More Dubious Notions
Immigration is enriching our American economy and culture. The falsity of this proposition has been demonstrated so often and so conclusively that it belongs in the same category as 1) Islam is a religion of peace, 2) politicians don’t lie and steal, and 3) Elvis is alive and well in a monastery in Bolivia. It is accompanied by the dominant but unstated assumption that the U.S. can have a First World economy and military with a Third World population. Given the American penchant for sanctifying pretty lies, this allows politicians to bask in an aura of benevolence while destroying your grandchildrens’ future.
"A public debt is a public blessing." At the time of Alexander Hamilton’s famous statement in the early days of the U.S., everyone knew what he meant: Government debt is a blessing to the rich and to politicians who want to push their schemes while postponing payment for them. The Jeffersonians detected the evil and held it in check until Lincoln’s time. Since then it has been the Standard Operating Procedure of the U.S. government, though never so forthrightly stated.
Thomas Jefferson was anti-Christian. Thomas Jefferson had a capacious, active, and questing mind, wrote prolifically, and lived through a more than usual number of years of more than usually full history. To understand his religious beliefs requires careful and extensive inquiry. Jefferson never scoffed at Christianity. He never denied its divine inspiration or its importance or that man is made in the image of God. He did want to remove the miracles from the Scriptures because he thought it made them less believable rather than more so. He did believe, quite reasonably, that, historically, religious dogma had sometimes assumed the guise of superstition that had stifled intelligence and that religious establishments had suppressed freedom more than was justified. His statement about the desirable wall of separation between church and state, though later hyped by haters of Christianity, was merely a standard American and Protestant position and emphatically did not advocate the banishment of faith from public life. When all is said and done, Jefferson’s belief, though not meeting strict definitions of Christianity (which disagree among themselves), differed little from that of many another Anglican gentleman then or later. Curiously, the same people who calumniate Jefferson have sanctified the village atheist Abe Lincoln, who once wrote a treatise ridiculing Christianity and who, according to his closest associates, was never a believer. The political context explains much about Jefferson’s thinking. He thought that Calvinism was responsible for the peculiarly malicious and domineering nature of Massachusetts and Connecticut, which had introduced a distorting element into the American polity. Calvinism, he wrote, was the mother of atheism because it presented God as unchristian, unloving, and unlovable.
Medicare and Medicaid can be fixed by electing the right people to implement the right policies. It is theoretically possible to design a national medical system that is fair, workable, and affordable. However, Congresspersons, who are owned by drug and insurance corporations, will never enact such a system, nor can it ever be made affordable as long as the immigration of new unpaying clients rages unchecked.
Entries(RSS)
Calvinism, he wrote, was the mother of atheism because it presented God as unchristian, unloving, and unlovable.
Jefferson nevertheless supported the French Revolution. But true, he wasn't a supporter of the Jacobins of the Mountain. Was it simply that he was too blinded by geographical distance and the prejudices of the social milieus he frequented to perceive that the Girondin was in the long run no better than the Montagne, that what was going on overseas could never have resulted in anything BUT the bloodshed of the Terror he would ultimately balk at?
"Jefferson nevertheless supported the French Revolution"
I have often heard this and have always wondered what, exactly, Thomas Jefferson (or any American at the time) knew about the French Revolution. Being a modern man I tend to take for granted the way news travels around the globe today, and even with the numerous instant conduits on the internet I have a sense, although incomplete, of how much that news is colored by the ones doing the reporting. Back in the late 18th century, how, exactly, did one get news of international affairs? Where did the newspapers get their news from? Who controlled the "color" of the information being fed and then the way that information was reported.
I apologize if my question is off topic. It's just something I've wondered in relation to the claim that Jefferson supported the revolution. I've always been curious what, exactly, he knew of the Revolution at the time. I mean, scads of folks today, with our historical hindsight and vast resources, STILL think it was all about the poor folks rising up to overthrow the selfish & rich aristrocracy and know little of the anti-Catholic attacks, details of the Terror, or the rising of teh Vendee.
