Our Christian Manifesto Today passage from the Word of God today is Exodus 20:3-7 which reads: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.”
Our Christian Manifesto Today quote today is from Thomas Jefferson. He said: “I am a Christian, that is to say a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus. I have little doubt that our whole country will soon be rallied to the unity of our Creator and, I hope, to the pure doctrine of Jesus also.”
In this podcast, we are using as our text: “A Christian Manifesto” by Francis A. Schaeffer. Dr. Francis A. Schaeffer writes on “Foundations for Faith and Freedom” (Part 6):
To William Blackstone there were only two foundations for law, nature and revelation, and he stated clearly that he was speaking of the “holy Scripture.” That was William Blackstone. And up to the recent past not to have been a master of William Blackstone’s Commentaries would have meant that you would not have graduated from law school. There were other well-known lawyers who spelled these things out with total
clarity. Joseph Story in his 1829 inaugural address as Dane Professor of Law at Harvard University said, “There never has been a period in which Common Law did not recognize Christianity as laying at its foundation.”
Concerning John Adams (1735-1826) Terry Eastland says:
“….most people agreed that our law was rooted, as John Adams had said, in a common moral and religious tradition, one that stretched back to the time Moses went up on Mount Sinai. Similarly almost everyone agreed that our liberties were God-given and should be exercised responsibly. There was a distinction between liberty and license.”
What we find then as we look back is that the men who founded the United States of America really understood that upon which they were building their concepts of law and the concepts of government. And until the takeover of our government and law by this other entity, the materialistic, humanistic, chance worldview, these things remained the base of government and law.
A Christian Manifesto Today 