7 Faiths of the Founding Fathers - Perimeter Church

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A History of Christianity in America • Part VII: Faiths of the Founding Fathers 10God, and there it resets. It honours Reason as the choicest gift of God to man and thefaculty by which [man] is enabled to contemplate the power, wisdom, and goodnessof the Creator, displayed in the creation. ... It avoids all presumptuous beliefs andrejects, as the [preposterous] inventions of men, all books pretending to berevelation.”Faiths of the Founding MothersThe Orthodox Impulse.• The conservative gender.• Martha Custis Washington.• Why were women (generally) more conservative?(1)Deism and Freemasonry.(2)The college connection.(3)The Revolutionary orientation.Abigail Adams.• An apostle of Unitarianism.• A religious pluralist:• Abigail to her sister (1786): “The Universal Parent hasdispensed his blessing throughout all creation... [including]Christian, Jew, or Turk [i.e., Muslim].... To the glory of thepresent age they are shaking off that narrow contracted spirit ofpriestcraft and usurpation which has for so many agestyrannized over the minds of mankind, and deluged the worldin blood.... Religion [should be] a wise and benevolent system,calculated... to harmonize mankind to the temper of its greatAuthor, who came to make peace, and not to destroy.”• A theological Unitarian:• “There is not any reasoning which can convince me, contrary to my Senses, thatThree is one, and one is three.... The first commandment forbids the worship of butone God.”Dolley Payne Madison.• A Quaker heritage.• A “liberal Christian.”
A History of Christianity in America • Part VII: Faiths of the Founding Fathers 11Post-Script: Religious Skepticism, the Founding Fathers, andChristian ApologeticsMen of Their Times.• Good (but unorthodox) men.• The spirit of the times.The Legacy of the Scientific Revolution.• A naturalistic orientation.The Spirit of the Enlightenment.• Enlightenment humanism.• The Catholic legacy.• Superstition, irrationality, and imperialism.• Protestant dogmas.• Sola scriptura.• The battle for the Bible.• The “problem” of Calvinism.The State of Christian Apologetics.• In an age in which skepticism was growing, Christian apologetics was lagging far behindthe times.• The front-line issues in the late 1700s:• The divine inspiration of the Bible and its accurate preservation and transmissionthrough the centuries.• The historicity of Jesus.• The controversy over slavery.• The traditional class system and the socio/political status quo.• In the mid-to-late 1800s, Christians were unprepared for the challenges of Darwiniannaturalistic evolutionary theory.• The Christian defense against modernism.• Twentieth century Christian apologetics.• G.K. Chesterton.• C.S. Lewis.• Josh McDowell, Francis Schaeffer, Norman Geisler, et al.• Intelligent Design theory.
Page 1 and 2: Part VIIFaiths of the Founding Fath
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7 Faiths of the Founding Fathers - Perimeter Church

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