The Highway Forums General Discussion Open Forum "The Declaration of Independence" by David W. Hall

This year, thankfully, is giving rise to many reviews of the Declaration of Independence. Toward that end, we are republishing a few resources to help this who wish to commemorate, leading up to the July 4th celebration. These posts are collected in a small volume, Declaring Independence: Revealing Dependence (2025) if you or friends wish to have the series as a package.

The Declaration of Independence

In both the documents themselves, and in the recorded statements of the leaders, it is clear that the influence of the Reformation continued to impact the ideas of America’s founding. Douglas Kelly recognizes covenantal argumentation in the Declaration of Independence and notes how the actions of George III were cited as violations of the limited charter of government, amounting to tyranny.[1] In a list similar to the grievance lists of earlier British Puritans, Americans confidently repudiated their king in terms that reflected a theological tradition that was over two centuries old.[2]

The Declaration of Independence (see the text with emphasis added in the next post) illustrates at least five Calvinistic themes.

1. It refers to the transcendent basis for government in its two opening sections. As is well known, the Declaration not only roots itself in the providence of human events but also grounds the powers of government in transcultural and universal notions as provided by the “laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” The phrase “and of Nature’s God,” in addition to the “the laws of Nature,” signifies that the Declaration reaches beyond Deism and the glorification of reason. The authors could have—many moderns likely would have—simply omitted any reference to theological notions. However, they thought such transcendent principles were essential for intelligibility by their countrymen and the best justification possible for armed resistance. A document so powerful, if its authors hoped for widespread approval, simply could not fail to reference the dominant theology of the day—thus the reference to Nature’s God.

The second paragraph refers to self-evident truths.[3] These, the founders believed, were unquestionable. Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration used theological wording, i. e., “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable,” which was later neutralized a bit to become the well-known basis for truths as “self-evident.” Further, they maintained that the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were unalienable rights that were endowed by their Creator. Happiness as understood in pre-Revolution America was the well-known result of a virtuous life not a libertine freedom or license. God was not only transcendent, he was also the Creator and Donor of human rights. God, not blind nature, was the Guarantor of civil conditions, and as the universal Creator he endowed certain liberties that transcend space and time. That “Governments are instituted among Men” was also close enough in substance to remind the reader of earlier language in the Westminster Confession of Faith and other Puritan treatises on civil government. The penultimateparagraph of the Declaration refers to God as “the Supreme Judge of the World,” who had been frequently invoked in those terms by various American Calvinistic theologians and sermons. Other denominations could embrace similar language—one basis for its wide acceptance—but much of the theological phraseology in these documents is derived from Reformation theology.

2. The Declaration then moves on to address derived powers, which stem from the consent of the governed. Many scholars now recognize that the “consent” motif was developed by Reformation advances to overthrow monopolistic powers.[4] In this context the Declaration refers to “the right of the People to alter or abolish” an existing government. It should be recalled that prior to the Reformation no such right to revolution was admitted. Despite a few medieval precursors, a full justification of the right to revolt did not arise until the writings of Calvin’s disciples—Beza, Ponet, Goodman, and the Vindiciae. Three times the Declaration referred to “tyrant” or “tyranny,” leaving the clear impress of the Vindication Against the Tyrants. The language of biblical support for revolution did not emanate primarily from Catholics, Lutherans, Anglicans, or Baptists at the time of composition, although they all endorsed Christ’s saying, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s.”

3. The Declaration condemns “absolute Despotism” and reminds citizens of their duty to overthrow a king who would not submit to the law of the land. The call for King George III to submit to the law was an echo of Rutherford’s Lex Rex. Rutherford had earlier written that the king must be circumscribed by constitutions and other legal limits. The reiteration of the principle that the king is under the law, not over it, was widely accepted in early American culture because of the spread of that idea through the writings of Calvinists such as Rutherford and Buchanan. The Declaration includes the Reformation maxim that “any government is better than no government at all” and “Mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable.” Within Calvinism’s long tradition, rebellion could never be taken up lightly. It had to be intricately and exhaustively justified, and even then required nationwide repentance and fasting (see next chapter).

