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Dear Folks:
It is hard to ignore that we are celebrating the 250th anniversary of our country’s independence. The American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence came with Enlightenment ideals which had its foundation in the Protestant Reformation, which started with Martin Luther in 1517. Martin Luther questioned the absolute authority of the pope to determine faith practices, which led to The Enlightenment questioning the absolute authority and the “divine right of kings”. The printing press, designed in the 1440s by Johannes Gutenberg, and the subsequent dramatic increase in literacy helped disperse Luther’s ideas, and it encouraged the eventual spread of scientific knowledge and philosophy. The printing press was the first mass media, and it democratized knowledge and aided in the rise of rationalism, which was a key ideal in the Enlightenment. During the Reformation a rise in individualism in terms of understanding the faith led to the idea of individual liberty with rights that a government does not give nor can it take away.
When the Pilgrims (Congregationalists) landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620, before
disembarking, they wrote a covenant, later called the Mayflower Compact, which laid the path for civic law and consensual governance not under a king, but in covenant with each other. In the Declaration of Independence, which Thomas Jefferson wrote 156 years later, “consent of the governed” granted powers to governments instituted by people (not kings).
Jefferson asserted that people, created equal by God, were granted certain rights-life, liberty, pursuit of happiness (Declaration of Independence) [or life, liberty, property (John Locke and the US Constitution)]. The Us Constitution designed a government around consent that could not take away these rights without due process of the law.
Divinely granted rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, was a theological shift from the divine right of kings. Democratization of knowledge brought a theological shift from the elite priesthood being the only ones to understand and explain the faith to the people studying scripture on their own. Reason replaced mystery as a theological starting point as the natural world was explained through the scientific method of repetition and observation.
On the eve of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, it feels like divinely granted rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and the consent of the governed are normal and natural ideas. Today, it also feels to me like these rights are fragile and easily dissolved. My prayer is that what was begun by our Congregationalist forebears as they discerned God’s will for this new community is truly natural and normal and together we can consent to be governed by a government that is granted its power by the people and for the people.
In peace and prayer,
Pastor Tony
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