Audio Transcript

Happy Monday as we get back after it here on the podcast. Pastor John, I know one of the things you really enjoy is answering questions in front of students — open-floor Q and As. You’ve been doing this for over fifty years, and you’re still at it — currently investing in the lives of students at Bethlehem College & Seminary. This time with students is built into your schedule now. And recently, in that context with BCS students, you had a chance to walk through the theological battles you’ve fought over the decades. And I was wondering, looking back on those battles, if you could share with us here on APJ what you said in private. Rehearse those battles, decade by decade. And, if you could, tell us what points you were trying to make in rehearsing this history with the students.

As part of my happy responsibilities as chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary, I regularly participate in what we call TableTalk, where the students gather to eat their lunch and ask questions of the leaders — and I’m one of those — related to life, related to ministry, how it relates to the issues of our day. I generally begin those sessions with some thoughts off my front burner just to prime the pump of questions and throw it open to whatever the students want to talk about.

“The best way to prepare for faithful, obedient, fruitful ministry in the next fifty years is to know your Bible deeply, thoroughly, confidently, joyfully.”

A few weeks ago, I tried to make this point in my introductory comments. I said something like this, looking at the students: “Since the issues that you will be facing in ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years from now — you’ll be my age in fifty years — since those issues that you’ll be facing are utterly unpredictable, and in some cases unimaginable, your best preparation right now in your teens and twenties and thirties is to gain the spiritual and intellectual abilities to interpret God’s never-changing word in Scripture according to its true, God-intended meaning, which will never leave you speechless, never, but always provide the profoundest wisdom for every new challenge, none of which takes God off guard.”

That was my main point to try to get across to them. And then to drive the point home, I gave them a glimpse into the controversies of the last fifty years of my life and how precious the Bible has become as an absolutely sure compass for staying the course of truth and wisdom, and as an anchor to keep me from being driven about by every wind of doctrine, and as a treasure chest of holy joy that satisfies so deeply that I’m not sucked into the seductive pleasures that, on the surface, change from era to era. (They don’t really change, but the form changes.)

Decades of Controversies

Here’s part of the glimpse that I gave them into my fifty-year history of dealing with unexpected issues. But let me say at the outset that I’m not going to focus on race and abortion as one of those issues, because they’re just pervasive. I mean, for the last decades of my life, I have lived every decade with issues of race that need to be addressed and issues of abortion that need to be addressed. So, understand that those are huge issues, and the fact that I don’t mention them in the list doesn’t mean they’re absent. It means they’re everywhere.

1960s: History and Criticism

In the 1960s, I was coming to terms with the controversy surrounding fresh historical arguments for the factual resurrection of Jesus Christ. Daniel Fuller’s Easter Faith and History had been published in 1965. Wolfhart Pannenberg was making waves with his 1968 book Revelation as History, where he argued that the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth was a historical event as real as your getting out of bed this morning, which in German Bultmannian circles in the ’60s was absolutely radical. He was one of the teachers I had, by the way, at the University of Munich in the 1970s.

Hand in glove with the controversy was the whole issue of the modern methodology of critical biblical scholarship. In 1966, George Ladd published The New Testament and Criticism, where he tried to sort out what was usable in so-called higher criticism and what was contradictory to the inspired nature of Scripture. Those were crucial days for me, crucial like crux, like crossroads. How I thank God, in the ways I could have gone, that he held on to me for his glory and for his word.

1970s: Eschatology, Anthropology, and Bibliology

Then came the 1970s and three huge issues. In 1970, Hal Lindsey published The Late Great Planet Earth. By 1999, that book had sold 35 million copies. In it, he virtually predicted the second coming by 1988 — I don’t know how that book stays in print unless they adjusted it — and he popularized the pre-tribulational rapture view of the second coming. And I wrote a paper in response to this. It became very personal because my father and I locked horns over this. There’s nobody I loved more than my father, and I didn’t want to alienate him. We got along pretty well, although that book brought a lot of stuff to the fore.

