrow in his humanity.
Always Set to Be Man
Our Lord Jesus is not only the fulfillment of all promises, which are yes and amen in him (2 Corinthians 1:20), but the fulfillment of all truth concerning who God is toward his creatures. The Lord’s hand (arm) is not too short to save because his “hand” is his Messiah who is able to save to the uttermost (Hebrews 7:25). Hands are what we use to work, and God works with his hand (Jesus) our salvation.
God often spoke of himself in human terms because the Son was always set to become the true human, the one truly in the image of God (Colossians 1:15), who allows the faithful to see God by faith in this life and by sight in the life to come. As important for us as his divinity is his humanity — a humanity that such stooping language in the Old Testament always anticipated.
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Septuagint: Why the Greek Old Testament Still Matters
ABSTRACT: What many call “the Septuagint” today was a collection of varied Greek translations of the Hebrew Old Testament that circulated among Jews and Christians in antiquity. The apostles both read and referenced these Greek translations often, especially as they wrote to Greek-speaking churches throughout the Greek-speaking world. Sometimes, their use of the Septuagint comes across through translations of key words; other times, they quote directly from the Septuagint rather than the Hebrew. Their familiarity with the Greek Old Testament also exerts a behind-the-scenes influence on broader New Testament themes. Familiarity with the Septuagint, then, offers a fresh window into the study of the Scriptures, for pastors and engaged laypeople as well as for scholars.
For our ongoing series of feature articles for pastors and Christian leaders, we asked Greg Lanier, Associate Professor of New Testament at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, to offer an introduction to the Septuagint.
If your personal Bible is the ESV or NIV, you first come across it in a footnote at Genesis 4:8. If you are using the NET, you will spot it even earlier in a translators’ note at Genesis 3:15. But if you cut against the grain and use the CSB, you will see it make a cameo as early as Genesis 2:2. In fact, you will bump into it roughly 96 times in the CSB’s footnotes for Genesis–Deuteronomy.
It is called the Septuagint, or LXX for short: in a nutshell, the Greek form of the Old Testament (OT). Often ignored or misunderstood, it is one of the more important words in your Bible’s footnotes.
Septuagint studies has enjoyed a bit of an academic renaissance in recent decades, but many pastors and laypersons still know little about it. It sounds esoteric, especially with its difficult-to-say title — which scholars do not pronounce uniformly anyhow — and fancy nickname. The aim of this article is to bring it out of the shadows of footnotes and into the light, focusing on clarifying what it is and why it matters to everyday Christians.
What Exactly Is the Septuagint?
Before discussing its relevance, we have to clarify what is meant by Septuagint. But that is part of the problem. The term itself, when paired with the (the Septuagint, or the LXX), and combined with the fact that you can purchase a copy, might give the false impression that “the Septuagint” is a singular book, produced by a single committee, and published in a single place at a single time. But since we are looking back to a time before printing presses, publishers, computers, and online booksellers, little of this impression is accurate. It is better to think of the word Septuagint as a pointer to the process by which the Hebrew Scriptures circulated in the Greek language among Jews and Christians in antiquity. The details are complex, but some key ideas can be sketched.
Clear Starting Point
Most Christians know that their personal copy of the OT is a translation from the ancient Hebrew text, aimed at conveying God’s word to people unfamiliar with Hebrew. Jews in antiquity faced the same issue. After the conquest of Alexander the Great (d. 323 BC), much of the Mediterranean world adopted Greek as the functional language. Jews inside and outside Palestine followed suit to varying degrees, and competency in Hebrew began to wane. In the mid-third century BC, a group of Greek-speaking Jews in Egypt (likely Alexandria) undertook translating the Torah (or Pentateuch, Genesis–Deuteronomy) from Hebrew into Greek, not only to give their own people access to Scripture in their daily language for use in worship but also (possibly) to provide a copy of their law code to the Ptolemaic rulers.
The embellished account of this translation (in the Letter of Aristeas, from the second or third century BC) states there were 72 translators, which, over the course of time, became 70 — the Latin of which is septuaginta or LXX. Strictly speaking, then, Septuagint or LXX refers only to this initial endeavor.
The Plot Thickens
The Greek Pentateuch may have been first in the pool, but over the next centuries more swimmers entered, the water itself began changing, lane markers started crisscrossing, and so on. Five overlapping developments are worth mentioning.
First, more books of the traditional OT were translated from Hebrew into Greek, starting perhaps with Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the minor prophets. The precise sequence, location, and timing are unknown, but most, if not all, were completed by the time of the early church. Swimming in this same pool of activity were the writings known as Apocrypha. Their association with the Greek copies of scriptural books greatly influenced how, in due course, they were designated as deuterocanonical books within Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy.
Second, translation strategies evolved over time. Some books were translated in a way similar to today’s NASB (stricter correspondence to the Hebrew) while others were closer to the NLT (less strictness, more paraphrastic). The translations are all adequate as Greek but had different philosophies, needs, and audiences in view.
Third, existing Greek translations were not carved in stone but began to be revised (or even retranslated), often with the goal of bringing them closer to the Hebrew. Some books like Daniel and Esther even branched into two distinct Greek forms. Such activities are traditionally associated with the Kaige movement, Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion, Origen, Lucian of Antioch, and possibly others. One could compare these translations to the different editions of, say, the NIV (1978, 1984, 1996 NIrV, 1999, 2002 TNIV, 2011).