Dr. Wilson:
As a Presbyterian (i.e. PCA, which I understand is roughly a remnant of the Southern Presbyterian Church in its conservatism) and a Calvinist myself, I have been curious ast to how the views of the Northern Puritans differed from their Southern brethren? I know my father's Scots-Irish ancestors were almost certainly Presbyterians upon their arrival here in the 18th c., but I also know the English Calvinists up in New England didn't much care for us, hence our presence down along the then- frontier here in the South (Of course many of us later latched on to Methodism, the Baptists, and snake-handling in come cases, post Second Great Awakening, I guess). R.L Dabney was obviously firm in his beliefs as was his friend, T.J. Jackson, yet heir understanding of election didn't drive them to think they had the right and obligation to aggressively foist their utopian ideas of the ideal society on others, unlike the corrupted Calvinism found in New England.
Other than their resulting actions (e.g. the WTBS), where do the two schools of Calvinism differ between North and South?
"Jefferson supported the French Revolution." How did he know? Gentlemen, I humbly suggest that you folks are caught up in two many abstractions (too common in these discussions) and know too little of the context. Jefferson was actually in France as the U.S. representative in the early stages of the events in France. Jefferson did not support what you have in your mind and label as "the French Revolution." He was sympathetic to the events that were unfolding in France, as were his friend Lafayette and many other decent Americans (and oithers), hoping that a reletively free constitutional monarchy could be established. He understood perfectly that nothing more could be expected in Europe. He was not very surprised at the direction the revolution took or at the rise of Napoleon, none of which he approved. He was looking at the revolution as current events, not as the completd evil that you have in mind. He merely shared the hopeful sentiments of good Frenchmen and friends of self-government everywhere. It is a relic of the New England dominance of American culture that everybody wants to harp on Jefferson's supposed support of "the French Revolution." It was the New England intellectuals of the antebellum period and Abe Lincoln and his national socialists supporters who imported the French Revolution into the U.S.
As to the difference between New England Calvinists and Scots/ Southern Presbyterians, I am not remotely qualified to discuss the theology. I can recognise them by their different works.
As to communications in the late 18th century. Six weeks would be a very good cross Atlantic voyage. But Americans like Jefferson had many well-informed European friends and correspondents. He knew and understood vastly more about what was happening in the world than does the entire U.S. State Department today.
Its good to see some defense of Jefferson from someone who knows what hes talking about. Probably no other Founder has had more nonsense written about him than ol Tom. On a past Chronicles Unbound Radio Show, I pointed out the problems with the 'Hemming' story that is usually used to smear him.
Dr Wilson, you wouldnt believe the attacks on the American Revolution, our Founders, and our entire union that have come from the so called traditionalist right in the last decade or so. They put it on par with the French Revolution and Bolshevik Revolution. They especially like to use the eccentric views of some Founders as representative of the entire populace - forgetting that our ancestors - the regular soldiers, are who really made it a great success.
"Jefferson supported the French Revolution." How did he know? Gentlemen, I humbly suggest that you folks are caught up in two many abstractions (too common in these discussions) and know too little of the context. Jefferson was actually in France as the U.S. representative in the early stages of the events in France. Jefferson did not support what you have in your mind and label as "the French Revolution." He was sympathetic to the events that were unfolding in France, as were his friend Lafayette and many other decent Americans (and oithers), hoping that a reletively free constitutional monarchy could be established. He understood perfectly that nothing more could be expected in Europe. He was not very surprised at the direction the revolution took or at the rise of Napoleon, none of which he approved.
Dr. Wilson, there is another well-intentioned man who was, as Jefferson, "sympathetic" to what was happening in France in the early stages of the Revolution, a man who is well-respected by many anti-revolutionaries and who, unlike Jefferson, was quite thoroughly Christian and in fact Roman Catholic. This man was one Hilaire Belloc.