In 1975, Paul Jewett published Man as Male and Female, in which he said that when Paul instructed only men to teach and have authority in the church, he simply made a mistake. Paul just made a mistake and allowed his rabbinical background to silence his radical Christian newness. From then on to this very day, I knew that’s an issue I’ll never be able to get away from, because there are more critical things going on there, more reasons to be concerned than just one.

In 1976, Harold Lindsell published The Battle for the Bible and brought to public awareness how many Christian institutions were sliding away from a commitment to the inerrancy of Scripture. In 1978, the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy produced “The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.” I wrote a review of Lindsell’s book, and I’m very happy with what happened in Chicago. I’m happy to sign on to the Chicago statement on inerrancy.

1980s: Sovereignty and Missions

In the 1980s, two controversies stand out. Professor of philosophy Thomas Talbott and I went back and forth with articles in Reformed Journal over the sovereignty of God in Romans 9. I think the titles were like, “How Does a Sovereign God Love?” I published a book on Romans 9 called The Justification of God, which focused on Romans 9:1–23. And so, the understanding of God’s sovereignty in history and in salvation dominated the early 1980s.

Near the end of the decade, the missiological controversy surrounding the new language of “unreached people groups” and whether that was a biblical way to think or not was a huge issue for me. Does the Great Commission focus on reaching as many individuals as possible, which is what I had thought, or on reaching all the ethnolinguistic groups in the world?

1990s: Open Theism

Then much of the 1990s was dominated by open theism. Does God have an exhaustive foreknowledge of the future? Open theism said no, he doesn’t. Its chief spokesman was and is right here in the Twin Cities as a pastor, and so he and I debated back and forth. We had lunch together. I wrote much, and other people wrote very good books. Thankfully, I think open theism was basically marginalized, though it hasn’t gone away.

2000s: Emergent Church

In the 2000s, the emergent church flourished for a season and then morphed into other things. I don’t think it’s entirely gone away, but it’s not the movement it was. I took two of those leaders out to lunch one time, just to give our folks a flavor of what we’re talking about with the emergent church. I said to them, “Talking to you guys is like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall,” to which they responded, “That’s not what Jell-O is for.” That really gives a good flavor of how doctrinally amorphous that movement was.

2010s: Justification and Ecumenism

In the 2010s, the doctrine of justification was very controverted and prominent. I wrote a whole book, The Future of Justification, responding to N.T. Wright. On the same front, friends of mine were involved relationally in some very difficult conversations called Evangelicals and Catholics Together, which broke some hearts over how good Reformed brothers didn’t relate to Catholics in the same way.

2020s: The Swirling Decade

Which brings us then swirling into the last decade with the splintering of evangelicalism because of Trump, the realities of so-called “same-sex marriage,” the realities of so-called “gender transition,” vaccination mandates, critical race theory, systemic racism, cancel culture. None of these things can be ignored by a pastor — I think, indeed, by a thoughtful layperson — and I’ve written on virtually all of them.

Go Deep with God

But the point for that TableTalk — and maybe for this moment in Ask Pastor John — is this: if you live long enough, you will be confronted by issues and controversies that are so many and so diverse and sometimes so complex that you cannot possibly predict or specifically prepare for them. The best way for our students and our listeners to APJ to prepare for faithful, obedient, fruitful ministry in the next fifty years is to know your Bible deeply, thoroughly, confidently, joyfully.

Other studies are important, absolutely important. This study of the Bible is essential. If you have gone deep with God by means of a rigorous and accurate understanding of his word, you’ll always be relevant, and you’ll never be speechless.

Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. (Matthew 10:37–39)

Erik Reece is Professor of English at the University of Kentucky. Reece grew up in a fundamentalist Christian home, like I did. He rejected his. I loved mine and give thanks for it to this day. He published a book in 2009 titled An American Gospel: On Family, History, and the Kingdom of God. He did a radio interview about his book, and something he said there is why I am speaking to you about the question, Is Jesus an egomaniac?

At one point in the interview, the host of the show pointed Reece to page 28 of his book, where he quotes the words of Jesus that we just read from Matthew 10: “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” Then, after quoting Jesus, Reece says, “Who is the egomaniac speaking these words?” The radio host asks him, “Would you elaborate on that reaction?”

