Many a man has asked the question, “Am I called to pastoral ministry?” And many a wise leader has counseled him to place the matter upon the three-legged stool of aspiration, affirmation, and opportunity:

Do you aspire to the office (1 Timothy 3:1)?
Do others (especially your current pastors) affirm you as a faithful man who will be able to teach others also (2 Timothy 2:2)?
Has God given you an opportunity to shepherd a particular flock (Acts 20:28; 1 Peter 5:2)?

These are clarifying questions — but they do not clarify everything. Many who sit on this stool find that one leg seems to wobble. One man may aspire to pastor and have an opportunity, but others have voiced reservations about his readiness. A second man may aspire and receive affirmation, but God has not yet provided an opportunity. And a third man may receive affirmation and have an opportunity, but he wonders if his desires for pastoral ministry really rise to the level of godly aspiration.

For some time, I found myself as the third man. I felt a desire for ministry, but I wondered if it had been shaped too much by others’ expectations. I also wondered how much ungodliness was mixed in my motives; maybe what I really wanted was a seat at Jesus’s right hand (Mark 10:37). And I felt the weight of the question. As David Mathis writes in his book Workers for Your Joy, “The good of the church is at stake in the holy desire of its pastors. They will not long work well for her joy if it is not their joy to do such work” (47).

How can men in this position discern whether they truly aspire to shepherd God’s people? We might find clarity by asking three diagnostic questions, drawn from Peter’s charge to the elders in 1 Peter 5:1–4.

Shepherd the Flock of God

Before we turn to Peter’s diagnostics, consider what kind of calling the apostle had in mind when he addressed “the elders among you” (1 Peter 5:1) — lest we aspire to an eldership of our own imagining. Peter writes,

I exhort the elders among you, as a fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, as well as a partaker in the glory that is going to be revealed: shepherd the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight . . . (1 Peter 5:1–2)

Shepherd the flock of God. A pastor may find himself with a host of responsibilities, but at the heart of his calling is this charge to shepherd God’s precious sheep. And at the heart of shepherding is teaching.

Peter had learned the shepherd’s teaching task first from his Lord. He had noticed how Jesus, seeing a crowd wandering “like sheep without a shepherd,” did what a true shepherd would: “He began to teach them many things” (Mark 6:34). He had heard how this good shepherd taught and kept teaching, and how the sheep heard his voice (John 10:27–28). And then, of course, he had received his Lord’s threefold command to feed his sheep (John 21:15–17) — a feeding Jesus had already linked with his words (John 6:57–58, 63).

And so, following Jesus’s ascension, the apostle-shepherd taught and taught and taught — among the eleven (Acts 1:15), to the crowds (Acts 2:14), all through Jerusalem (Acts 5:28–29), across the Jew-Gentile divide (Acts 10:34–43), and then eventually by letter, including to those “elect exiles of the Dispersion” who received 1 Peter (verse 1). For Peter, to shepherd Jesus’s lambs meant, preeminently, to feed them Jesus’s words.

Now, the word shepherding does not exhaust an elder’s job description. Elders also “exercise oversight,” as Peter says — governing the church’s structures, guarding the church from threats, guiding the church through difficult decisions. Even here, however, teaching saturates the pastoral task, for how else will elders govern and guard and guide except by God’s word?

“Pastors are first and foremost Bible men — men who preach and teach and counsel God’s word.”

Pastors, then, are first and foremost Bible men — men who preach and teach and counsel God’s word in public and private, from the pulpit and the hospital chair, in season and out. At its core, this is the “noble task” to which we aspire (1 Timothy 3:1).

Three Tests for Godly Aspiration

With the what of eldership in view, Peter proceeds to describe the how in three pairs of “not this, but that”:

Shepherd the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight, not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you; not for shameful gain, but eagerly; not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock. (1 Peter 5:2–3)

Here, Peter points us to where our aspiration comes from, where our aspiration aims, and what shape our aspiration takes.

Where does your aspiration come from?

Shepherd the flock of God . . . not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you.

For some years now, perhaps, the word pastor has seemed stamped on your future. Maybe your father pastored. Maybe friends and mentors have encouraged you to pastor. Maybe you’re currently a seminary student. Either way, pastoring has become entwined with both your own sense of identity and others’ expectations. But now you wonder whether you really want to do this work.

“Jesus wields the rod and the staff with his whole soul, and he looks for men who will embody that same shepherd’s heart.”