Fourth, manuscripts of the emerging Greek versions of the OT themselves took on a life of their own, as they were copied and passed on by Jewish and, in turn, Christian scribes. No scribe was perfect, and accidental or intentional changes entered the stream over time.
Fifth, running through all these developments is the fact that the Hebrew source text itself — which translators were attempting to capture in Greek — was itself not 100 percent stable at the margins. The Hebrew text was passed on with exceptional accuracy, but there is no guarantee that any given translator was working from an identical copy of the Hebrew. (This is why modern Bibles sometimes mention alternative wording found in certain Hebrew manuscripts like the Dead Sea Scrolls — as, e.g., the ESV at Psalm 22:16.)
We could go further into the weeds, but this suffices to prove the point: there really was no such thing as the Septuagint. Talking about it as such is like asking a churchgoer where to find the Bible. Do you want the ESV? NIV? KJV? RVR (Spanish)? A study Bible? Devotional Bible? Interlinear? App? Audio Bible? Even for those who can read the biblical languages, there are multiple options.
Septuagint, then, is at best a kind of shorthand for the complex but fascinating history by which God’s word in Hebrew made its way throughout the empire in various Greek forms.
Why Is It Relevant to the Study of the NT?
Precisely here — the use of Greek Bible(s) in antiquity — the relevance of the so-called Septuagint for us today becomes evident.
By definition, it is clearly relevant to studying the OT, particularly for reconstructing the authentic OT text (e.g., ESV at 1 Samuel 10:1; 14:41), exploring canon-related issues, and tracing early Jewish interpretation — vital topics that would merit a standalone article.
But it is also of great relevance to studying the New Testament (NT), which is our focus here. Early Christians, like their Jewish predecessors, were immersed in a Greek-speaking world. We see this not only in how some of Jesus’s disciples bore Greek names alongside Semitic ones (Saul/Paul, Levi/Matthew, Simon/Peter) or were from Hellenistic backgrounds (Acts 6), but most clearly in the writing of the entire NT in Greek. It should come as no surprise, then, that the authors sometimes make direct use of the Greek form of the OT in addition to or even in place of the known Hebrew form. Just as a Korean-speaking pastor would naturally quote from a Korean Bible in a sermon to a Korean congregation, so also the Greek-speaking apostolic authors would often default to a Greek Bible when writing to Greek-speaking congregations.
Matthew offers a helpful example to prove the point. On the one hand, he uses the specific Hebrew form of Hosea 11:1 (“I have called my son”) and not the Greek (“I have called my children”) in Matthew 2:15. On the other hand, he draws on the Greek form of Isaiah 40:3, even where it differs from the Hebrew, in Matthew 3:2. Since Matthew was a bilingual tax collector, it makes sense that he would be able to navigate the OT in both Hebrew and Greek.
In short, the Greek tradition of the OT influenced the writing of the NT in various ways alongside the Hebrew tradition, which means that today’s student of the Bible would benefit to know something about it. I will trace three ways we can detect this influence, offering brief implications at each step.
The Greek OT shaped the contours of certain words.
When my church congregation prays the Lord’s Prayer, I self-consciously avoid using thy and thine embedded in memory from the KJV. Your Bible influences your theological vocabulary. Similarly, the Greek of the Septuagint texts shaped to varying degrees the specific ways certain words were used by NT authors.
A marquee example is the use of ekklēsia for “church.” Other options existed, and in secular Greek ekklēsia often carried the sense of a civic assembly. So why did this term get applied immediately (and with no apparent debate) to the spiritual gathering of believers (Matthew 16:18; Galatians 1:2)? The Jewish community had already settled on this word as a suitable way of translating Hebrew terms for the congregation or gathering of the Israelites for religious worship and instruction (e.g., Deuteronomy 4:10; Joshua 8:5). Indeed, ekklēsia is used for the assembly of the Israelites in Acts 7:38 and, only a few breaths later, for the early church in 8:1. Knowing something about the Greek OT, then, is crucial to grasping the identity of today’s church as the people of God.
Another key example is “gospel” or “good news.” Euangelion vocabulary was often used for reports of military victories in antiquity. But in the Greek tradition of the prophets (especially Isaiah), it was applied to spiritual good news related to the saving work of God, doubtless shaping the apostolic authors. For instance, Mark 1:1–3 traces the good news directly to Isaiah 40, and Paul treats the good news as something pre-promised to the prophets as well (Romans 1:1–2).
A final example is the term used in the Greek OT for the “sin offering,” namely, peri hamartias (e.g., Leviticus 5:6). Strictly speaking, this phrase means “concerning sin,” but it became a technical term for the specific Levitical sacrifice (see Hebrews 10:6). Its influence can be felt most vividly in Romans 8:3, where Paul refers to Jesus as peri hamartias; though some English translations take this as “for sin” (KJV, RSV), it is more accurate to render it “sin offering” (CSB, NIV), which concretely captures how Jesus’s blood fulfills the Levitical sacrificial system.
Implication: Students of the NT can benefit from adding the Greek OT to their set of tools for studying the semantic ranges of NT words (from covenant to mercy seat/propitiation and beyond). The Greek OT may not answer every question for every word, but it can be a window on common use in the first century — and sure beats using Merriam-Webster!
The Greek OT was often used in specific quotations.
Additionally, NT authors often use wording from the Greek tradition when directly quoting an OT passage. When studying such reuses of the OT in the NT, it is important to keep four basic patterns in mind.