Reece replies, “Well, it just struck me as, ‘Who is this person speaking two thousand years ago, a complete historical stranger, saying that we should love him (who we are really incapable emotionally of loving) more so than we should love our own fathers and sons?’ It just seemed like an incredibly egomaniacal kind of claim to make.”

So here is Jesus saying: “Love me more than you love anyone in the world. If you don’t, you are not worthy of me.” And Erik Reece says: “That is an egomaniac talking.” The word is pretty self-explanatory. But the dictionary puts egomaniac in plain English: “someone who displays excessive selfishness and self-centeredness.”

Neither New nor Uncommon

Now, Mr. Reece is not the only one who feels that way. If this were an isolated opinion, I wouldn’t bother you with it. But it’s not. Take the young C. S. Lewis, for example. If you haven’t already met him in your reading, you will. He eventually became a brilliant, creative, courageous defender of the Christian faith. He was an English professor at the University of Oxford in England who died about seventy years ago. But he was slow to come to Christ — age 29 before he was converted.

He says in his book Reflections on the Psalms that one of the great obstacles in coming to believe in the God of the Bible was that when he read the Psalms, the constant demand from God to be praised seemed (to him) to picture God as craving “for our worship like a vain woman who wants compliments.” In other words, he stumbled, just like Erik Reece, over the self-exalting commands of God that we praise him above all others and over the self-exalting commands of Jesus that we love him above all others. To C. S. Lewis and Erik Reece, this was sheer egomania.

Then there is Michael Prowse, a writer for a major London newspaper. Here’s what he wrote in one of his columns:

Worship is an aspect of religion that I always found difficult to understand. Suppose we postulate an omnipotent being who, for reasons inscrutable to us, decided to create something other than himself. Why should he . . . expect us to worship him? We didn’t ask to be created. Our lives are often troubled. We know that human tyrants, puffed up with pride, crave adulation and homage. But a morally perfect God would surely have no character defects. So why are all those people on their knees every Sunday?

In other words, it’s a character defect for God to command his creatures to praise him and worship him. And we know what the name of that character defect is: egomania. If Prowse were here, he would say, “Why are all these young people letting themselves be coerced into doing just what this egomaniac wants them to do — namely, admiring him and praising him above everybody else in the universe?”

Then there’s Oprah Winfrey. You can go to YouTube and listen to her explain why she left traditional Christianity. She was describing being in a church service where the preacher was talking about the attributes of God, his omnipotence and omnipresence. Here’s what she said,

Then he said, “The Lord thy God is a jealous God.” I was caught up in the rapture of that moment until he said “jealous.” And something struck me. I was 27 or 28, and I was thinking God is all-powerful, God is omnipresent, God is . . . also jealous? A jealous God is jealous of me? And something about that didn’t feel right in my spirit because I believe that God is love, and that God is in all things.

Why did she stumble over the jealousy of God? In Exodus 34:14 God says, “You shall worship no other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.” In other words, God demands that you and I and Oprah Winfrey give him all our worship. If we give any of our worship to another, he is jealous, because it belongs to him. And if we don’t repent, he will break forth in wrath. “For the Lord your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God” (Deuteronomy 4:24). Oprah Winfrey walked away from that truth because God sounded to her like an egomaniac.

One more example. Actor Brad Pitt did an interview with Parade magazine. In it he describes how he stumbled over God’s ego. Pitt was raised a conservative Southern Baptist, like many of you, and like me. At first his faith seemed real. He said,

Religion works. I know there’s comfort there, a crash pad. It’s something to explain the world and tell you there is something bigger than you, and it is going to be all right in the end. It works because it’s comforting. I grew up believing in it, and it worked for me in whatever my little personal high school crisis was, but it didn’t last for me.

Why not? He points to the ego of God:

I didn’t understand this idea of a God who says, “You have to acknowledge me. You have to say that I’m the best, and then I’ll give you eternal happiness. If you won’t, then you don’t get it!” It seemed to be about ego. I can’t see God operating from ego, so it made no sense to me.