In Peter’s day, it seems, some men were tempted to become elders “under compulsion” — prodded by others’ wishes or a mere internal sense of oughtness rather than propelled by their own wants. Such an impulse is understandable — but, Peter writes, it is not “as God would have you” shepherd his people. Jesus, the church’s first and chief Shepherd, does not lead his sheep under compulsion. He wields the rod and the staff with his whole soul, and he looks for men who will embody that same shepherd’s heart to his sheep. So, Mathis writes, “Christ grabs his pastors by the heart; he doesn’t twist them by the arm” (46).

Christ looks for willing men. Of course, even men who shepherd “under compulsion” do so willingly in one sense. But Jesus wants a willingness that goes deeper than “Everyone else thinks I should pastor” or “I can pastor if no one else will.” He wants a willingness that reaches for the staff (rather than simply receiving it when asked) — and a willingness that keeps a man from tossing the staff when trouble comes.

Where does your aspiration aim?

Shepherd the flock of God . . . not for shameful gain, but eagerly.

Shameful gain refers, most directly, to money. (In Paul’s letter to Titus, the same word as here appears — translated “greedy for gain” — in place of the phrase “not a lover of money” in his letter to Timothy.) Those who pastor for shameful gain do so mainly because pastoring provides a paycheck — and maybe they can’t imagine how else they would make money. Ministry has lost its God-centered, Christ-exalting, soul-saving focus, and has shrunk to the size of a 401(k).

Of course, the pastorate also offers other types of shameful gain besides money. Pastoring may bring discomfort and criticism and the burden of others’ expectations, but it can also bring honor in a community, a measure of power, and, for some, a flexible work schedule without much oversight. These too are kinds of shameful gain that might draw a man to ministry. But whatever the kind, Peter buries them all beneath the word eagerly.

Eagerly overlaps some with willingly, both of them putting their finger on the animating principle in a pastor’s soul. But given the contrast with shameful gain, eagerly seems to suggest not only a deep willingness to do the work, but also a decided lack of calculation in the work.

The godly elder does not tally what he can get from the ministry and then labor (or not) accordingly. He throws himself into the work, come what may: large paycheck or small, honor or suspicion, influence or weakness, difficulty or ease. For him, the work offers its own rewards in the heavenly currency of preaching Christ and helping to lead his flock to glory. Vocational pastors will get paid for their work, as they ought — “the laborer deserves his wages” (1 Timothy 5:18) — but however much they receive, the godly know their pockets are already lined with better treasure.

What shape does your aspiration take?

Shepherd the flock of God . . . not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock.

If the word shepherd echoes Jesus’s charge to Peter on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, the word domineer recalls another striking conversation:

Jesus called [the twelve] to him and said to them, “You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over [or domineer over] them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you.” (Mark 10:42–43)

Peter never forgot these words. More importantly, he never forgot the one who spoke them: the Lord who did not lord his authority over his people, but served and died as if he were a slave (Mark 10:44–45). However much Peter may have been tempted toward Gentile-like lordship in the years following, the power of that temptation had bled dry on the cross of his King.

So, when Peter calls the elders to set an example, he wants them to serve not only as model sheep, but also as little lower-case reflections of the chief Shepherd (1 Peter 5:4). Christ left the highest heaven to find his sheep and bear them home upon his back, and the thought of imitating his regal humility, his lordly lowliness, makes the hearts of godly shepherds beat faster.

Do You Love Me?

Having pointed us backward, forward, and around, Peter ends his charge by lifting our eyes up:

When the chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the unfading crown of glory. (1 Peter 5:4)

Self-examination has its place on the path to eldership, and in eldership. We need some knowledge of our own hearts to sincerely aspire to the office. But the aspiration itself comes from the upward, not the inward, look.

So as we seek to discern whether our desires for eldership match God’s pattern for eldership, we may do well to return often to those Galilean shores, where before Jesus issued his threefold charge he asked his threefold question: “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” (John 21:15–17). Do you love the voice that bid you fish for men? Do you love the glory shining on the mount? Do you love the hands that washed your feet and took your nails? Simon, son of John, do you love me?

Willingness, eagerness, and the desire to set a Christlike example rest and rise on a daily and deepening yes.

Jesus sent out seventy-two disciples into the towns where he was about to go. He said to them, “Heal the sick in it and say to them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you’” (Luke 10:9). When they came back from their ministry, Luke tells us,

The seventy-two returned with joy, saying, “Lord, even the demons are subject to us in your name!” And [Jesus] said to them, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. Behold, I have given you authority to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall hurt you. Nevertheless, do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” (Luke 10:17–20)

Do not rejoice at your stunning power over evil (even in my name!), but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.