But the problem with the French Revolution historiography of Belloc is that it was just flat-out WRONG. There was absolutely nothing benign about the Revolution at the outset, even if certain trappings and parallels may well have attracted the sympathy of otherwise sane-minded folks. Jefferson may well have been in France at the beginning stages of the Revolution, but he was still an American and, while you'll have to confirm this for me, he might not have seen things through any lens other than the American lens.
To better fit this post into the thread, here is another notion to debate: the idea that a "constitutional monarchy" is merely a seventeenth or eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxon breakthrough. Actually, royal France DID have a constitution (though it was not so called): the Fundamental Laws of the Kingdom. This may not have been a "constitution" to the liking of certain luminaries of the day (and may not have included the sort of "liberty of cult" they would have liked), but royal power was not unrestrained and arbitrary. Such laws and restraints were part and parcel of nearly every European monarch of the time, having grown and evolved out of the various tribal customs of the early Middle Ages and adapted with the reintroduction of Roman law and changing needs and circumstances.
Nothing lasts forever, of course, and princes in particular, as we have it from on high. If one wishes to argue in the abstract that it would have been desirable in any case for France to change the separation of its legislative estates convoked only occasionally into popular representation in the form of a National Assembly, one may well do so, but what is easy to miss when speaking in the abstract, as you rightly decry doing, is that that sentiment was in fact tied to the deeply anticlerical, Jansenist and Libertine atmosphere with which Paris especially was enflamed. The targets from the outset were the Church and aristocratic privilege, and the history of the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre should have left little doubt about what excited urban mobs, and Parisian mobs in particular, could be capable of, especially when religious passions are flared. The Terror and the Vendée were only logical outcomes. (Even the Storming of the Bastille, if one reads the full story, definitely gives pause.)
Anyway... I hope I'm not coming across as arrogant or stubborn. Dr. Wilson, you obviously know a lot more about Jefferson than I do and for all I know perhaps more about the French Revolution, but I do think I know at least a bit. And I am confident that the Revolution in France was rotten through and through, right from the start, igniting the fuel that was a terrible countercultural current and setting Europe ablaze before the flames jumped across an ocean and destroyed our own country, as well. It is not necessarily a blight on Belloc or on Jefferson if they did not predict what would happen right from the outset (some might argue that Belloc should have known better with the benefit of hindsight, but despite his virtues I am not sure he had the intellectual capacity or cosmopolitan perspective of Jefferson). It does, however, suggest that even the best can get things wrong. For that matter, I am not aware of any "good" Frenchmen of the 18th century who staked their hopes an ambitions in the current events of the time at any stage, however nascent, at least not any who did not live to regret it.
As for Jefferson's attitudes toward Christianity, I have nothing near enough non-abstract knowledge to articulate a worthwhile opinion, so I'll leave that to you. I will say that as a non-Catholic Jefferson could perhaps not be expected to support the clergy against the philosophies, nor to perceive the bewildering religious quarrels of 17th- and 18th-century France (which were far more complicated than the sectarian conflicts of contemporary England). Again, not so much a fault as a question of where one is coming from and what he is able/willing to sort through. (True, one of the best books on the religious culture of France of the time was written by a Dutch Calvinist, but he's a specialist in the matter... one only has one lifetime.)
Anyway... when all is said and done, thank you for posting these! Because, speaking of the French Revolution, as I think I said before, it is a good idea to put into practice what Joseph de Maistre warned us about over 200 years ago: “[E]verything which good common sense perceives initially as self-evident political truth is nearly always exposed… as not only false, but gruesome.”
No, the French Revolution is not comparable with the American Revolution. Confounding the two is an error made by both liberals and conservatives - liberals, who support the French Revolution on such grounds, and conservatives, who oppose the American Revolution on such grounds. (There are other reasons to oppose the American Revolution - family loyalties come to mind.)