The wording matches both the Hebrew and the Greek, particularly if the latter is a straightforward rendering of the former (e.g., Leviticus 19:18 in Matthew 19:19).
The wording matches the Hebrew more closely, and not the Greek (e.g., Zechariah 12:10 in John 19:37).
The wording matches neither fully but appears to involve apostolic retranslation or interpretation (e.g., Psalm 68:19 in Ephesians 4:8).
The wording matches the Greek more closely, even where it deviates from the Hebrew.The fourth category is of most interest here, since it demonstrates the vital importance of the Greek translation(s) of the OT to NT study. I will provide a few examples to illustrate the point.
Let us begin with instances where the use of the Greek OT is important Christologically.
In Jesus’s visit to the Nazareth synagogue, his reading of Isaiah 61:1–2 as recorded in Luke 4:18–19 includes “and recovering of sight to the blind,” found only in Greek Isaiah and not the known Hebrew. This line is important to the Lukan context because it frames Jesus as the Spirit-anointed deliverer who will, indeed, bring healing to both physical and spiritual blindness.
Amid the rapid-fire set of quotations in Hebrews 1:5–14, the author writes, “When he [God] brings the firstborn into the world, he says, ‘Let all God’s angels worship him’” (Hebrews 1:6). This line is apparently drawn from the Greek tradition of Deuteronomy 32:43 and is absent in the standard Hebrew tradition, providing the author with helpful wording to express the divinity of Jesus. (Note: some English translations incorporate the line into the text of Deuteronomy, effectively blending the Hebrew and Greek.)
Hebrews also reflects the distinct wording of the Greek of Psalm 40:6–8 in order to capture the humanity of Jesus via “A body have you prepared for me” (Hebrews 10:5), whereas the Hebrew reads, “You have given me an open ear.”These are but a few instances where the OT — and the Greek form, at that — is key to articulating the person and work of Christ.
The Greek OT is also missionally important to the NT authors. Occasionally, the ancient Greek translators had already enhanced how a given passage anticipates the inclusion of the nations/Gentiles in the plan of God, allowing the apostolic authors more readily to root the global mission of the church in Scripture.
Matthew draws on the distinctive Greek wording of Isaiah 42:1–3 to plant the seed that Jesus’s ministry is not only for Jews but encompasses Gentiles, too: while the Hebrew reads, “The coastlands await his laws,” the Greek form that is used in Matthew 12:21 reads, “In his name the Gentiles will hope.”
At the Jerusalem council, the decisive evidence in favor of not imposing circumcision on Gentiles comes from Amos 9:11–12. The wording of the quotation in Acts 15:17, “that the remnant of mankind may seek the Lord,” aligns more closely with the clearer Gentile-inclusive wording of the Greek of Amos rather than the Hebrew.
Among Paul’s string of OT quotations about the Gentile-embracing work of Jesus is another use of the unique Greek form of Deuteronomy 32:43 (see above), “Rejoice, O Gentiles, with his people” (Romans 15:10), which is not found in the Hebrew.No doubt other Hebrew Scriptures would suffice to make the same points, but the apostolic authors apparently opted to draw on Greek translations that were already ripe for use.
Lastly, knowledge of the NT authors’ use of the Greek OT is also helpful apologetically for today’s readers. On occasion, an OT quotation in the NT seems at first glance to contradict what one finds when looking it up in the English Bible (which, recall, uses the Hebrew). In such cases, the Greek OT can sometimes shed light.
Luke references a figure named “Cainan” in Jesus’s genealogy (Luke 3:36) as well as “seventy-five persons” emigrating to Egypt (Acts 7:14). The former figure is not found in the Hebrew genealogies, and the latter is presented as “seventy” in the Hebrew of Genesis 46:27 and Exodus 1:5. In both cases, however, Luke is seemingly drawing on the Greek tradition, which mentions “Cainan” at Genesis 10:24 and tabulates the descendants (via a different way of counting) as “seventy-five.”
The quotation of Psalm 95:7–8 in Hebrews 3:7–11 reads, in part, “as you did in the rebellion, on the day of testing.” This seems to contradict the Hebrew: “as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah.” But the author is using the Greek form that has translated those place-names.
Hebrews 11:21 states that the dying patriarch Jacob worshiped “over the head of his staff,” pointing to Genesis 47:31. The Hebrew reads “upon the head of his bed,” but the NT author has simply used the Greek form.In these instances and a few others, any apparent misstep by a NT author is ameliorated by recognizing that he is drawing on a Greek form of the text known to his audience.
Implication: Students of the NT, when encountering an OT quotation, should consider consulting not only the English translation (from the Hebrew) but also the Greek form, to see if any specific nuances in the Greek tradition have influenced the apostolic writer. Those who are unable to read Greek can use a modern translation, specifically LES or NETS.
The Greek OT exerts behind-the-scenes influence on broader concepts/themes.
Finally, we see telltale signs of the formative influence of the Greek OT on the NT exegesis of Scripture beyond word-for-word quotations. In such scenarios, knowledge of the broader context of the specifically Greek form of an OT passage often enhances our understanding of what a given NT author is doing.
A simple example involves the Greek form of Numbers 24:17, picturing a royal star that “will rise” (anatelei) from Jacob (versus Hebrew “walk”). The Greek verb provides a clue as to why the magi seek a new Jewish king when they see a star “in its rising” (anatolē, Matthew 2:2).