Written for Redemption

What does it mean to have your name written in heaven? The apostle John tells us that names were written in heaven before the foundation of the world. We also know that the book where these names are written is called “the book of life of the Lamb who was slain” (Revelation 13:8). In other words, it is the book of salvation, the book of the redeemed.

If your name is in the book, these things are true of you (or most assuredly will be):

You are chosen by God in eternity.
You are predestined for sonship in his family.
You are ransomed from every evil bondage.
You are purchased for God’s precious possession.
Christ has taken your place under the punishment of divine wrath.
God has caused you to be born again; he has taken out the heart of stone and put in its place the heart of flesh.
He has made you alive in Christ Jesus and given you the gift of repentance and faith.
He has forgiven you all your sins, and declared you innocent before God.
You are irrevocably rescued from the terrors of hell.
You stand righteous in the court of heaven and have peace with God.
He has adopted you as his own child, and made you an heir of eternal life with the inheritance of all things.
He has made his Holy Spirit to dwell in you, and brought you into the fellowship of his beloved Son.
He is omnipotently committed to holding on to you so that nothing can separate you from the love of God.
He will make every pleasure and pain work for your eternal good.
He will lead you in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
He will bring you safely to his eternal kingdom and present you blameless before the throne of his glory.
He will grant you to see the glory of Christ and be changed into his likeness.
He will give you a new glorious body for the enjoyment of all the endless delights of the age to come.
He will grant you to sit with him on his throne, and share in his universal rule.
He will give you access to the very presence of God, where there will be fullness of joy and pleasures forevermore.

That is what it means to have your name written in heaven.

Joy of All Joys

Now, when the seventy-two returned rejoicing that powers of darkness, evil, and destruction had fallen before them in Jesus’s name, why would he say, “Do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven” (Luke 10:20)? Why would he say that?

“Be more irrepressibly thrilled that you are saved than that you are gifted — even in the name of Jesus.”

I don’t assume that Jesus was giving an absolute prohibition of rejoicing over the rescue of people from satanic evil. Because in Luke 15, in the parable of the prodigal son, he tells us to rejoice when we rescue a lost sheep (v. 6), a lost coin (v. 9), or a lost son (v. 32). So, when Jesus says, “Do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but [do] rejoice that your names are written in heaven,” I take him to mean that rejoicing in our salvation — in the God of our salvation — is something more essential.

It is to be your most essential joy — that is, the joy with the deepest roots, the joy that is most durable, the joy with the greatest satisfaction, the joy that sustains and shapes all joys, the joy that is unmistakable to those around us, the joy that can’t be suppressed, but marks your ministry and your life. Let that joy be this: that your name is written in heaven. Let that joy be this: that you are saved.

Be more deeply, more durably, more gladly, more pervasively, more unmistakably, more irrepressibly thrilled that you are saved than that you are gifted, or competent, or productive, or successful, or famous, or powerful, or fruitful — even in the name of Jesus.

Do not rejoice that, with degree in hand, you are equipped to make a difference, but that your names are written in heaven. To be precise, when you take your diploma, and rejoice to enter the world for the good of others and the glory of God, do it in such a way that people say, “His truest joy, her truest joy, is to be saved. Those Bethlehem graduates are thrilled that their names are written in heaven. Everything flows from that.”

Seven Reasons to Rejoice

Now, back to our original question. Why did Jesus say not to rejoice in ministry success but to rejoice that your names are written in heaven? Why does this matter? It matters for seven reasons: legalism, authenticity, zeal, glory, love, death, and shame.

1. Legalism

To the degree that we are not thrilled to be saved, we will move toward legalism. If ministry is not the overflow of joy in Christ, it will become the achievement of joy — and it won’t be in Christ. If our work is not coming out of joy, it will become the desperate striving after joy.

2. Authenticity

To the degree that we are not thrilled to be saved, we will not be able to commend Christ with authenticity as the all-satisfying Savior. There will always be a niggling sense of inauthenticity in our ministry and our witness: “If he does not satisfy me, why am I trying to show him to others?”

3. Zeal

To the degree that we are not thrilled to be saved, our zeal for any worthy cause will be distorted, out of tune. The cause may be totally righteous, but it will be missing the melody of God’s all-satisfying presence. People may admire your stature as a warrior, but the music of your life will not sound like the pleasures of knowing Christ.

