The Founding Fathers on Law & Liberty
In Western society, the source of stability for the tension between order and freedom has traditionally been found in the ballast of the Christian religion. The Founding Fathers understood the danger of the experiment that they started. Wisdom told them that if they took the power from the king and gave it to the people, there would be a real risk of anarchy. What would bring order if there were no king imposing force from the top down?
James Madison the guiding force behind the language of the Constitution, co-author of the Federalist Papers, and our fourth President answers: “We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government; upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments.”
And now listen to John Adams, one of the most influential of the Founding Fathers and the second President of the United States: “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion . . . Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
But if according to our Founding Fathers the government cannot produce this morality and religious sentiment that is the necessary ground of liberty, what can?
Something to think about from “The Kingdom Perspective”.
Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit.
~2 Corinthians 3:17-18 NASB