A more potent example appears in John 12:41, where the evangelist comments that Isaiah “said these things” — referring to two quotations of Isaiah in 12:38, 40 — because he “saw his glory and spoke of him.” The “him” here is Jesus, and the key connection is “glory” (doxa). The quoted passages are from Isaiah 53:1 and 6:10, respectively, and the quoted wording is not otherwise notable. But if one reads each passage in Greek, light bulbs start turning on. In the Greek of Isaiah 52:13–53:12, the “servant” is “glorified,” but his “glory” is rejected (versus Hebrew “lifted up” and “form”); and in the Greek of Isaiah 6:1, the Lord’s “glory” fills heaven (versus Hebrew “train of his robe”). John taps into both “glory” connections in Greek to express what Isaiah “saw” in each scene: namely, the suffering-doxa and heavenly-doxa of the Son of God.
Sticking with Isaiah, another intriguing example is Isaiah 65:17–22, the grand vision for the new heavens and new earth. When the heavenly Jerusalem comes, death will be defeated and God’s people will rest secure. The Greek tradition includes a reference to the “tree of life” (65:22) — a rare mention of this Edenic plant — where the Hebrew reads only “tree.” This detail may to some degree influence the appearance of this same “tree of life” in Revelation 21:1–22:5 (specifically 22:2), where the author is capturing vividly the fulfillment of Isaiah 65.
Staying in Revelation, the initial vision of the “son of man” (Jesus) in Revelation 1:13–14 is intriguing because his attributes (e.g., hair as white as snow/wool) match those of the “Ancient of Days” in Daniel 7:9–14, where “son of man” first appears. In Revelation, the identity of the son of man seems almost to merge with the Ancient of Days, though in Daniel 7 they are distinct. Intriguingly, this close identification of the two figures already occurs in the older Greek tradition of Daniel 7:13, which has the “son of man” coming “as” the “Ancient of Days” (versus “to” or “before the presence of” in Aramaic). Perhaps such an exegetical tradition had taken root before John’s writing of the Apocalypse.
More examples could be mentioned, but the key point is this: in such cases, the influence of the Greek OT is felt not so much onstage (the wording of a given quotation) but more behind-the-scenes, reflecting the NT authors’ rich and multifaceted engagement with God’s word.
Implication: Students of the NT should strive to be sensitive to how the particular Greek form of the OT could shape an NT author’s argument or narrative at the conceptual level. One way to do this is simply to read the Greek OT (even in translation) regularly when studying OT passages that are instrumental to NT theology.
Septuagint and Scripture
Much more could be said, but the hope is that this brief survey has whetted the reader’s appetite to explore the texts of the Septuagint further (see here or here). It offers an exciting gateway to studying both OT and NT afresh, not only for scholars but for ministers and laypersons too.
Many Christians often ask at this point, “If the apostles sometimes used the Septuagint, does that make it inspired?” A common answer is that a NT quotation of the Greek OT does sanction its wording, even when it deviates from the Hebrew. This answer hits the rocks, however, when NT authors do not always use identical wording for the same OT quotations (e.g., Isaiah 6:9–10 in Matthew 13:14–15; Mark 4:12; Luke 8:10; John 12:39–40; Acts 28:25–27), making it hard to say which wording is “sanctioned.”
A better answer is this: the Jewish community and early Christians clearly privileged the Hebrew text as the locus of inspiration. However, there were no efforts (then or now) at linguistic Judaizing, whereby new converts would be forced to learn Hebrew to access Scripture. The Greek OT in its varied forms was seen as more than adequate as a translation of the word of God to reach a Greek-speaking world, and the apostles used it accordingly. Does this mean that apostolic use of the Greek OT where it appears to deviate from the Hebrew is an exercise in building theology off a faulty translation? Not at all — it simply means the NT writers felt that the Greek “pew Bible” (in modern terminology) familiar to their readers faithfully captured the theological intent of God-given words, so they used it accordingly.
Studying the Septuagint, if nothing else, is an illuminating exercise in tracing God’s faithfulness in using his word to motivate and sustain the early church in proclaiming Christ from the Scriptures to the ends of the earth (Luke 24:44–47).
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Hamilton: An American Prodigal
In July of 1741, a 37-year-old Jonathan Edwards grabbed a sermon already preached in Northampton and took it on the road to Enfield. There it was “attended with remarkable Impressions on many of the Hearers.”1 Edwards spoke of sinners in the hands of an angry God and grace to those in Christ in a message that would come to represent the First Great Awakening. “What are we,” Edwards asked, “that we should think to stand before him, at whose rebuke the earth trembles, and before whom the rocks are thrown down?”
Thirty years later, the spirit of Edwards was alive and well — yet in a most unlikely place and through a most unlikely pen. In August of 1772, a hurricane, described as “one of the most dreadful . . . that memory or any records whatever can trace,”2 swept through the Caribbean island of St. Croix. The fury came at dusk and “raged very violently till ten o’clock.” Then followed the eye, “a sudden and unexpected interval, which lasted about an hour.” Finally came four more hours of “redoubled fury . . . till near three o’clock in the morning.”
A few days later, after hearing a Sunday sermon, “a Youth of [the] Island,”3 seventeen years old, composed a letter to his derelict father, who was living on another island. The youth wrote, “It seemed as if a total dissolution of nature was taking place. . . . In a word, misery, in all its most hideous shapes, spread over the whole face of the country.” But this rare teen, in Edwards-like fashion, saw more than natural causation: “That which, in a calm unruffled temper, we call a natural cause, seemed then like the correction of the Deity.”4
Reforming Influences
It was no accident that this youth, named Alexander Hamilton, would take up such a perspective on the hurricane. Earlier that year, a Princeton graduate and pastor named Hugh Knox (1733–1790) had arrived on the island, discovered the precocious orphan, and begun to serve as a spiritual father to him.