4. Glory

To the degree that we are not thrilled to be saved, God will not be glorified in our vocation the way he ought to be. Why? Because the fullness of his worth and beauty and greatness is known and shown only where he is manifestly felt as the deepest, sweetest, most durable joy in life.

5. Love

To the degree that we are not thrilled to be saved, our love for other people will be compromised. Because what is love but to labor, at any cost to ourselves, to give people what is best for them, what is fully and eternally satisfying? That labor of love is weakened by every degree of joy we do not find in our own salvation.

6. Death

To the degree that we are not thrilled to be saved, we will approach our own death without peace. We will be tormented late at night with the nagging fear that we loved service more than the Savior. (A precious parenthesis here: In my last interchange with Tim Keller, Luke 10:20 was the verse we reveled in. He wrote, “That book in heaven is the one that Lloyd-Jones was comforted by. You probably know the story of him quoting it near the end of his life.”) Dear young graduates, I promise you that sixty years from now, if you have spent your life reveling in the Savior more than in his service, you will be so glad.

7. Shame

To the degree that we are not thrilled to be saved, we will be afraid to face the Lord on the last day. When he asks, “What did you enjoy most in the life I gave you on earth?” how will we face him? How will we face him if we must confess, “You were not my most essential joy”?

Joy Now, Joy Forever

I say with Jesus to all the graduates (and to the rest of us), “Do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven” (Luke 10:20). Make that joy your most essential joy. Let that joy be known to all.

Then you will be delivered from legalism, and you will minister with authenticity, and your zeal will have the melody of heaven, and God will be glorified in your life, and you will taste the sweetness of loving people, and you will face death without fear — and you will face the Lord without shame.

ABSTRACT: Due to his shameful death at the hands of Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton is not typically remembered for his religion. But Hamilton appeared to exercise a genuine faith during his lifetime, including in the final hours following the duel. While a number of America’s founding fathers questioned or rejected the fundamental beliefs of Christianity, Hamilton, the grandson of a French Huguenot, remained within the bounds of historic Protestantism and was no stranger to the Bible or the church. Without these broad theological convictions, his immigration to America and his own political achievements likely would not have been possible. Despite his seemingly authentic faith, however, Hamilton was a man between two churches, shaped by both but finding fellowship in neither.

For our ongoing series of feature articles for pastors and Christian leaders, we asked Obbie Tyler Todd (PhD, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary), pastor of Third Baptist Church in Marion, Illinois, to explore the faith of Alexander Hamilton.

When Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton through the liver in Weehawken, New Jersey, on the morning of July 11, 1804, Hamilton clung to life for another 31 hours after the duel. Although his illustrious career and ignominious death have not typically been remembered for their piety and devotion, Hamilton’s beliefs about God, Christ, sin, and salvation came to the fore in these last excruciating moments.

Hamilton was no stranger to the Bible or the church. As a child on the Caribbean island of Nevis, where he was born across the street from St. Paul’s Anglican Church, he attended a small Hebrew school and learned to recite the Decalogue in its original language. At Elizabethtown Academy in New Jersey, he wrote commentaries on the books of Genesis and Revelation. At King’s College in New York, he attended chapel and began “the habit of praying upon his knees both night and morning.”1 In fact, Hamilton owed his passage to America largely to the Presbyterian church through the patronage of Rev. Hugh Knox, who inspired the teenager to record his thoughts about God and who likely sponsored the subscription fund that sent him to America to be educated.

By the time Burr’s bullet settled in his vertebra and left him withering away in a second-floor Manhattan bedroom, however, Hamilton’s relationship to the church was much less promising. Alexander Hamilton, the West Indian immigrant who became the principal architect of the new American government, was still without a church home. As a result, coupled with the egregious circumstances of his death, he was twice denied communion in his final moments.

Deathbed Confessions

Shortly after crossing the Hudson River wounded and being transported to the home of his friend William Bayard, Hamilton called for Rev. Benjamin Moore, the rector of Trinity Church, the Episcopal bishop of New York, and the president of Columbia College. In 1788, the Hamiltons had their three eldest children baptized simultaneously at Trinity Church. Since 1790, when the church was rebuilt after the great fire of 1776, they had rented pew 92. Therefore, to ask Moore to perform last rites was not totally unexpected. On one hand, Hamilton appeared to ascribe some efficacy to the sacraments and wished to be buried at Trinity Church. On the other hand, Hamilton was only nominally Episcopalian.

