JOHN WITHERSPOON

PRESBYTERIAN PREACHER AND PATRIOT

 

A Sermon by Rev. James D. Brown

Market Square Presbyterian Church

June 29, 2008

 

The Wisdom of Solomon 6:1-11 and Romans 13:1-14

 

John Witherspoon immigrated to the American colonies in 1768 from his Presbyterian parish in Scotland.  He had been called to be the President of the College of New Jersey, later to become Princeton University.  He soon emerged as a passionate American patriot and in 1776 would be the only minister in the colonies to sign the Declaration of Independence.  His role in the Revolutionary War was to be so significant that the English author Horace Walpole remarked, “Cousin America has eloped with a Presbyterian parson!” [i]    

 

 

Between 1768 and his death in 1794 he had an enormous impact on the new nation of the United States of America.  Just listen to some of his accomplishments: 

 

 

His students included James Madison, the young Aaron Burr,

Henry and Charles Lee of Virginia, and the poets Philip Freneau

and Hugh Brackenridge.  Ten of his former students became

cabinet officers, six were members of the Continental Congress,

thirty-nine became Congressmen and twenty-one sat in the

Senate.  His graduates included twelve governors, and when

the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America met

in 1789 [five years before Market Square Church was founded!],

52 of the 188 delegates had studied under Witherspoon.[ii]

 

Witherspoon was to serve on over 100 committees in the emerging American Congress and during the Revolutionary War he headed what was called the Board of War, functioning somewhat like a modern day Secretary of Defense to whom General George Washington was responsible.

 

This is quite a resume for a preacher who came to American steeped in the general conviction that, as he put it to a group of fellow preachers in Scotland, preachers should refrain from “intermeddling in civil matters.” (Tait, p. 154)  As a young pastor he would have agreed with  the Apostle Paul that “every person should be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God.”

 

One of the interesting things you discover in Witherspoon’s preaching during the heady days of the Revolution is that he felt topics related to the political order were best reserved to times of national observances and celebrations.   The week of the 4^th of July is a good time for us to examine how Witherspoon accounted for his leap into the political maelstrom of his own times.

 

 

Some of his reasoning had to do with his developing understanding of the role of a minister in society.  Witherspoon had a good sense of humor, and I think you’ll enjoy his tongue-in-cheek reaction to a proposal before the Georgia legislature that would have prohibited ministers of the gospel from being eligible to hold any civil office.  The reason given was that ministers should not be diverted from “the great duties of their function.”

 

Witherspoon took the occasion to write a letter to the editor in opposition to this approach.  He asks that if a man was qualified to hold office before being ordained, what is there about ordination that would deprive him of this right.

 

Is not this inflicting a penalty which always supposes an offense?

Does his calling and profession render him stupid or ignorant?...

Perhaps it may be thought that they are excluded from civil

authority, that they may be more fully and constantly employed 

their  spiritual functions. If this had been the ground of it, how much

more properly would it have appeared, as an order of an ecclesiastical

body with respect to their own  members.[iii]

 

Witherspoon is now on a roll.  He concludes by suggesting that the Georgia legislature should revise the  proposed amendment to exclude clergy with the proviso that “if at any time he shall be completely deprived of the clerical character by those by whom he was invested with it, as by disposition for cursing and swearing, drunkenness or uncleanness, he shall then be fully restored to all the privileges of a free citizen; his offence shall no more be remembered against him; but he may be chosen either to the Senate or House of Representatives, and shall be treated with all  the respect due  to his brethren, the other members of Assembly.” 

 

In other words, once a minister makes his mark as a scoundrel and is defrocked, then he’s fit to hold office.  I should note that Georgia came around to Witherspoon’s way of thinking and in 1798 included a strong declaration of the rights of religious leaders in its third Constitution.

 

A good way to discover the theological foundation for Witherspoon’s evolving understanding of the connection between the Christian faith and the civil order is in a close examination of a sermon he preached on May 17, 1776 on the occasion of a time of fasting called for by the Continental  Congress.  His sermon title is instructive:  “The Dominion of Providence over the Passions of Men.”  The theological doctrine of providence lies at the very center of the Christian faith for Witherspoon.

 

Witherspoon has a very high conception of God’s sovereignty.  He understands God’s power to be absolute, with human passions and actions ultimately under God’s sway.  God is creator, sustainer and governor of all things.  As he puts it bluntly, God “overrules all his creatures, and all their actions.”[iv]

 

I find myself thinking in terms that would not have been familiar to Witherspoon, but which point to his deeply held conviction that God’s purposes are being worked out in time, in the course of human history.  It’s as if God’s providence is a vast magnetic field in which at any moment in time humans who know themselves to be exerting their free will are also being molded and guided and shaped into what God intends.  In this sense, God’s providence trumps free will and even overrides a Scriptural admonition about Christians being subject to the civil authorities.  In the end, God prevails.  God’s providence is what matters most.  As we heard in the Wisdom of Solomon, “the Lord of all will not stand in awe of anyone.”