In the 1750s, Knox had been student and good friend of Aaron Burr Sr. (1716–1757), founder and second president of the college in Princeton, New Jersey. Burr had married Esther Edwards, Jonathan’s third child (of eleven), and Burr himself greatly admired Edwards. Knox admired Burr. Now the young Hamilton sat at the feet of Knox, on September 6, 1772, as he preached on the hurricane. Later that day, the young Hamilton, imbibing the Calvinist theology, sat to compose the now-famous letter to his father.
Hamilton’s Christian interests cooled as they were eclipsed by political ambition and zeal for his work.
Doubtless, the first time Hamilton would have heard the name “Aaron Burr” was from Knox, speaking about the father, rather than his son. Burr Sr. died in 1757, just a year after the birth of his son. (Edwards then became the third president at Princeton and would have raised his grandson, Aaron Jr., had Edwards not died of a botched smallpox inoculation in 1758.)
In the fall of 1772, Knox was so impressed with Hamilton’s hurricane letter that he steered it to the local paper (published October 3, 1772), and it became the occasion for raising funds to send this gifted “Youth of this Island” to the mainland, in hopes he would study, as Knox had, at the college in Princeton.
‘Adore Thy God’
What did the seventeen-year-old Hamilton write? The hurricane had thundered, he claimed, “Despise thyself and adore thy God.” Yet Hamilton, in his Christian faith, found refuge:
See thy wretched helpless state, and learn to know thyself. Learn to know thy best support. Despise thyself, and adore thy God. . . . What 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. He will snatch me from ruin. He will exalt me to the fellowship of Angels and Seraphs, and to the fullness of never ending joys.
The young Hamilton then exhorts his readers, “Oh vain mortal! Check thy ill timed joy,” and he ends with this plea: “Oh Lord help. Jesus be merciful!”5
That same year, Hamilton wrote a Christian hymn, one that his future wife, Eliza, would come to prize and cling to during the half-century she outlived him. In the hymn, Hamilton confessed,
O Lamb of God! thrice gracious LordNow, now I feel how true thy word.6
Yet this early Hamilton is not the one we typically remember today, nor the one celebrated in the award-winning musical (which Lin-Manuel Miranda spent seven years writing, from 2008 until its debut on Broadway in 2015).
What Hamilton is perhaps most famous for is the circumstances of his death, in a so-called “affair of honor.” In the summer of 1804, Hamilton took a duel with Edwards’s grandson, Aaron Burr Jr., who was the sitting vice president of the United States. Strangely enough, citing Christian conviction, Hamilton “threw away his shot” by not firing at his opponent. Burr, however, took aim and struck his rival. Hamilton died 31 hours later on July 12, 1804.
Hamilton’s Four Stages
Remarkably, in 2004, Ron Chernow’s eight-hundred-page biography began the work of doing justice to Hamilton’s memory in the twenty-first century. More than a decade later, Miranda’s musical, inspired by the biography and with Chernow as historical consultant, sent Hamilton skyrocketing back into broader American awareness — and just in time to save his face on the ten-dollar bill.
Of our interest, Hamilton seems to have experienced a Christian conversion, under Reformed (and Edwardsean) teaching, when the Great Awakening came to the West Indies in the early 1770s. Yet from a Christian perspective, Hamilton’s story is complicated, to say the least.
In his late teens, he professed faith, wrote hymns and commentaries on the Bible, and daily knelt to pray. But in his youthful zeal to rise above his station and in his ascent to political prominence, he became a prodigal. None rose so fast and then fell so far as Hamilton. But when he was finally humbled, neither Chernow nor Miranda could ignore his “late-flowering religious interests.”7
In this complex life of Hamilton, Douglass Adair and Marvin Harvey, writing in 1955, identified “four distinct stages” in his spiritual development:
his early piety, from 1772–1777
a “fifteen-year period of complete religious indifference,” from 1777–1792
his “opportunistic religiosity,” from 1792 to 1800
his final season, from 1800 until his death in 1804, when he “began sincerely seeking God in this time of failure and suffering”8Jesus told a parable in Luke 15 of a youth who left home for a far country, squandered his life in reckless living, and eventually realized the world could not satisfy. In time, the young man “came to himself” and returned home to his father (Luke 15:17).
Whether there was a celebration in heaven on July 12, 1804, for the final homecoming of Alexander Hamilton, I cannot tell you with certainty. But I want you to hear the rest of the story, so far as we can tell, as we weave together both Jesus’s parable of the prodigal with these four distinct stages in Hamilton’s spiritual development.
A challenge here is that Hamilton’s life will look very different to a political scientist and a Christian pastor. I’m a pastor. Without doing injustice to his life as a statesman, I want to draw out, with special emphasis, the often-muted story of Hamilton’s prodigal journey and late-flowering faith.9
1. His Early Piety (1772–1777)
The younger son gathered all he had and took a journey into a far country. (Luke 15:13)
Hamilton was born in 1755 on the island of Nevis. Due to his mother’s previous marriage and alleged infidelity, his parents were not legally married. He had an older brother, and his father abandoned them when he was ten. Two years later, his mother died of yellow fever. Orphaned, Alexander and his brother went to live with a cousin, who soon thereafter committed suicide. At age fourteen, he went to work as a clerk for an importer-exporter on the island of St. Croix and excelled. In 1772, Knox arrived on St. Croix and took an interest in him.
