The Founders and the Bible by Carl J. Richard

Author:Carl J. Richard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Virginia Anti-Federalist George Mason agreed with his northern counterparts. At the Constitutional Convention he declared regarding slaves, “They produce the most pernicious effect on manners. Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgment of heaven on a Country. As nations cannot be rewarded or punished in the next world, they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes & effects, providence punishes national sins by national calamities.” Note that Mason envisioned God passing judgment not through miracles but through the natural effects of slavery itself. This view did not contradict the Bible, since God’s judgment against nations in the Old Testament, while sometimes accomplished through miracles, often works through natural causes. For instance, God uses Babylonian armies to destroy the Assyrian Empire (Nahum 3) and Persian forces to overwhelm the Babylonian Empire (Daniel 5).[42]

In 1790, during a congressional debate regarding a petition submitted by the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and signed by its president, Benjamin Franklin, Elias Boudinot also warned of divine judgment. Boudinot cited the Book of Exodus, in which he claimed that many of “the same arguments as have been used on the present occasion had been urged with great violence by the King of Egypt, whose heart, it is expressly said, had been extremely hardened, to show why he should not consent to let the children of Israel go, who had now become absolutely necessary to him.” Boudinot concluded ominously regarding the Hebrew slaves, “Gentlemen cannot forget the consequences that followed: they were delivered by a strong hand and outstretched arm, and it ought to be remembered that the Almighty Power that accomplished their deliverance is the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Hebrews 13:8). Many Americans later considered the Civil War, which remains the bloodiest conflict in the nation’s history, the fulfillment of the founders’ prophecy of divine punishment of the United States for slavery.[43]

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