 

Let’s look to some of the specifics Witherspoon spells out in his sermon.  Witherspoon reiterates that it is God who is “the supreme disposer of all events.”  So how are we to know how we fit in God’s scheme of things?  There are three “ifs” to be accounted for:  “If your cause is just, —if your principles are pure,

—and if your conduct is prudent, you need not fear the magnitude of opposing hosts.” (Tait, p. 157) 

 

Witherspoon has now come to his central point, that God is wrapped up in the politics of the day, and that a believer with a discerning eye can lay claim to God’s cause in the world.  Let’s turn to the quote from this sermon found in your bulletin today.  It’s here that Witherspoon makes his case for injecting politics into his preaching:

 

You are my witnesses that this is the first time of my introducing

any  political subject into the pulpit.  [Witherspoon’s biographers

suggest that he may be stretching this point a bit!]  At this season,

however, it is not only lawful but necessary, and I willingly embrace

the opportunity of declaring my opinion without hesitation, that the

cause in which America is now in arms, is the cause of justice, of

liberty, and of human nature….The confederacy of the colonies,

has not been the effect of pride, resentment, or sedition, but of a

deep and general conviction, that our civil and religious liberties, 

and consequently in a great measure the temporal and eternal

happiness of us and our posterity depended on the issue.

 

The knowledge of God and his truths have from the beginning

of the world been chiefly, if not entirely, confined to those parts

of the earth, where some degree of liberty and political justice

were to be seen….[In truth] there is not a single instance in history

in which civil liberty was lost, and religious liberty preserved

entire.  If therefore we yield up our temporal property, we at the

same time deliver our conscience into bondage.

                                                                                    (Tait, p. 158)

 

For Witherspoon religious and civil liberty are bound up as one.  God’s purposes include freedom for individuals to choose the path of faith that is opening before them. Therefore, he could throw his lot with those rebelling against the British monarchy in the confidence that he was swimming in the tide of God’s providence at that very moment in time.

 

Needless to say, this sort of providential theology is fraught with peril, meaning that the three “ifs” are very, very important.  And a good deal of humility is always the order of the day.  This brings me to several lessons we would do well to learn from John Witherspoon.

First, a certain modesty of spirit is evident in Witherspoon even as he becomes a leading proponent of the Revolution.  All along he emphasized a healthy piety based on belief in a God who governs all things.  By allowing God to be God he saw the need to restrain the excesses involved in warfare.  In our day we need to listen carefully when he says that “no soldier [is] so undaunted as the pious man”—suggesting a willingness to fight for one’s convictions.  But such a person, according to Witherspoon, never fights “till it is necessary, and …ceases to fight as soon as the necessity is over.”  (Tait, p. 18)

 

He understands that King George was loathe to give up the colonies, and counsels against “railing at the king personally, or even his ministers and the parliament, and the people of Britain, as so many barbarous savages.”  After all, he says, “many of their actions have probably been worse than their intentions.”  (Tait, p. 58)

 

Witherspoon was certain of God’s hand in the liberation of the colonies—“Nothing,” he said in his sermon on May 17, 1776, “appears to me more manifest than that the separation of this country from Britain, has been of God.”  Still, there must be “no vain-glorious boasting” that America has won the war.  The only proper response for those fortunate enough to remain alive is humble thanksgiving because God “hath spared us as monuments of his mercy.”  (Tait, p. 164)  We do well to follow leaders in our own day whose spirits match Witherspoon’s in this regard.

 

Finally, we need to distance ourselves from those in today’s church and society who relish painting everything in black and white, pure good and pure evil.  Witherspoon, in spite of his unflagging patriotism, never gave in to the temptation some of his contemporaries fell victim to—that of describing the Revolutionary War “as the decisive battle between Christ (America) and the anti-Christ (Britain).”  Witherspoon’s views of the place of America in the world were at once “more modest, more this worldly, and more contingent on the piety” of the people who would come after him—contingent on the qualities of character evidenced by you and by me.  (Tait, p. 172)

 

After the War Witherspoon returned to the College of New Jersey, teaching and preaching as he always had.  In his later years he became blind and had to be led into the pulpit.  His breathed his last on November 15, 1794.  That day his final request was to have the latest newspaper read to him. 

 

 

MARKET SQUARE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

John Witherspoon: Presbyterian Preacher & Patriot