The message on the church sign read, “The last four letters of American are I CAN.” According to noted church historian George Marsden, this church sign reveals much about the American religious tradition. Lecturing for the Jonathan Edwards Center at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School on November 3, Marsden compared and contrasted the lives of Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Edwards to highlight the ongoing need for Christians to learn from the insights of Edwards.
The church sign, patriotically emphasizing the potential of human achievement without reference to faith, reveals an American church rather than a Christian nation—a church confident in itself, instead of dependent upon God. This kind of church, according to Marsden, embodies the deistic ideas of one of America’s founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, not the Christian truths of one its earliest theologians, Jonathan Edwards.
Both Franklin and Edwards were born into strict Calvinistic homes in the beginning of the 18th century and responded to the influence of the Enlightenment. Franklin became a proponent of Enlightenment thinking, while Edwards critiqued many of its foundational assumptions. Franklin believed the universe was the creation of an impersonal God, governed by natural laws, understood through science, and controlled by technology. Religion, for Franklin, played a supplemental role in human flourishing. It primarily represented a superstitious distraction from the promise of a better world created through instrumental reason. So a church influenced by Franklin’s thinking could post a slogan that holds out the promise of what is possible through human determination and say nothing of the redemption that God has accomplished through Jesus.
Edwards, on the other hand, saw the universe as the creation of a personal God, the ongoing and intimate expression of his love. Faith enabled a relationship with God, by which one could experience the redemptive love and transformative beauty of Jesus. Marsden argued that this beauty, understood by Edwards as an active beauty that captivates affections, needs to be rediscovered as a theological category.
After Marsden’s lecture, TGC council member Colin Smith, senior pastor of the Orchard Evangelical Free Church in Arlington Heights, Illinois, served as a respondent. He asked: What can help a person with the religion of Franklin transition to the faith of Edwards? Smith agreed with Marsden’s assessment of the pervasiveness of Franklin’s influence in American Christianity. The gospel, Smith argued, is often presented as the good news of God’s provision for a way of salvation, from which he now stands removed yet benevolent. In the words often credited to Franklin, the good news is that God helps those who help themselves, rather than the biblical gospel than an active God invaded history through his Son, Jesus, to save those who cannot save themselves.
Acknowledging the inability to provide a mechanistic formula, Smith identified three means for pastors to lead people from the religion of Franklin to the faith of Edwards. First, we must prioritize the proclamation of Jesus as Lord and resist the kind of preaching that simply teaches people how to cope with stress, manage their finances, or fix their marriages. Second, we must humbly acknowledge our need for God’s grace. Franklin’s religion makes no room for sin and so fails to experience the truth of Jesus that those who are forgiven much love much. Third, nothing undermines the superficial religion of Franklin more than the faith of a suffering man or woman who can sing Habakkuk’s song: “though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines . . . yet I will rejoice in the Lord” (Hab. 3:17-18).
Listening to these lectures, it was hard for me to imagine the difficulty facing Colin Smith in responding to George Marsden, a world-renowned Edwards biographer. Nevertheless, Smith delivered an excellent response by demonstrating the wisdom of this lecture series that combines the historical and pastoral disciplines. As a student of Edwards, I was initially exposed in an American literature class to the cold caricature of him as a dark, deterministic theologian. Yet as many others have discovered upon further reading, Marsden brings to light Edwards’s theology of the redemptive love and transformative beauty of Christ.
For many, Franklin’s ideas have proved empty to the core. The removal of “superstitious” distractions has not addressed the verifiable reality of the sinfulness of human hearts. The reduction of self to the mere physical has advanced our understanding of the body, but it has given little insight on how to love one another. The growth of technology allows travel and communication that would astound Franklin, but the consequences of weaponry and environmental disaster are equally hard to grasp. Therefore, it’s particularly sad when churches, whose Scriptures speak frankly about the depravity of the human heart and speak hopefully about the transformative beauty of Christ, reinforce the empty message of human achievement without reference to faith.
Are we reinforcing an empty promise or proclaiming a beautiful alternative?
Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?
In an age of faith deconstruction and skepticism about the Bible’s authority, it’s common to hear claims that the Gospels are unreliable propaganda. And if the Gospels are shown to be historically unreliable, the whole foundation of Christianity begins to crumble.