So there it is again. Erik Reece and the early C. S. Lewis and Michael Prowse and Oprah Winfrey and Brad Pitt — and I dare say thousands of people, maybe some of you — have turned away from the God of the Bible because they thought he was too self-exalting. Too self-centered. Too much the egomaniac.

Christianity’s Very Heart

I heard a wise New Testament scholar, Don Carson, say that as he did evangelistic outreaches on university campuses for decades, the questions from students have changed over the years. Thirty years ago, he said, they tended to revolve around historical problems with Christianity. Did Jesus exist? Did he do miracles? Did he rise from the dead?

Nowadays, he said, there are questions like, How can you worship a God who is so self-exalting and so self-centered as the God of the Bible — a God who is constantly pointing to his own greatness and constantly telling people that they should recognize this greatness and tell him how much you like it? (Which is what worship is.)

I don’t think that what we are seeing here is a small, marginal, or tricky opposition to Christianity. I think what Erik Reece, C. S. Lewis, Michael Prowse, Oprah Winfrey, and Brad Pitt are seeing touches the very center of Christianity.

If you say in response: “I thought Christ crucified for sinners and risen triumphantly was the heart of Christianity?” — you would be right. Paul said, “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2). The death of Jesus, the Son of God, for sinners is the center.

That’s true. But amazingly it’s the intersection of God’s apparent egomania with the human condition of sin that makes the cross of Christ necessary, and makes it understandable, and reveals the deepest things about God in the death of Christ. So we are not dealing with something small or marginal here, but something central and crucial, when we face this accusation of God’s egomania and Jesus’s egomania.

No Impersonal Matter

I didn’t face this issue until I was about 33 years old — 54 years ago now. I had grown up in a Christian home where I was taught 1 Corinthians 10:31: “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” So it was clear to me that I should live for the glory of God. That seemed obviously right to me. I never kicked against that.

But no one ever said to me that God lives for the glory of God. Then I read the New England preacher from 250 years ago, Jonathan Edwards, who wrote a short book called The End for Which God Created the World, and everything changed. He simply blew me away with page after page of biblical texts showing God’s pervasive God-centeredness. That God does everything for his glory. That he is unwaveringly committed to uphold and display his glory.

And what became clear to me, and remains clear to this day, is that many Christians think it is good for us to be God-centered, but do not feel at all comfortable with God being God-centered. We should be Christ-exalting, but Christ shouldn’t be Christ-exalting.

“God’s God-centeredness is the test of whether our own God-centeredness is real.”

But what I have found in my own life, and in the life of many others, is that God’s God-centeredness is the test of whether our own God-centeredness is real: Do I rejoice in God’s unwavering commitment to uphold and display his glory — do I rejoice in God’s God-centeredness?

Or am I God-centered only because deep down I believe God is man-centered, so that my supposed God-centeredness is really man-centeredness, even me-centeredness? As long as God is me-centered, then I’ll be God-centered, which is really a way of me being me-centered. Which is what I want. So the crucial question is: Does my opposition to God’s God-centeredness reveal that my supposed God-centeredness is just a cover for wanting myself to be at the center?

Stamped Across Scripture

Reading the Bible with these eyes, I began to see what Erik Reece and C. S. Lewis and Michael Prowse and Oprah Winfrey and Brad Pitt were seeing. God really is radically devoted to being exalted by his people. God is radically committed to seeing to it that his glory is esteemed as the supreme value of the universe.

Here is a sampling of what I saw:

God creates for his glory: “Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth, everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory” (Isaiah 43:6–7).
God elects Israel for his glory: “I made the whole house of Israel and the whole house of Judah cling to me, declares the Lord, that they might be for me a people, a name, a praise, and a glory” (Jeremiah 13:11).
God saves them from Egypt for his glory: “Our fathers . . . rebelled [against God] by the sea, at the Red Sea. Yet he saved them for his name’s sake, that he might make known his mighty power” (Psalm 106:7–8).
God restrains his anger in exile for his glory: “For my name’s sake I defer my anger; for the sake of my praise I restrain it for you . . . For my own sake, for my own sake, I do it, for how should my name be profaned? My glory I will not give to another” (Isaiah 48:9–11).
God sends his Son into the world the first time “that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy” (Romans 15:9).
God sends his Son at the end of the age for his glory: “He comes on that day to be glorified in his saints, and to be marveled at among all who have believed” (2 Thessalonians 1:10).