Re: New England vs. Southern theology... it has to do with differing degrees of Calvinism. The Scottish and Scots-Irish Presbyterians did not necessarily try to re-create Calvin's Genevois paradise in their countries, and so many of their old customs survived the Reformation. The same cannot be said of the English Puritans. No, the American Revolution wasn't "revolutionary" - it didn't really change society. But that rotten Puritan element, the seed of its destruction, was there before the start. That is where the traditionalist critiques of the American Revolution get it wrong.
The fascinating thing about this, however, is that the two ends sometimes get mixed up in their deepest loyalties and mentalities. Historically it was the "high church" that was more Catholic/conservative/monarchist and the "low church" that was more Calvinist/liberal/republican, and this is in theory still true, though in America today Southern Presbyterians are far more reliable conservatives than are New England Episcopalians. And this is just one example.
Dr. Wilson, what say you to Jefferson's rather anti-Christian statement that he hoped one day science would cause the belief of Jesus's divinity as Son of God the Father, and birth from the Virgin Mary, to be relegated to the dustbin of long-extinct religious beliefs such as the birth of Jupiter from Minerva?
Probably what he already said, that is, by removing miracles, Jefferson hoped the truths of the Divinely inspired Christian faith would be more believable.
Mr. Maxwell,
What are the problems with "the Hemming story"?
While the regular soldiers are in many ways the ones who win and lose wars, that does not mean that their ideas are the ones the war are being waged for or that will be implemented if they win. The worldview of the soldiers and Marines on the ground in Afghanistan is quite different in many ways from George Bush's or Barack Obama's. Whose worldview sets the strategy?
Unfortunately, wars generally consist of normal men killing and dying each other while being misled about the reasons they are doing so.
The problem with the Hemmings story is that not only does it not fit the circumstantial evidence (ie no evidence of closeness or affection between them) but that having a Jefferson Y DNA is meaningless since there is strong evidence of promiscuity on the part of Sally (Jefferson's nephews, the Carr Bros., both admitted to liaisons with Sally). Of the descendants of two supposed Jefferson bastards who were tested, only one carried the Y chromosome (the failed test subject was of course forgotten), and tellingly, descendants of one other Hemmings son refused to also have their DNA tested - probably because they would have carried Carr or some other Y DNA. All of that taken together, its really unknown who the father is. Too many Jefferson men in and out of the household for the Y DNA to mean anything. It could even be that an earlier generation of Jeffersons (ie that of Col. Peter Jefferson's generation, or even before that) fathered an illegitimate son who was then the father.
Trying to assign parentage stemming from bastard lines is usually a fool's errand in the world of genealogy, short of royal bastards, and even the most strict genealogists will dismiss even those. The standard practice for them is to say the parentage is unknown.
Mr. Maxell,
Thank you for the information. I've never dived into the topic of Jefferson and Hemming, although I have of course heard a variety of theories on it. Of course, if some other member of Jefferson's family was having his way with Hemming, that might raise questions about Thomas Jefferson as well. After all, if Hemming is his property, isn't he responsible for her?
I don't see how the argument that Jefferson wanted to strip the supernatural out of the Bible in order to make Christianity's case more convincing to be a very compelling one. If God isn't a god who can perform miracles, what exactly is He?
Mr. Henderson, what is your source?
Let us not get into the Hemmings matter. It is a red herring raised b y the enemies of Jeffersonian politics to cut off discussion of his principles and his greatness.
95 per cent of what is written about TJ today concerns Hemmings. It has been affirmed in the press that it has been proved that TJ fathered the mullato children. This is a lie. It has not been proven, though shown that some Jefferson family blood appears in some (not all) of the Hemmings. THe people who press this charge have a false notion of antebellum slavery. Mount Vernon and Monticello were not concentration camps---they were the pleasant abodes of the greatest men American ever produced.
The proper response to the whole issue is "So what?"
I will say nothing more on this issue.
Jefferson was a man of his time. He wished to separate superstition from faith. He had a point, even if in the larger sense he was wrong.
The proper response to the whole issue is "So what?"