“Hamilton’s beliefs about God, Christ, sin, and salvation came to the fore in these last excruciating moments.”

No amount of legal work he supplied for the church or religious fervor on the part of his wife, Eliza (who was unaware of the duel), could atone for the fact that Hamilton had never actually been baptized an Episcopalian. Hamilton had neither attended Trinity Church regularly nor had he taken communion. Therefore, despite a dying plea from one of the nation’s founding fathers, Hamilton was to Bishop Moore a lawless duelist without access to the Lord’s Table. Moore’s refusal to administer the Lord’s Supper to a non-Episcopalian would only foreshadow the high church theology of the next bishop of New York, John Henry Hobart, whose Apology for Apostolic Order and Its Advocates (1807) was aimed at the second clergyman who visited Hamilton that day: Rev. John Mitchell Mason.

Although Mason was less exclusivist than the Episcopalians, he likewise was bound by his own theological convictions in the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church. When Hamilton pleaded with his dear friend to administer communion to him, Mason replied that, even though it gave him “unutterable pain” to decline such a request, “it is a principle in our churches never to administer the Lord’s Supper privately to any person under any circumstances.” After Mason explained that the Supper was only a sign of the mercy of Christ that is “accessible to him by faith,” Hamilton responded softly, “I am aware of that. It was only as a sign that I wanted it.”

Alexander Hamilton held to a basic understanding of the gospel, to be sure. Nevertheless, in the face of Hamilton’s shameful and imminent demise, Mason proceeded to quote from a barrage of scriptural texts, including Romans 3:23, Acts 4:12, Hebrews 7:25, Ephesians 1:7, 1 Timothy 1:15, and Isaiah 43:25 and 1:18. When the preacher reminded him “that in the sight of God all men are on a level, as all have sinned, and come short of his glory,” and must take refuge in the righteousness of Christ, Hamilton answered, “I perceive it to be so. I am a sinner: I look to his mercy.” Upon Mason’s insistence that the grace of God was rich, Hamilton interrupted, “Yes, it is rich grace.” Indeed, few presentations of the gospel could have been clearer than the one delivered to Alexander Hamilton on his deathbed. Still, perhaps the most compelling testimony from Rev. Mason is his account of Hamilton’s reaction to Ephesians 1:7. After hearing of the “forgiveness of sins according to the riches of his grace,” Hamilton finally let go of Mason’s hand, clasped his own hands together, looked up to heaven, and cried, “I have a tender reliance on the mercy of the Almighty, through the merits of the Lord Jesus Christ.”2

Hamilton the Christian?

Were these the words of a true believer? At first glance, Hamilton’s confessions appear as if they were uttered in genuine faith. In his final hours, the Major General claimed that the promises of Scripture were his “support.” Years earlier, in a renowned legal case, Hamilton had referred to the Jews in the Old Testament as the “witnesses of [God’s] miracles” who were “charged with the spirit of prophecy.”3 Even though Hamilton was influenced by deism during his lifetime, he was never suspicious of biblical revelation to the degree of Franklin, Jefferson, or Madison.4 Hamilton once confessed that he could prove the truth of the Christian religion “as clearly as any proposition ever submitted to the mind of man.”5 His abolitionism and his capacity for lasting friendship set him apart from many of the other founders. His view of human nature, demonstrated best in the Federalist Papers, often bordered on the Puritanical.

However, like Washington (who actually joined the Episcopalian Church), Hamilton was reticent to discuss his Christian faith. Ironically, the man who, to rescue his financial integrity, printed an entire account of his own affair in the first major sex scandal in American history had seemingly less to say about his relationship with Jesus Christ. Episcopal Bishop William White refused to publicly drink a toast to Hamilton due to his indiscretions with Maria Reynolds, and evangelicals today have also been reluctant to honor an adulterer.6 Although he had once opposed dueling “on the principles of religion” and seemed not to intend to actually kill Burr, a duelist he was nonetheless.7

“Hamilton was a paradoxical figure whose sins were just as public as his successes.”

As many scholars have noted, Hamilton was a paradoxical figure whose sins were just as public as his successes. By examining the complexity of Hamilton’s faith, Christians today are confronted with the conflict that inevitably arises when the authority of the local church is subordinated to personal ambition and when the teenage fire of Christian zeal is slowly cooled by professional aspirations and the desires of the world. In such a relatively brief life, one encounters the danger of building earthly kingdoms without seeking first the kingdom of God, the grace and encouragement of a believing spouse, and the fleeting nature of even the most astonishing career. In order to better understand Hamilton’s theology, his aversion to church membership, and his own Christian practice, the best place to begin is on the small Caribbean island from which he came.