In all of redemptive history, from beginning to ending, God has this one ultimate goal: that his name be glorified. The aim of God in all that he does is ultimately the praise of his glory. All of redemptive history is bookended by this amazing purpose in God the Father and God the Son. And in the middle of that redemptive history stands the greatest event in the history of the world: the death of Jesus Christ.

And just at these points — the beginning, the end, and the middle — the predestining of our salvation at the beginning, the consummation of our salvation at the end, and the purchase of our salvation in the middle — just at these points the problem of God’s apparent egomania finds its amazing solution. So consider a passage of Scripture about each of these points — the beginning (predestination), the end (consummation), and the middle (propitiation).

Beginning: Predestination

God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of the glory of his grace. (Ephesians 1:4–6)

Before the foundation of the world, God planned a redemption in Christ with this great and ultimate goal: that we would praise his glory. And the apex of that glory would be the glory of his grace.

“The glory of his grace shines most brightly in your enjoyment of it.”

So from the very beginning, we see that God made his exaltation and the joy of our salvation one piece. You don’t have to choose between God’s glory and your joy, because the apex — the highest point — of your joy is its overflow in praise of God’s grace, and that grace is the apex of his glory. Your joy in his grace and his zeal for the glory of his grace are one. They happen together. The glory of his grace shines most brightly in your enjoyment of it.

C. S. Lewis broke through to the beauty and goodness of God’s self-exaltation (though he stumbled over it at first). Here’s the breakthrough:

My whole, more general, difficulty about the praise of God depended on my absurdly denying to us, as regards the supremely Valuable, what we delight to do, what indeed we can’t help doing, about everything else we value. I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. (Reflections on the Psalms, 93–95)

Lewis saw that praising the glory of God is the consummation of joy in God.

End: Consummation

Therefore, when God is pursuing — even demanding — our praise, he is pursuing the consummation of our joy. If Jesus wants you to have the greatest and longest happiness, what would he give you for your enjoyment? He would give you the greatest, most beautiful, most admirable, most satisfying reality in the universe — himself. In Jesus Christ, who made that gift possible. That’s what Jesus prayed for, as the greatest thing God could do for us:

“Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.” (John 17:24)

That’s not egomania. It’s love. Because nothing will make us happier forever than to be with the greatest Person in the universe, to see his glory, and to be changed to be like him. This is why Psalm 16:11 says, “In your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.”

When all is said and done, and the history of the world is complete, and the new heavens and the new earth are established, and the infinitely joyful age to come is here, the ultimate joy, the ultimate climax of history for our aching hearts, is this: “We will see his glory.” And we will be transformed by it into the kind of people who can enjoy it fully and not be incinerated by it.

When, to paraphrase, Jesus says, “Love me more than you love your mother and father and sons and daughters and your own children and your best beloved on earth” (Matthew 10:37), he is not hurting anyone! He is saying:

If you find your ultimate joy in your most cherished earthly treasure, you will be disappointed in the end, and I will be dishonored. Because I am offering myself to you as the all-satisfying beauty and greatness and wisdom and strength and love of the universe. I am what you were made for. And I am telling you that, if you see this — if you see me as your supreme Treasure — then you don’t have to choose between your satisfaction and my glorification, because in the very act of your being most satisfied in me, I will be most glorified in you. I am not an egomaniac. I am your all-satisfying friend.

But of course, there is a great problem — namely, that we are sinners. Not only do we not want to treasure someone above ourselves; we don’t deserve that privilege. And so how will sinners like us be able to stand in the presence of God and enjoy his greatness as our all-satisfying Treasure?

Which brings us now to the middle of history and the work of Christ on the cross.