That's really the whole point, of course. Individual dalliances are fairly common sins in the world of politics, and it's important not to be sanctimonious. We can uphold higher standards where it is prudent, but in general it is not wise to call out peccadilloes unless the man engages in a particularly egregious high-profile affair or happens to be inflicted with a hyperesthesia that makes his adventurism more than an open secret. I feel a little Machiavellian saying that, but the truth is that if you took all the heads of state over the ages you'd have an easier time counting the ones that did NOT cheat on their wives.
Jefferson was a man of his time. He wished to separate superstition from faith. He had a point, even if in the larger sense he was wrong.
From a Catholic or continental point of view, it may be impossible to evaluate Jefferson's intentions, since in America there was nothing like the clerical estate or hierarchy that the European revolutionaries hoped to tear down. One might well speculate, "Had Jefferson been a Frenchman/been raised a Catholic..." but then he wouldn't have been Thomas Jefferson. (After all, one might also speculate, "Had Mike Tyson not bitten that guy's ear off...")
The primary point I wished to make was that Jefferson, though sharing in the Deistic tendencies of his time and frank in private letters, never publicly scoffed at the faith. Compare with that supposed bastion of conservatism John Adams, who became a UNITARIAN, or Alexander Hamilton who cynically used the faith for political purposes., By the early 19th century Southerners had shed their skepticism and become the most orthodox people in America, whereas Northerners traveled ever more deeply into European apostacy.
A historian notes the flow of events. In the early stage of the French revolution Jefferson was an observer in the midst of events. He was not a philosopher viewing from the future what we now know as the finished product "the French Revolution." When he did have that view he recognised and deplored the outcome. It is important to note that at the time Jefferson and other good Americans were observers, just that. Jefferson was not emotionally involved in European politics which he recognised as dissimilar to America. America was a land of freeholders able to enjoy self-government, while Europe was carrying out
an irreconilable conflict between privileged classes and unprivileged rebels. This was a standard American attitude. Note that Northerners like Adams was emotionally involved on the British side, and other radical Northerners on the French side.
In Albert Jay Nock's book on Jefferson he describes an incident which may be apocryphal but carries truth. Mobs are rioting in the streets of Paris. Along comes the American minister, Thomas Jefferson, in his carriage. The mobs part while he quietly passes through and then begin again.
While I remember the professor in my History Methodology class, Dr. "Perk" Hardeman at Cal State Long Beach back in '81 effectively cautioning us budding historians regarding "bias" in historical writing - he advocated a position more in line with what I've read from you, Dr. Wilson, that is, honesty if not absolute full disclosure of one's positions - I don't recall near the emphasis I find here in trying to understand an individual's point of view as he would have experienced it "on the ground", "in real time" (or whatever the latest expressions are).
This, and other articles of yours, highlight for me the fact that all of us, including the men and women who inhabited the past, lived their lives within the confines of their times. Yes, right and wrong remain the same for all of us from age to age, but our ancestors were as entrenched in the times and tides of their eras as much as we are now. I don't know whether Mr. Jefferson was a Christian or not; that's between him and God. That he may not have always expressed himself as a 21st c. evangelical, or, as you have also pointed out elsewhere, that he and his fellow Southern planters didn't have the modern view of slavery and race, should not lead me to an immediate wholesale condemnation of all and sundry. What arrogance! Do I really believe I am unaffected by the attitudes of the times I live in? I, for example, have some notion of the deficits of my generation, the Baby Boomers, with our demanding selfishness, but what will future generations say about us?
Did our predecessors seek to live consistently with what they professed to believe, with a minimum of hypocrisy? After all, we being fallen creatures, are prone to all manner of imperfection! When I evaluate the likes of a Jefferson, Washington, let alone a Jackson or a Lee, I am left in utter amazement that they navigated this life as well and with as much personal integrity left intact as they did.
No, I hope I am left with a bit more humility and will look with added skepticism at the comicbook narratives that pass for "history" these days.
As ever, thanks for articles that challenge my thinking!