Grandson of a French Huguenot

As a boy, Alexander Hamilton was raised in a religious, albeit savage and precarious, world. His mother’s store in St. Croix was next to St. John’s Anglican Church on Company’s Lane. The Hebrew school in which he was instructed left him with a lifelong affection for the Jewish people. In fact, Protestantism was the very reason that Hamilton’s family had arrived in the West Indies. In a letter to William Jackson in 1800, in which he fumed over criticisms of his ignoble birth, Hamilton wrote, “My Grandfather by the mothers side of the name of Faucette was a French Huguenot who emigrated to the West Indies in consequence of the Edict of Nantz and settled in the Island of Nevis and there acquired a pretty fortune. I have been assured by persons who knew him that he was a man of letters and much of a gentleman.”8

Huguenots were Protestants in France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who held to the teachings of John Calvin, a French-born theologian in Geneva. While the Edict of Nantz in 1598 granted religious toleration to Protestants for the sake of civil unity, the French Reformed Church would endure severe persecution when the Edict was revoked in 1685 by Louis XIV.9 The result was a Huguenot diaspora throughout the western world, including the West Indies. John Faucette had arrived at the shores of Nevis as a French immigrant seeking religious freedom from the tyranny of the Catholic Church. Not surprisingly, his grandson would carry an aversion to popery all of his life.

Indeed, Hamilton may very well have thought of his grandfather when he denounced the Quebec Act of 1774, a measure that extended the border of Quebec to the Ohio River and guaranteed full religious liberty to French-Canadian Catholics. In A Full Vindication of the Measures of the Congress, Hamilton opined, “The affair of Canada, if possible, is still worse. The English laws have been superseded by the French laws. The Romish faith is made the established religion of the land, and his Majesty is placed at the head of it. The free exercise of the protestant faith depends upon the pleasure of the Governor and Council.” He then asked, “Does not your blood run cold, to think an English parliament should pass an act for the establishment of arbitrary power and popery in such an extensive country?”10

Shown by his friendship with Marquis de Lafayette and his proficiency in the French language, Hamilton never lost touch with his French heritage. But an abiding hostility toward Catholicism and French “infidelity” always remained. In a letter to Edward Carrington in 1792, Hamilton warned that Thomas Jefferson had “drank deeply of the French philosophy, in Religion, in Science, in politics.”11 Although the rationality of deism appealed greatly to Hamilton, he never strayed from a Protestant outlook of world events. He was, after all, also the grandson of a Scottish laird on his father’s side.

Nevertheless, despite his rich family heritage, there was also a darker side to the religious world he inhabited. As the illegitimate son of a bankrupt merchant, Hamilton was likely barred from being instructed at an Anglican school.12 In addition to the many losses and rejections that he and his brother James suffered at a young age, this would certainly have influenced his religious consciousness. Alexander Hamilton was, in some sense, disinherited by his own family and by the church. As Ron Chernow observes, “As a divorced woman with two children conceived out of wedlock, Rachel was likely denied a burial at nearby St. John’s Anglican Church. This may help to explain a mystifying ambivalence that Hamilton always felt about regular church attendance, despite a pronounced religious bent.”13

Hamilton’s affiliation with the church thus became not unlike his own American citizenship, being at once insider and outsider. The hierarchical West Indian system that bred in him a hatred of slavery and an indomitable ambition may also have fostered a rather conflicted view of the church. Hamilton, the architect of the U.S. Constitution and the nation’s first banking system, was a believer in institutions. Yet as demonstrated in his last moments, he also had difficulty submitting himself to that very authority.

Under a Sovereign God

Hamilton’s life changed when he met Rev. Hugh Knox. Ordained by Princeton president Aaron Burr, the son-in-law of Jonathan Edwards and the father of the man who killed Hamilton, Knox believed that illegitimate children should be baptized. His combination of evangelical Calvinism and intellectualism attracted young Hamilton to the things of God. Soon after the Presbyterian minister arrived in St. Croix in 1771, Hamilton began regularly attending his revival services and reading from his extensive library (Knox graduated from Yale in 1751). According to one historian, “At seventeen Alexander Hamilton may have undergone a powerful religious conversion. At least that is the impression he gave that spring, as the Great Awakening swooped down on St. Croix.”14