Middle: Propitiation

At the center of God’s plan — from beginning to end — stands the mighty cross of Christ. And in it we see the clearest statement of God’s passion for his own glory, precisely and amazingly in the joyful salvation of sinners.

All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. (Romans 3:23–26)

So here’s the argument:

1. What did God do?

Romans 3:25: He put Christ “forward as propitiation by his blood.” Christ died to remove the wrath of God.

Romans 8:3: “[God did] what the law could not do . . . he condemned sin in the flesh.”

Galatians 3:13: “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.”

2. Why did he need to do it this way — by dying on a cross?

Romans 3:25: “This was to show God’s righteousness.”

3. Why did he need to show his righteousness?

Romans 3:25: “. . . because in his divine forbearance [or patience] he had passed over former sins.” Sins like David’s adultery with Bathsheba and his murder of her husband — for which David should be hell!

4. Why does passing over sins call God’s righteousness into question?

Romans 3:23: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

To “fall short” means to “lack.” We have exchanged the glory of God in every sin (Romans 1:23). Every time we sin, we say that the glory of God is not the supreme Treasure to be desired above all others. It is not satisfying. It is not to be preferred. Here’s something else I want more.

So when God passes over that, it looks as if he agrees, that he agrees that he is not to be preferred above all. And if he agrees, he is unrighteous. He is wrong. He is acting in contradiction to what is true. His righteousness — his commitment to doing what is right — is his commitment to act in a way that shows his glory is supremely valuable. His righteousness is his commitment to uphold and display the infinite worth of his glory. And that is what the cross does.

By requiring the death of his only Son for my God-belittling sins, God shows how valuable the glory of God is. This is what it cost to vindicate the worth of the glory of God that I had so belittled by preferring other things.

Glorious Giver of Grace

Therefore, from beginning to end — from predestination before creation to the final state of contemplation of the glory of Christ at the end of history — God is passionate for his glory. In the center of that history, the greatest event that ever happened, the death of the Son of God for sinners like us, is the demonstration of God’s righteousness — the demonstration of his unwavering commitment to uphold and display the infinite worth of his glory as the supreme, all-satisfying Treasure of the universe.

“God is the one being in the universe for whom self-exaltation is not the act of a needy ego.”

The greatest news in the world is that in the death of Christ, God has made a way for his glory to be exalted and my sins to be forgiven in the very same act. God is ultimately glorified in us, and we are ultimately satisfied in him. And they happen together.

Here is the end of the matter: God is the one being in the universe for whom self-exaltation is not the act of a needy ego, but an act of infinite giving. The reason God seeks our praise is not because he won’t be fully God until he gets it, but because we won’t be fully happy until we give it.

This is not arrogance. This is grace. This is not egomania. This is love.

In 1801, the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, penned a letter to the newly elected president, Thomas Jefferson, to declare their belief “that America’s God has raised you up to fill the chair of State out of that good will which he bears to the Millions which you preside over.”1 In their view, Jefferson was a divine instrument for the purpose of securing and safeguarding religious liberty. The Danbury Baptists were speaking on behalf of thousands of Baptists in the early United States who still endured the weight of religious intolerance by their respective state churches. But the Danbury Association did not speak for all Baptists.

Jefferson’s famous reply, in which he referred to the First Amendment as erecting “a wall of separation between Church & State,” has led many historians to frame virtually all Baptists as Democratic-Republicans who shared a similar view.2 However, most Baptists did not define religious liberty in such strict separationist terms. In fact, many believed that Jefferson’s ideas about God and government were harmful to society.

In an era of American history in which certain states still boasted a tax-supported church, many Baptists partnered politically with actual Christian nationalists to realize their own vision of an America where religion was not established but still encouraged.3 They locked arms with Congregationalists and Episcopalians, denominations that traditionally opposed disestablishment, to promote various moral and social causes, and to regulate matters like immigration and the influx of foreign (i.e., French) ideas. Like many Baptists today, they emphasized freedom of conscience and the importance of the Bible to shape the minds and morals of citizens.

