Like most extremist arguments, Covenanter political logic was deceptively simple. A nation was its laws, and law was rooted in the authority of God. The English Magna Carta’s preamble issued laws “at the prompting of God.” In America’s great charter, however, God was neither prompting nor prompted. He was not there at all. Therefore, the Constitution had a “We the People” problem. . . . A Christian culture, even a Christian majority, did not equate to a Christian nation, they insisted. . . . Yet the Covenanters’ critical distinction–that by the standards of its own time the newly born United States was simultaneously a Christian civilization and a secular nation–has been lost on our contemporary debates (Joseph S. Moore, Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the Constitution, 3).

Covenanter critiques centered on two interrelated themes. The first was the absence of Jesus Christ in the Constitution: an affront to God’s name and an open statement of rebellion against his reign over the people. The second was human slavery and its long wake of American racism: a desecration of God’s image. Even as America changed and as life in America changed the Covenanters, these arguments maintained a remarkable continuity among their religious adherents in both the North and the South, spanning the years from the Early Republic to the Civil War era and Reconstruction and into the twentieth century. . . . The Covenanters’ insistence on God in the law and humanity’s equality before it gave purpose and energy to their fight against America’s twin founding sins (Joseph S. Moore, Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the Constitution, 2).

When the Founders failed to found a Christian nation it was not by accident. They were intentionally dismissing those who sought to mix God and government in the new nation in old, European ways. That failure was loudly protested. In the thick of America’s first culture wars were the Covenanters, an assortment of radical Scotch-Irish Presbyterian sects sharing the conviction that all nations must be in an explicit covenant with God (Joseph S. Moore, Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the Constitution, 1-2).

The United States was not founded as a Christian nation, because slavery was in the Constitution and Jesus was not. The people who said this, rather loudly and for quite a long time, were called the Covenanters [aka Reformed Presbyterians, Cameronians, Society People, Old Light/Old School, Anti-Burghers, Seceders, Associate Reformed Presbyterians, United Presbyterians, etc.]. Whereas today most religious conservatives insist that America’s Founders created a Christian nation, Covenanters were the most conservative Christians in early America, and they vehemently disagreed. . . . the most strident critique of America’s failure to be a Christian nation came from the right (Joseph S. Moore, Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the Constitution, 1).

Though every statement in the Scripture cannot be regarded as absolutely essential to salvation, yet everything there is essential to some other wise and important end, else it would not find a place in the good Word of God. . . . All Scripture is profitable. . . . The faith of a Christian should strive to reach and grasp everything that God has honoured with a place in that Word, the design of which is to be a light to our feet as we thread our way through this dark world. Besides, this, unlike every other book, is not doomed to perish. Heaven and earth may pass away, but the words of Christ shall not pass away. The seal of eternity is stamped on every verse of the Bible. This fact is enough of itself to make every line of it important (“The Apostolic Church: Which Is It? by Thomas Witherow in Paradigms in Polity: Classic Readings in Reformed and Presbyterian Church Government, eds. David W. Hall & Joseph H. Hall, 37-38).

For it is not the prerogative of the church to define either its status or activity. It is Christ’s church, not humankind’s. It is Christ, therefore, who declares both that his church shall have a government and what the nature of that government will be. This he has done through the inspired Scriptures (“History and Character of Church Government” by Joseph H. Hall in Paradigms in Polity: Classic Readings in Reformed and Presbyterian Church Government, eds. David W. Hall & Joseph H. Hall, 4).

Beza is surely correct in his contention that laxity in applying biblical principles of church government leads eventually to erosion of doctrine in the church. Therefore, we ought ever to be assiduously conforming church polity to biblical norms (“History and Character of Church Government” by Joseph H. Hall in Paradigms in Polity: Classic Readings in Reformed and Presbyterian Church Government, eds. David W. Hall & Joseph H. Hall, 3).

The Trinity is not a mystery among others, but it constitutes the central mystery of Christian faith and should illumine the entirety of the Christian life. The Trinity is the mystery of salvation, as Karl Rahner vigorously reminded us: ‘The trinity is a mystery of salvation, otherwise it would never have been revealed’ (From “Introduction” by Gilles Emery and Matthew Levering in The Oxford Handbook of the Trinity, 1).

“The Bible’s message is the power of God to salvation, but that message comes to us in a particular form . . . . When we detach the message from the medium, we muzzle the message itself. The message can still get through; the Spirit blows where he listeth. But the message does not get through in its full transfiguring power” (Peter Leithart, Deep Exegesis, 34).

Scripture once transformed the world precisely because Bible students clung to the letter. Once the letter is reduced to a malleable vehicle, Scripture loses its potency. It no longer shapes our imaginations, our poetry, or our politics, because it is not allowed to say anything we do not already know. We have lost the Bible because we are no longer theologians of the letter (Peter Leithart, Deep Exegesis, 6).