Although Hamilton probably read sermons and devotional tracts from his mother’s book collection as a child, this was the first time he thought freely and deeply about the Bible, consuming bound sermons from his mentor’s library. Knox even inspired his young protégé to compose his own religious epistle! After a hurricane demolished St. Croix in 1772, Knox delivered a sermon to his congregation to lift their minds and hearts heavenward. Eventually published in a pamphlet, the sermon seemed to have a profound effect upon Hamilton, who wrote a graphic letter to his father describing the ferocity of the storm and drawing from Knox’s themes. After showing the letter to Knox, the minister persuaded him to publish it in the Royal Danish American Gazette. The letter illustrates that, even as a teenager, Hamilton believed in a Creator who intervened powerfully and personally in his creation. He wrote,

See thy wretched helpless state, and learn to know thyself. Learn to know thy best support. Despise thyself, and adore thy God. How sweet, how unutterably sweet were now, the voice of an approving conscience; Then couldst thou say, hence ye idle alarms, why do I shrink? What have I to fear? A pleasing calm suspense! A short repose from calamity to end in eternal bliss? Let the Earth rend. Let the planets forsake their course. Let the Sun be extinguished and the Heavens burst asunder. Yet 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.15

After recounting the horror of the hurricane to his father, Hamilton added, “But see, the Lord relents. He hears our prayer.” The themes of judgment, mercy, and human dependence in the letter reflected Hamilton’s belief in an all-controlling God who ordered the cosmos and who ultimately could be trusted in an unstable and cruel island world. Remarkably, Hamilton’s letter about God’s providence became his ticket to America when a number of benefactors read the piece and began a fund to send the young man north to be educated.

Before leaving, Hamilton almost certainly penned an unsigned hymn that his future wife, Eliza, would cherish for decades after his death as an example of his Christian piety. Published in the Gazette on October 17, 1772, as an imitation of Alexander Pope’s “The Dying Christian to His Soul,” it reads,

Hark! hark! a voice from yonder sky,Methinks I hear my Saviour cry,Come gentle spirit come away,Come to thy Lord without delay;For thee the gates of bliss unbar’dThy constant virtue to reward

I come oh Lord! I mount, I fly,On rapid wings I cleave the sky;Stretch out thine arm and aid my flight;For oh! I long to gain that height,Where all celestial beings singEternal praises to their King.

O Lamb of God! thrice gracious LordNow, now I feel how true thy word;Translated to this happy place,This blessed vision of thy face;My soul shall all thy steps attendIn songs of triumph without end.16

While Alexander Hamilton did not frequently express his thoughts about Jesus Christ, he was, at times during his youth, capable of eloquent meditations on the Son of God. After arriving in America, he continued his religious instruction and even developed spiritual disciplines. But the Revolution and his own personal ambition made it difficult for him to settle upon one denomination.

Between Two Churches

By the time Hamilton disembarked in Boston in 1772, the political frenzy in the colonies had already begun to erupt in the churches. At Elizabethtown Academy, Hamilton studied under Presbyterian teachers who would later serve under his command, including headmaster Francis Barber. Hamilton listened to three-hour sermons on Sundays next to men possessed by the spirit of liberty. As a training ground for Princeton (the College of New Jersey), Elizabethtown introduced Hamilton to Presbyterian orthodoxy and patriotism. In some ways, he was being catechized in the Westminster Confession and in republicanism. After all, Princeton’s president John Witherspoon was the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence and the first clergyman at the Continental Congress.

On one hand, its combination of evangelical Calvinism and Whig principles made Princeton the logical choice for a college education. Hamilton was accepted at 18 years old after passing Witherspoon’s examination. On the other hand, Hamilton’s insatiable drive to achieve was greater than his desire to ground himself in the Presbyterian faith. As a result, when Witherspoon denied his bold request to complete his schooling in three years instead of four, Hamilton looked to New York — to the Church of England.

As he would later prove in his writings, Hamilton’s departure from Princeton was not a sign of any Tory sympathies (although he often feared the rising mob mentality in the colonies). However, upon his passing an examination into Princeton by one of the most anti-Episcopal figures in America, that Hamilton then chose to attend King’s College in New York City, a bastion of Anglicanism and loyalism in the colonies, is perhaps the clearest sign that Hamilton’s affiliation to the church was only as strong as his professional aspirations.

“Hamilton was a man between two churches.”