These Baptists help to expose two myths about religion in America: (1) The earliest Baptist supporters of the First Amendment intended a “wall” between church and state. (2) Baptists in the early United States agreed upon a universal definition of religious liberty.

Four Kinds of Baptists

The ultra-Jeffersonian Baptist John Leland (1754–1841) once called religious liberty the “polar star” of Baptist politics.4 However, to borrow a biblical analogy, in their pursuit of the “polar star” of religious freedom, Baptists did not always arrive in the same Bethlehem.

“Many Baptists believed that Jefferson’s ideas about God and government were harmful to society.”

Although Leland has become somewhat famous for wheeling his 1,235-pound cheese to the White House as a gift to his “hero” Jefferson, not every Baptist was a self-professed “dyed-in-the-skin” Democratic-Republican.5 On one hand, due to their common cause in disestablishing religion, there is a sense in which every Baptist in the early United States was “Jeffersonian.” On the other hand, most Baptists were not willing to remove religion from government in the same way that Jefferson wished to extricate government from religion.

In fact, there were at least four kinds of Baptists who qualified their Jeffersonianism: (1) those Democratic-Republicans who supported Jefferson but did not share his view of religious liberty, (2) Federalists who applauded Jefferson’s push for religious liberty but who partnered with establishmentarians due to a common belief in the importance of Christianity as the basis for good government, (3) anti-Jeffersonians who believed Jefferson’s ideas were dangerous and undermined public morality, and (4) those who were so disillusioned with party politics that they chose not to support any candidate, including Jefferson. Like their spiritual descendants today, Baptists in the early republic were a diverse bunch.

Democratic-Republican but Not Separationist

Isaac Backus, pastor of Middleborough Baptist Church in Massachusetts, had every reason to be a Jefferson man. At the Continental Congress in 1774, John Adams dismissed the former Congregationalist when the latter contended for “the liberty of worshipping God according to our consciences, not being obliged to support a ministry we cannot attend.”6 Like most Separate Baptists, Backus had experienced the hostility of the so-called “Standing Order” clergymen in the Federalist Party. As the chairman of the Grievance Committee in the Warren Association, he documented complaints of religious persecution by Baptists.

But Backus was not interested in building a wall between church and state. He believed in the “sweet harmony” between religion and civil government, and he also did not object to compulsory attendance at public worship, teaching of the Westminster Confession in New England schools, and strict observance of the Sabbath.7 Backus once referred to Roger Williams’s Rhode Island as an “irreligious colony,” bristling at the thought of a more secular America where Christianity was removed from the public square.

Thomas Baldwin defended Jefferson publicly after his election in 1800. However, as pastor of Second Baptist Church of Boston and as chaplain of the General Court of Massachusetts, Baldwin was on friendly terms with Federalists. In the so-called “benevolent empire” that arose in the early republic, Baldwin worked with Congregationalists in various moral and missionary endeavors.8 Of Baldwin it was said that “no important association seemed complete unless it had enrolled him as its President.”9

However, Baldwin’s vision of America included more than voluntary societies. He also campaigned for publicly funded biblical education. In a sermon delivered before the Federalist governor of Massachusetts in 1802, Baldwin insisted that there was cause “no more deserving of legislative attention, than the education of youth and children.” Without the “religion of the Bible,” he argued, America would certainly lose its most basic liberties. Sensitive to the “irreligion” sometimes associated with the “Republican name,” Baldwin’s response to the First Amendment wasn’t to keep Bibles out of schools, but to teach children “the essential articles of the ‘Faith once delivered to the Saints.’”10

Federalists Who Appreciated Jefferson

The second group of Baptists who did not adopt Jefferson’s “wall” metaphor were not Democratic-Republicans at all. These Baptists affiliated with the Federalist party not because they believed that religion should be wedded to the state, but because they feared the tyranny of a state completely divorced from religion.11