After the publication of the hurricane letter, Hamilton came to New Jersey, hoping to enroll in Princeton. He proposed an abbreviated course of study to president John Witherspoon, who denied his request. (Recently a student named James Madison had completed a two-year fast-track at Princeton and worked himself into a nervous breakdown. Perhaps Witherspoon had Madison in mind when he declined Hamilton’s request.)
Undeterred, Hamilton took his proposal to King’s College in New York, where it was approved, and he began classes in the fall of 1773. As early as that summer, he made his first public speech in favor of the revolutionary cause. His college roommate, Robert Troup, remembered Hamilton’s “habit of praying upon his knees both night and morning” and that “he was a zealous believer in the fundamental doctrines of Christianity.”10
However, Hamilton’s physical and social journey into the far country soon led to a spiritual pilgrimage — or better, to spiritual lethargy and distraction, as the revolutionary spirit was fomenting in New York and began to draw forcefully on his energies. However devout he may have been at arrival, his unusually able brain and pen were soon captured by the feverish energy of the day. Rather than to Christian jeremiads and hymns, his attention turned to the revolution.
Ashbel Green (1762–1848), who would later serve as the eighth president of Princeton, reflected on those prewar days in the British colonies: “The military spirit that pervaded the whole land was exceedingly unfriendly to vital piety, among all descriptions of the citizens.” And this was especially so at the colleges:
Military enthusiasm had seized the minds of the students, to such a degree that they could think of little else than warlike operations. By the time the cloud of war had passed over, the colleges were more enamored of Deism and the French Revolution’s Cult of the Supreme Being than of orthodox piety.11
Hamilton too, alongside his fellow collegiates, was swept up into what was trending, into the talk of the cultural moment. And he had manifest abilities — skilled with words, brave enough for battle, and a natural leader. His revolutionary success quickly pulled him into the heart of American cause and its politics from 1775 to 1800, perhaps surpassed only by George Washington in that quarter century.
His Christian interests, however, cooled 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 to 1795. Alongside Madison, this young Hamilton would prove 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), he far surpassed Madison, and the other leading founders, in economics.
2. Fifteen Years of Indifference (1777–1792)
There [in the far country] he squandered his property in reckless living. (Luke 15:13)
Adair and Harvey call this the “fifteen-year period of complete religious indifference,” when politically he “shot up like a skyrocket.”12 Hamilton’s wordsmithing and courage had propelled him to revolutionary leadership. In 1777, he was promoted to Washington’s side.
Now 22 years old, he would be Washington’s right-hand man during the revolution and, later, under the new constitution, the first secretary of the treasury from 1789 until 1795. Then he would essentially function as the prime minister and occupy the most powerful seat in the first executive administration. Hamilton’s long-standing relationship with Washington proved to be a stabilizing force, at least in public life. In hindsight, his most productive (and least self-destructive) work came when he was most proximate to Washington.
But it was not only Washington (whose guidance was political) who influenced him, but also Eliza, whose sway was gently but relentlessly spiritual. He married her in 1780. She was, even then, what we would call an “evangelical Christian” today, and she became only more so as she aged.
“As a woman of deep spirituality, Eliza believed firmly in [Christian] instruction for her [eight] children,”13 and it would prove to have effects on her husband as they raised them together, and particularly as his great humblings came later. She endured his wandering and, in the end, may have won him with her life and conduct (1 Peter 3:1).
Hamilton was there at the battle of Yorktown in 1781, leading a battalion and with distinction. After the war, his ascending career seemed nonstop. In 1782, he was appointed to Congress from New York, under the Articles of Confederation. Here he would see firsthand how weak and inadequate they were for a league of thirteen states.
In 1783, he resigned from Congress to establish a law practice in New York. In 1786, he wrote the letter calling delegates to a convention in Philadelphia for the summer of 1787. He attended this Constitutional Convention, and the following year he organized and edited The Federalist Papers, partnering with Madison and John Jay to persuade New Yorkers to ratify the new Constitution.
Under Hamilton’s lead in 1789–1795, the Treasury Department drove the executive branch and new government. He grew the department to more than five hundred employees, while the War Department had a dozen employees, and Jefferson’s State Department only six.
And yet it was in this rapid rise, in his shooting up like a rocket, that cracks began to show — in particular, in 1791, in the adultery that Chernow calls “one of history’s most mystifying cases of bad judgment.”14 It would be whispered in private rooms until 1797 and then proclaimed from rooftops. We’ll come back to this in the next section.15
3. His ‘Opportunistic Religiosity’ (1792–1800)
When he had spent everything, a severe famine arose in that country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him into his fields to feed pigs. And he was longing to be fed with the pods that the pigs ate, and no one gave him anything. (Luke 15:14–16)
Washington began his second term in 1793. In January, France’s Louis XVI was executed. By June, the Committee of Public Safety came to power in Paris with its Reign of Terror. France became the unceasing controversy of Washington’s second term, driving party divisions deeper between Hamilton and Jefferson, who soon resigned.