Still a teenager, Hamilton was no more loyal to the Church of England than the Church of England had been to his family as a child. The only difference was that Hamilton, the illegitimate son from Nevis, was now in seeming control of his political destiny and itching to receive his education from the fastest bidder. While this apparently did not hinder his personal Christian devotion, it certainly did not strengthen his ties to the local church. Indeed, Hamilton was a man between two churches. A Presbyterian from Princeton had helped thrust him to America, and yet another inadvertently forced him to Manhattan to study under Anglican Myles Cooper, one of the most outspoken loyalists in the colonies.

Nevertheless, Hamilton’s ecclesiastical turnabout did not hinder his efforts to develop his own spiritual disciplines. At King’s College, his roommate Robert Troup recalled,

Whilst at college, [he] was attentive to public worship and in the habit of praying upon his knees both night and morning. I have lived in the same room with him for sometime and I have often been powerfully affected by the fervor and eloquence of his prayers. [He] had [already] read most of the polemical writers on religious subjects and he was a zealous believer in the fundamental doctrines of Christianity.17

Although Troup may have been guilty of a bit of hero worship, Hamilton did attend chapel services routinely and exhibited an interest in theological study. As to his reading of polemical works, these may have led Hamilton to lean in the direction of deism as the war began, as the Anglican church was defined by a vehement anti-Calvinism and extreme rationalism in the late colonial and early national periods.18 Although, for example, Hamilton mocked Anglican leaders like Samuel Seabury for their loyalty to Parliament, he did not repudiate Anglican theology to the same degree.

As the war progressed and nation-building ensued, due to his political genius and military skill, Hamilton’s writings naturally adopted a much more civil and diplomatic turn. Hamilton’s references to the divine became vaguer and less Christian. The language of a “divinely authoritative Religion,” “the will of heaven,” and “an over-ruling Providence” far outweighed any allusions to Scripture or any kind of theological discourse, indicating that Hamilton may have slowly traded the Christ-centered, born-again religion of his youth for the lawful, reasonable deism of the age (or something we might call Christian rationalism).19

Still, there is no evidence to support the idea that Hamilton rejected the deity of Christ or that he questioned God’s miraculous intervention in the world. To simply label Hamilton a “deist” or a “rationalist” does not adequately describe his own theology during this stage of his life. To begin, more so than Jefferson, Hamilton believed that the French Revolution was opposed to “friends of religion.”20 Like Washington, he believed that we “flatter ourselves that morality can be separated from religion.”21 In other words, natural law is grounded in the eternal, revealed law of God. In the early years of the republic, Hamilton proposed a “day of humiliation and prayer” for the nation.22 In his doctrine of divine providence, Hamilton still remained the same young man who had prayed for the hurricane to cease on the island of St. Croix. Faith was about more than knowledge or reason. As Secretary of the Treasury, he noted to George Washington “the conflict between Reason & Passion,” a tension that many of his deist or Unitarian colleagues might not have admitted so easily.23 Although the Federalist Papers never mention God explicitly, Hamilton sounded like a New Light evangelical in his opening essay: “In politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution.”24 Political liberty and religious liberty were inseparable in Hamilton’s mind, and he affirmed a real boundary between orthodoxy and “heresies.”

As he slowly passed from the earth, Hamilton once again found himself between the Episcopalians and Presbyterians, begging each for the bread and the cup from the Lord’s Table. But Hamilton’s end was much like his life, confessing the faith once delivered to the saints while finding no real home in the communion of believers.

Eliza’s Influence

As scholars have noted, perhaps the most compelling evidence to the authenticity of Hamilton’s faith is his marriage to Eliza, a devoted follower of Jesus Christ. An active member in the Dutch Reformed Church, Eliza worshiped her Lord and sought to obey his commands with such heartfelt sincerity that Washington’s staff was somewhat surprised when Hamilton chose to marry her.25 After all, Hamilton had written to a friend in 1779 about his ideal wife: “As to religion a moderate stock will satisfy me. She must believe in god and hate a saint.”26 In Eliza he found no moderate believer, and their wedding in 1780 was in traditional Dutch Reformed custom.

If Alexander Hamilton was an unbeliever, he was indeed “made holy because of his wife,” as her influence upon his soul became evident in his waning moments (1 Corinthians 7:14). Upon rushing into the second-floor room and discovering that her husband was dying (not suffering from “spasms,” as originally she had been told), the frantic Eliza was consoled not by Hamilton the soldier or Hamilton the founding father or Hamilton the financial genius, but by someone who appeared to know the weight of sin and the hope of Christ: “Remember, my Eliza, you are a Christian.”27