Charleston Baptist Richard Furman honored Jefferson as a founder of the nation, but he aligned with Federalists because they shared his ideal of a Christian citizenry. Furman was vice president of the Charleston Bible Society, which met in the home of his friend and vice-presidential candidate Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. Furman’s Southern network included Episcopal and Presbyterian pastors, and his favorite American theologian was Yale President Timothy Dwight, the leading clergymen of the “Standing Order” and the grandson of Jonathan Edwards.12 He also partnered with the most notable Federalists in the South when he led in the formation of a “Society” in Charleston “for encouraging Emigration of virtuous citizens from other countries.” According to his own combination of religious liberty and religious nationalism, Furman, a slaveowner, sought to regulate the influx of “those about to leave Europe” whom he deemed injurious to American society.13

There were, in fact, a host of Baptist Federalists in the early republic, men who did not excoriate Jefferson publicly but who were suspicious of his beliefs. These men included Hezekiah Smith, Oliver Hart, Morgan Edwards, James Manning, and Henry Holcombe. John Mason Peck named his youngest son after John Adams.14 Not surprisingly, they were proponents of education and moral improvement, causes they believed to be impossible with a “wall” separating church and state. To reach the poor and spread the gospel, these men worked with all sorts of Protestant denominations — and sometimes with Roman Catholics. In New Orleans in 1817, the young Federalist William B. Johnson was even asked to preach at St. Louis Cathedral for a benefit for the Poydras Orphan Asylum. Father Anthony of the local diocese approved of the homily, but he requested to “see his sermon before he preaches it.”15

Anti-Jeffersonians

The third group of Baptists who opposed Jefferson’s “wall” were in fact Jefferson’s most bitter opponents. These Baptists defy the stereotypical Lelandian caricature of Baptists who praised “America’s God” for raising up Jefferson. In fact, they were anti-Jeffersonian.

Jonathan Maxcy was a brilliant college President who served at three different institutions. He spent most of his career in New England and South Carolina, two hotbeds of Baptist Federalism. Maxcy was judged by some to be a “violent politician” whose “sarcasms against the Anti-Federalists” were viewed as incompatible for a man of his office. The year before “the revolution of 1800,” Maxcy warned his audience of “foreign foes and domestic traitors” in America who were “continually advancing opinions and doctrines which tend to its subversion.” The nativistic Maxcy believed that Jefferson posed a threat to religious liberty with his “foreign influence and foreign intrigue” and his “utmost efforts to ruin our government.”16 His case against a Jeffersonian wall was simple: “The most salutary laws can have no effect against general corruption of sentiments and morals. The American people, therefore, have no way to secure their liberty, but by securing their religion.”

Samuel Stillman, the pastor of First Baptist Church of Boston, launched the same kind of verbal assaults in Jefferson’s direction. In 1795, he warned his hearers of “men of boundless ambition, who become heads of parties, and spare no pains to get into place.”17 These kinds of thinly veiled shots at Jefferson were not uncommon in New England, even among Baptists.

Neither Democratic-Republican nor Federalist

Stillman was a personal friend of John Adams. However, the last group of Baptists who opposed Jefferson were friends of neither Adams nor Jefferson. Some, like Georgia Baptist Jesse Mercer, simply did not vote, “for he said all parties had aberrated so far from the constitution, that he could not conscientiously vote for the candidates.”18 In 1798, Mercer wrote the article of the Georgia constitution guaranteeing religious liberty. However, at least by the end of Jefferson’s presidency, Mercer no longer identified with the principles that Jefferson had bequeathed to the Democratic-Republican party.

“Religious liberty has always united — and to some extent divided — Baptists in America.”

A closer look at the political leanings of Baptists in the early United States reveals a people who were remarkably similar to Baptists and other evangelicals today. They wrestled with the influence of ideas on society, the importance of shaping children’s minds, the responsibility of Christians to practice their faith, the relationship between religious liberty and nationalism, and the inherent tension of supporting political parties led by men who denied some of their most basic convictions. There is truly nothing new under the Baptist sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9).

By examining our Baptist ancestors, we are reminded that religious liberty has long united — and to some extent divided — Baptists in America. However, within this spectrum of views, it is doubtful that the majority of Baptists, including the Danbury Association, ever intended to build a “wall” between church and state.19