Independence Day provides an opportunity to consider some American history that has been long neglected. The words of Abraham Kuyper spoken in 1898 about that history put the word “independence” in a new light. It will help us better understand what has happened in our nation, and what we need to do.
Kuyper, soon to become the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, delivered that year’s Stone Lectures to the seminarians at Princeton University. Speaking of Old Europe in relation to the United States, he said:
“Life in Old Europe is not something separate from life here; it is one and the same current of human existence that flows through both Continents. . . . By virtue of our common origin, you may call us bone of your bone . . . and . . . you will never forget that the historic cradle of your wondrous youth stood in our old Europe, and was most gently rocked in my once mighty Fatherland.” (emphasis added)
To what was he referring? What would we “never forget”?
First, he was referring to the fact that the Netherland’s William of Orange, who secured the Protestant Reformation there, became the King of England, Scotland, and Ireland during the Glorious Revolution of 1688. It became the “new” England following the Puritan Revolution and the end of the Protectorate. It was from England, as reformed by those events, that our forebears came. Kuyper’s Fatherland did indeed rock the cradle of the nation God formed on our shores.
But “besides this common parentage,” Kuyper was referring to a second, more fundamental commonality:
“Far more precious to us than even the development of human life, is the crown which ennobles it, and this noble crown of life for you and for me rests in the Christian name. That crown is our common heritage. . . . It was not from Greece or Rome that the regeneration of human life came forth—that mighty metamorphosis dates from Bethlehem and Golgotha.” (emphasis added)
In other words, we, like Old Europe, were forged in the mighty stream of the Reformation’s theological thought. Reformed Christianity formed our native, unwritten constitution, and its fundamental law was the common law.
So, while our Declaration may have declared a governmental independence from England, we could not, but by bold, brash arrogance against God - as with the French - declare our independence from God’s work in history to constitute us a nation. But that is precisely what the U.S. Supreme Court did with respect to our fundamental law.
In 1938, in Erie RR. v. Tompkins, the Court embraced the atheistic conception of law espoused by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. It said the common law on which the Constitution was based, and from which its words and phrases were drawn, must be understood “without regard to what it may have been in England or anywhere else.” It denied "a transcendental body of law” that was “obligatory” apart from the State. It declared that “the authority and only authority” for common law “is the State.”
Now, by losing our history, our “independence” extends to God as the author of any law. And since then, it seems as if God has said, “Have it your way.”
Sobering words, but it seems to me the only way is not repentance for this or that sin, but of a national denial of God. There is the root. And knowing some of the history we’ve not learned and where we got off track is, I think, the first step back in the right direction. Perhaps the foregoing is a start in that direction.
