Green and Blair believed in God’s sovereignty to command the obedience of all nations. Ultimately, their sermons are just longer reflections on what the psalmist said in so few words: “For dominion belongs to the LORD and he rules over the nations.” But notice that their point–and that of the biblical text–is not devoid of grace. Certainly, God is just, but he is also merciful. For Blair, if he and his countrymen would only show “real contrition for, and conversion from our evil ways, we may hope for the blessing of God” (30). This is not the evangelism of “winsome politics” but simply a political application of Matthew 4:17: “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.”

On a late spring day in 1798, two ministers stepped behind pulpits to deliver important messages to their congregations. Both were Presbyterians and in Philadelphia, a city of importance for both the nation (it was the capital city at the time) and their new denomination (the PCUSA). Rev. Ashbel Green was at his home church, historic Second Presbyterian. In 1789, it hosted the PCUSA’s very first General Assembly. Just blocks away, Samuel Blair was addressing those gathered at First Presbyterian, an older congregation pastored by the eminent Rev. John Ewing who was near the end of his ministry.

The occasion for this midweek service was a solemn one: a national day of “fasting, humiliation, and prayer.” The young republic was facing its first major international crisis. 

Seven years earlier, the newly formed French Republic declared war against Great Britain. When President George Washington announced an official position of neutrality in the conflict while also sanctioning the Jay Treaty with Britain, many in France’s revolutionary government saw it as a betrayal by their one-time ally. Frustrated by America’s noninterference, French privateers began raiding American merchant ships who were trading with the enemy. When America stopped paying its war debts in response, the two nations moved toward the brink of war.

International pressure produced an ominous mood in the country, and Adams called on America’s spiritual capital for aid. Far from seeing it as an inappropriate syncretism of church and state, these men believed encouraging their congregations to greater piety was both a religious and civil duty. Indeed, both Green and Blair would serve as Chaplains to the House of Representatives, demonstrating their commitment to a harmonious relationship between the eternal and temporal spheres for mutual benefit.

France, by their estimation, had violated this divinely appointed order by rejecting God and embracing “infidel reason” (Green, 46). America, by contrast, had so far resisted the atheistic impulse, holding fast to Nature and Nature’s God from its founding. 

These addresses are worth studying for many reasons. Their comparisons of the French and American revolutions are fascinating, but my intentions are more pastoral and, I hope, relevant: the remarks by these ordinary pastors, and the ease they felt expressing them behind the pulpit no less, reveals a serious deficiency with the present state of political theology in our churches. The problem is twofold.

The first part relates to biblical interpretation and application. For sermons addressing national concerns, Blair and Green both chose passages from the Old Testament: Isaiah 1:5 and 2 Chronicles 15:2 respectively. The reason why Blair and Green picked these texts and the point they intended to make is straightforward: just as God dealt with Israel, blessing or cursing her for the people’s attention to the law, so too would God deal with America.

Sirens immediately begin to ring in our modern ears at such a proposition. That ministers would try and apply lessons from Old Testament Israel to the American republic is a hermeneutical Rubicon no self-respecting preacher would dare cross today. Israel occupied a special place in God’s redemptive plan. America does not. Any comparison between the two is not only flawed but dangerous. Or so we’re told. 

But invoking a comparison between Israel and America did not mean these ministers were ignorant of other significant differences. Israel was a “theocracy” while America is not, admitted Green (11). Israel’s polity flowed from the institution of “a complicated ritual of ceremonial observances and temporary regulations,” he explains, which reinforced God’s position not only as the common “supreme governor of the world” but also as their unique “civil chief” (11). In this way, Israel was manifestly different from her peers then and now. Moreover, the salvific purpose of the covenant-nation of Israel presently continues in the international covenant-people of the church–a key theme of the biblical canon not lost on Green or Blair.

But the Israel of the Bible was also one nation among many, all of which appear to be held by a common and divinely ordained standard to obey the moral law. This is Green’s main argument, which he proves by pointing to both sacred and secular history. “What was the cause of the destruction of the Canaanite (sic) nations?” he asks. After all, they did not have the “special revelation” afforded to Israel. Yet, God destroyed them because they violated “those great principles of religion and morality which the light of nature taught” (25).

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