4. Separated powers and checks and balances were additional political pillars of the Declaration. Condemnations of British rule invariably carried a litany of acts whereby the King had abused his power. According to the Declaration (and numerous sermons a generation before it), George III made judges dependent on his own will (for their pay for starters); he created new offices that became “Swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance; and he imposed Standing armies.” To the colonials, these and other abuses were clear instances of the violation of separation of powers. When absolute power is lodged in a single individual, checks and balances become ineffective, in fact meaningless. Viewing the tripartite government in Geneva as a model, bolstered by Montesquieu’s popular theories, and with preaching on the subject by the likes of Francis Alison, Americans in 1776 wanted governors limited and their powers expressly divided among independent authorities. To Calvinists, any single man, even the best intentioned, was by his fallen nature untrustworthy and self-interested. Had the founders believed in the perfectibility of man, the Declaration would have looked substantially different.

5. The last paragraph of the Declaration deals with limited government. The Continental Congress based its formulation on the “Authority of the good People of these Colonies” and lodged other responsibilities with independent states. These decentralized ruling units, the independent states (a phrase used three times in this closing paragraph), had “full Power to Levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which INDEPENDENT STATES may of right do.” Three theological ideas are stressed in this final paragraph as the moral basis for the independence of states: the “supreme Judge of the world,” “divine providence,” and “sacred” honor. God was not absent from the Declaration, and the understanding of God at the time had altered little from the theology of the Swiss Reformation.

Buttressing the Declaration, according to Douglas Kelly, are other “underlying Calvinist themes [which] permeate the founding documents.” Among these are “the two-powers theory of church and state and the covenantal-conciliar thesis of limitation of governmental powers in terms of divine law. Throughout the carefully ordered separation of powers with checks and balances, deliberately restraining a more unified operation of government, we see a reflection of the Calvinist doctrine of the fallenness of human nature, with its inevitable tendency of an ascendant arm of government to abuse power in a tyrannical direction.”[5]

When George Washington, who quickly became known as a leading spokesman for the principles of the Declaration, spoke of “providence,” the theological evolution of this term cannot be ignored. “Providence” had been a major theme of the theological tracts and preaching by predominantly Calvinistic ministers in America for over 150 years. Washington declared that no one had a stronger reliance on God as an “all-wise and powerful dispenser” of providence than he did. To those under his command, during the hard days of 1777, he preached hope based on providence: “A superintending Providence is ordering everything for the best. . . . . [I]n due time all will end well.” The next year, he ascribed credit for success thus far to “Providence,” and in 1779 he wrote to his compatriots, “I look upon every dispensation of Providence as designed to answer some valuable purpose, and I,” sounding almost as Calvinist as Calvin, “hope I shall always possess a sufficient degree of fortitude to bear without murmuring any stroke which may happen.”[6] This was the same Washington who uttered the sentiment that America could not be or remain a blessed nation if she jettisoned her piety.

While it is too much for Reformation thought to claim exclusive paternity for the Declaration, it is too little to ignore its influence.
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[1] Douglas Kelly, The Emergence of Liberty in the Modern World (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 1992), 133.

[2] See “The Parliamentary Background of the Westminster Assembly” in John L. Carson and David W. Hall, eds., To Glorify and Enjoy God (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1994), 267-300, for the pertinent petitions and bills to Charles I, 1640-1644. Michael P. Zuckert, Natural Rights and the New Republicanism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 56-62, also provides helpful information on the parliamentary backdrop for the period.

[3] A web site (https://founding.com/founders-library/preachers-pen/) provides hyperlinked commentary to key phrases used by pastors in the Declaration.

[4] Oxford Fellow Jonathan Clark’s The Language of Liberty, 1660-1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), which we have cited heavily in earlier chapters, asserts that the “consent of the governed” idea is properly derived from the covenant theology of the late sixteenth century.

[5] Douglas Kelly, The Emergence of Liberty in the Modern World (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 1992), 135.

[6] I am indebted for the quote in this paragraph to Marvin Olasky, The American Leadership Tradition: Moral Vision from Washington to Clinton(New York: The Free Press, 1999), 7.