I only brought it up because it is the favorite smear of the anti-Jeffersonians. Now it supposedly defines his entire presidency. But there are problems with it purely from the standard of proper genealogy, and I was appalled with some genealogists tripped over themselves to call it true.
Despite Virginia genealogy being my strongest area, I am so disgusted by the acceptance of the Hemming story as 'fact' that I refuse to even get into Jefferson genealogy now.
http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=Ai3AVHltdf39l3Zo0wgQnXCbvZx4?p=thomas+jefferson+jupiter+minerva&toggle=1&cop=mss&ei=UTF-8&fr=yfp-t-701
There are several sources on this web page, as you'll see. I believe I got the relationship of Jupiter to Minerva wrong, as I am no expert in the Roman mythology family tree, but anyway, it seems this was a comment in a letter to John Adams. Yes, as you stated, we should take Mr. Jefferson as an exemplar of Christian virtue over Mr. Adams the Unitarian any day of the week, if we must choose only between the two of them, but I still wish for intellectual honesty in this discussion, if I can be so bold.
Chosen-people-ism, Unitarianism, Mormonism . . . boy-howdy, that Puritanism sure did degenerate into a flea circus of cults, didn't it? Then again, a cult is exactly what Puritanism was to begin with.
Thomas Jefferson was the best of the Enlightened lot in my opinion. Why can't we just say he was one of our own and leave it at that. He was better than Jay, Franklin, Madison, and Hamilton by a long shot. He had a much smaller country to lead than the French. Widely distrubuted property among the American population was still a reality and Jefferson liked it that way and wanted to keep it that way. This in itself has always been a Christian teaching more vital to a free people than having a girlfriend or two. Besides, by all accounts the women Jefferson admired were beautiful, which is more than William Clinton can boast. When are we ever going to wake up and quit believing in these Puritanical morality tales we are fed by our enemies. Sin and death are realities for we mere mortals, that's part of the "good news" too.
Thomas Jefferson was the best of the Enlightened lot in my opinion. Why can't we just say he was one of our own and leave it at that.
Because some of us were raised by parents who were Tories...
Proessor Wilson,
That's telling them. "So what" is the best reponse going to 95% of what's on the "news" shows, too.
I may be off base, but, to try to put things in context, would the bit about Jefferson excising the miracles from the Gospel be akin to the many folks who try to interpret the Old Testament in the light of evolution? Or, for that matter, folks who do extensive feasibility studies on Noah and his ark? Or to explain how the walls of Jericho could have fallen through the physics of transverse vibrations?
Surely there is a fine line in there somewhere, but isn't the tendency to try to make Divine Revelation more palatable for the general intellectual populace as alive and well today as it was in Jefferson's time? Of course an all powerful God could, rationally, create everything in Six Days, flood the earth and miraculously make Noah preserve the species of his desire, and topple Jericho at the mere whim of a thought, but that hasn't stopped folks from trying to come up with scientific reasons and constructs to add "plausibility" to the Bible. Whether you agree with this method or not I don't think you can argue that the majority of its proponents are anti-Christian. They seem to operate from an earnest hope that their actions will result in more people being able to accept those things they find difficult so that they can discover those things that they truly need to hear and understand.
No, it is not. St. Augustine did not believe in a 144-hour creation of the universe no more than 10,000 years ago, nor does the language of the Bible imply it when you look at its translation into English from Hebrew. The Hebrew word for "day" is "yom", which means an undefined span of time, not a literal 24-hour day. Reconciliation of the Word to scientific discoveries in this world is always attempted, and I believe successfully performed, by true believers in the faith, not critics of it. Jefferson fell into the latter category.
If you are saying that the pathetic act of watering down the faith to appease the masses who are moving in a post-Christian direction in their lives, was alive then and needless to say now, then that much I would agree with. I'm sure there were late-18th and early-19th century equivalents of allowing families divorced for reasons other than sexual unfaithfulness, active homosexuals, rock and roll instruments, and thug/harlot clothing styles into the church.
Dr. Wilson,
Your title in all of its irony: Immigration is enriching our American economy and culture!