With the furor over the French Revolution came fresh atheistic fears among many faithful Christians. Hamilton saw the pro-French Jeffersonians exposed and “attempted to enlist God in the Federalist party to buttress that party’s temporal power,” write Adair and Harvey.16
Unfortunately Hamilton’s blasphemous attempts to use God for his all-too-human ends were extremely successful with large numbers of the clergy. . . . Actually it is during these years when religious slogans were so often on his lips that Hamilton seems farther from God and from any understanding of his Son, Jesus Christ, than at any time in his whole career.17
Like Jefferson, Hamilton was eventually worn down by political libel and public slander. In debt, with a growing family at home, he decided to return to New York in 1795. In this season, his early forties, he would experience the beginning of his many humblings.
The Adams administration, beginning in 1797, would bring mounting frustrations — both for him and him for Adams. He began to make several terrible judgment calls. In October of 1799, Adams broke with his cabinet (and Hamilton) to send an envoy to France, and in the wake of that came what Chernow calls “a total loss of perspective by Hamilton, the nadir of his judgment.”18
The dominoes began to fall, and Hamilton with them. In December of 1799, Washington died, his surrogate father. By February 1800, it became clear that the Federalist party was turning from Hamilton to Adams. Then, by the end of April, Aaron 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 Adair and Harvey write, “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.”19
And all this just eighteen months after the papers got ahold of his six-year secret, the adultery of 1791. Hamilton, hoping to protect his financial reputation, published a painfully long and detailed pamphlet confessing to his marital infidelity. He plainly did not know when to stop. His finances may have been in order. His soul was not.
Back to the Squalor
From a Christian perspective, Hamilton’s adultery appears as his most glaring flaw, even more obviously and unqualifiedly than the duel. His adultery showed how far his heart had wandered — and reminds us of the delusion of power and success. We can indeed be most vulnerable when we feel strongest.
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 Hamilton, at the height of his power in 1791 — and with so much work to do — stayed in Philadelphia 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, he would write that he came to her door with monetary assistance. “Some conversation ensued from which it was quickly apparent that other than pecuniary consolation would be acceptable.”20 This is the first of several 1790s instances about which Chernow, even as the cool-headed biographer (and measured admirer), 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.21
Yet even with the Reynolds affair made public, devastating as it was, it was still another eighteen months before Hamilton began to utterly crumble.
4. His Final Season of Suffering and Seeking (1800–1804)
When he came to himself, he said, “How many of my father’s hired servants have more than enough bread, but I perish here with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired servants.’” And he arose and came to his father. (Luke 15:17–20)
One great irony of Hamilton’s story, and caution for us today, is that when he was at his best politically, he was at his worst in relation to Christ. And yet as he was humbled, turning again to Jesus, he could have been at his worst politically.
More terrible judgments followed the Reynolds Pamphlet.22 Even as late as the spring of 1802, he wrote a letter to fellow Federalist James Bayard proposing what he called a “Christian Constitutional Society.” I suspect this to be a genuine, though terribly naive, expression of his renewed Christian faith. It may also be one last gasp of his 1790s opportunism.
When Hamilton was at his best politically, he was at his worst in relation to Christ.
To counter Jefferson’s French-friendly Democratic Societies, Hamilton proposed a new society that would exist to promote (1) the Christian religion and (2) the Constitution of the United States. He saw both under Jeffersonian threat, but his Federalist interests were clearly political, or at least politically expedient.
“By signing up God against Thomas Jefferson,” says Chernow, “Hamilton hoped to make a more potent political appeal. . . . Hamilton was not honoring religion but exploiting it for political ends.” However misguided the effort, Chernow can’t help but recognize, “It is striking how religion preoccupied Hamilton during his final years.”23
Quiet Uptown
In November of 1801, the most devastating domino fell: his eldest child, Philip, age nineteen, died in a duel, defending his father’s honor. Learning of the duel, Hamilton had advised his son to take the righteous course and throw away his shot, that is, shoot into the air. But his son’s opponent did not. This would prove to be Alexander’s greatest devastation. Soon he would write to a friend that Philip’s death was “beyond comparison the most afflicting of my life.”24
Yet by late 1801, Hamilton was plainly taking deep 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.”25
“While the sufferings and frustrations resulting from political failure started Hamilton’s religious conversion,” claim Adair and Harvey, it was this “terrible personal tragedy [that] crystalized the change.”26 “This plenitude of sorrow . . . accounts for a totally new note — the first echo in all his writings of ‘Thy will be done’ — that now appears in certain Hamilton letters. . . . The old Hamilton arrogance had disappeared.”27
Hamilton’s spiritual renewal in this last season is too pronounced to ignore, whether in a first-rate biography or on Broadway. His reawakening appears to have just preceded (and prepared him for) Philip’s death. Miranda partially captures it in the aftermath of his loss, in the culminating song “Quiet Uptown,” where Hamilton sings,
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 in the church know as powerful. And we name the 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.28
And so we ask, Why the duel with Burr? Just three years prior, he had lost his firstborn to a duel. On multiple occasions, he publicly had expressed his own disavowal of dueling. How could he agree to this, and especially now as a professing Christian?
Instead of engaging in speculation, I’ll let Oliver Wolcott Jr., Hamilton’s successor as secretary of the treasury, express his sense of its senselessness. On the day of the duel, Wolcott wrote to his wife that
Gen’l Hamilton . . . reasoned himself into a belief, that though the custom [of dueling] was in the highest degree criminal, yet there were peculiar reasons which rendered it proper for him, to expose himself to Col. Burr in particular. This instance of the derangement of intellect of a great mind, on a single point, has often been noticed as one of the most common yet unaccountable frailties of human nature.29
This was, thought Wolcott, “the derangement of intellect of a great mind, on a single point.” Wolcott added at the end his letter, “Gen’l Hamilton has of late years expressed his conviction of the truths of the Christian Religion.”