The 1965 Immigration Reform Act was the to-be-anticipated corollary to the 1964 Civil Rights Acts and its ancillary statutes, all coming one hundred years after Appomattox, fostered by the same spirit. The disgruntled Marxist Bertolt Brecht suggested to his former patrons that they should consider electing a new people. Our overlords are doing just that for at least three reasons: cheap labor on the Republican side; cheap votes on the Democratic side; and demographic war against us "Old Narnians" on the Jacobin ideological side. a side on both sides of the aisle.
Jefferson's enemies, actually the enemies of the remnant of the Jeffersonian tradition, are indeed on the march. On the cover of last months Discover Magazine, there was a fragmented picture of Jefferson. The article itself set up a straw man, namely the breezy words of the Enlightenment which are found in the Preamble of the Declaration, words which Lincoln recast in creating the propositional or creedal nation, and therewith suggested Jefferson as the potential hero; then, however, it reminded the reader that Jefferson, suggesting hypocrite, was also a slave owner, as if this were new. The cover of the same magazine this month has the face of a ruddy Lincoln with a fawning article on the Lincoln of Spielberg's movie.
The price of a soft drink, generically a "coke" or "cold drink"in these climes, tells me all I need to know about Hamiltonian debt and the attendant inflation tax. A cold drink, usually a Nehi Orange, a Big Chief Orange or an Orange Crush cost me one nickle; today, a similar cold drink costs at least a dollar.
Mr. Henderson,
I don't mean to get too far afield from the topic at hand, but I must correct a few points that you made. "Yom" can mean an indefinite period of time. It can also mean a 24 hour day. Saint Augustine is often cited by those who do not believe in six 24-hour days of Creation, as if his views somehow support theirs. In almost all cases, this is a great misreading of Augustine who believed in the instantaneous creation of everything. It's difficult to see how that view supports the idea that creation occured over millions and billions of years.
Mr. Daly,
Your words: "I don't mean to get too far afield..."
Indeed, when like Tootles the Steam Locomotive I dare to venture into the field of buttercups with you, I sense the presence of Dr. Fleming sternly admonishing us to get back on track or risk having our drive wheels removed. Yet, I venture this response to your post supra. That our Lord is the creator of all that is we Christians stipulate, so that we do not fall into the squabble between secular Puritans that if evolution including the requisite amount of time is true then God does not exist and the radical religious Puritans who assert that evolution and the requisite time cannot be true because God does exist. Neither side tolerates ambiguity, and ambiguity is the call to faith. The gap of ambiguity between the 144 hours and the eternal nature of God is so great for us merely creatures and on top of that fallen creatures that all of the galaxies which make up the universe could parade through the gap with infinite space left on each side. I apprehend as a finite and a fallen creature that God spoke that which is into existence in seven "yom." Beyond that, I frankly do not and cannot know and refuse to take sides in a false dichotomy.
Even in the matter of Mr. Jefferson, struggling to get back on track, who is a long way from things God, there is too much that I simply cannot know. What I do think to know is that we Southerners have much in common with our fellow Southerner Jefferson, and much of that which is commonly held is good. At no time did Jefferson become an enemy of the Christian faith. There, I will take my stand.
Dr. Peters. Thank you for responding to some of my notions other than the one on Jefferson.
As to Creation, I prefer to think of Our Lord in his revelations as a poet rather than a literal-minded "scientist."
Dr. Peters, you refer to us as "Old Narnians."
Bravo!!!
"I sense the presence of Dr. Fleming sternly admonishing us to get back on track"
With this thought in mind, I have to stress that my intent was not to move the discussion to Creation. I was just trying to use a modern example to possibly put Jefferson's actions in context.
I have not read the gospel according to Thomas Jefferson, but if all the miracles contained in the canonical gospels were removed, I assume that includes the greastest of them - the Resurrection. What, then, remains? I believe it was Whittaker Chambers who said Christianity without the cross is liberalism.