However tragic and ill-conceived his decision to row across the river to the dueling grounds in New Jersey, that would be not the place of his death. Hamilton threw away his shot while Burr’s bullet struck him in the liver and lodged in his spine. Hamilton seemed dead onsite but revived on the open water while being rowed back to New York. He lived another 31 hours, until 2:00pm the following day.
Mercy Through the Redeemer
Hamilton’s professions of faith on his deathbed are by no means his only indications of Christian faith, but they are his clearest and most documented.
First, he called for Benjamin Moore, episcopal bishop of New York and president of Columbia (formerly King’s) College. He asked to receive the Lord’s Supper. Hamilton was not a church member, so Moore hesitated to administer the sacrament (he would return later and administer it). Moore asked him, “Do you sincerely repent of your sins past? Have you a lively faith in God’s mercy through Christ, with a thankful remembrance of the death of Christ? And are you disposed to live in love and charity with all men?”30
According to Moore, Hamilton “lifted up his hands and said, ‘With the utmost sincerity of heart I can answer those questions in the affirmative — I have no ill will against Col. Burr. I met him with a fixed resolution to do him no harm. I forgive all that happened.’” Moore says that he “had no reason to doubt [Hamilton’s] sincerity.”31
Rich Grace, Only Refuge
A second minister also visited Hamilton on his deathbed — his old friend Rev. John M. Mason, pastor of the Scotch Presbyterian Church.32 Mason told Hamilton that he
had nothing to address him in his affliction, but that same gospel of the grace of God, which it is my office to preach to the most obscure and illiterate: that in the sight of God all men are on a level, as all men have sinned and come short of his glory [Romans 3:23]; and that they must apply to him for pardon and life, as sinners, whose only refuge is in his grace by righteousness through our Lord Jesus Christ [Romans 5:21].
Hamilton responded, “I perceive it to be so. I am a sinner: I look to his mercy.” Mason then turned his attention to
the infinite merit of the Redeemer, as the propitiation for sin, the sole ground of our acceptance with God; the sole channel of his favor to us; and cited the following passages of Scripture: There is no name given under heaven among men, whereby we must be saved, but the name of Jesus [Acts 4:12]. He is able to save them to the uttermost who come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them [Hebrews 7:25]. The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth from all sin [1 John 1:7].
Mason reminded him that “the precious blood of Christ was as effectual and as necessary to wash away the transgression which had involved him in suffering, as any other transgression; and that he must there, and there alone, seek peace for his conscience. . . . He assented, with strong emotions, to these representations, and declared his abhorrence of the whole transaction.”33 Mason then
recurred to the topic of the divine compassions; the freedom of pardon in the Redeemer Jesus to perishing sinners. “That grace, my dear General, which brings salvation is rich, rich.”
“Yes,” interrupted [Hamilton], “it is rich grace.”
“And on that grace,” continued [Mason], “a sinner has the highest encouragement to repose his confidence, because it is tendered to him upon the surest foundation; the scripture testifying that ‘we have redemption through the blood of Jesus, the forgiveness of sins according to the riches of his grace’ [Ephesians 1:7].”
At this point, Hamilton looked upward and said with emphasis, “I have a tender reliance on the mercy of the Almighty, through the merits of the Lord Jesus Christ.” Mason’s narrative continues with more Scripture and further affirmations from Hamilton.
Finally, writes Mason,
As I was retiring, [Hamilton] lifted up his hands in the attitude of prayer, and said feebly, “God be merciful to — ” His voice sunk, so that I heard not the rest distinctly, but understood him to quote the words of the publican in the Gospel, and to end with “me a sinner.”34
Puritan Roots and Prayers
Clearly Hamilton’s late-life return to his early faith and his deathbed confessions raise questions. As Christians, many of us may feel both relief and some uneasiness at the whole scene. That Hamilton never joined a church is troubling. Not many thieves on the cross have God as their Father but not the church as their mother. That is sobering.35 Perhaps he was an exception.
And those of us who grieve his long, tragic journey into the far country of political success and pride want to redouble our resolve to live now for what matters eternally and to welcome God’s humbling hand if we realize ourselves to have strayed.
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 is John Jay.) This is not to make much of Hamilton’s reticent and late-flowering faith but to own how unevangelical was the nation’s founding.
Hamilton’s political career is a warning to those today who pine to be in the room “where it happens.” Hamilton was there. It did not satisfy. For him, it led to the eroding and near ruin of what mattered most. His life is a cautionary tale.
Hamilton’s succession of humblings and his late-flowering Christian faith show us a man who rose to the top and was not satisfied with what this world alone has on offer. Military achievement and fame, political influence and position, success as a lawyer, an adoring wife, and eight children — his heart remained restless until, through much of his own sin and folly, he fell headlong.
But in his great humblings, he did seem to “come to himself” and find rest in the Savior in whom he first professed faith in his youth. For years, his life looked to Christian eyes like the third soil, “choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life” (Luke 8:14). But perhaps, as Hamilton wrote in his hurricane letter, his Lord did “snatch me from ruin.” In his final season, and particularly in his clear final confessions, he professed “tender reliance on the mercy of the Almighty, through the merits of the Lord Jesus Christ.”
May we too not only depart, but live now with such a reliance — and observing Hamilton’s follies, be spared some of our own.