Note: One of the best historical reviews I've read
AMERICA 250 by Shane Harris
From AMAC Magazine (April 2026)
Two and a half centuries ago, a provincial people on the edge of a vast continent
declared something astonishingly radical: that government derives its just powers
from the consent of the governed. These brave patriots—farmers, bankers,
merchants, frontiers men—did not merely protest taxation or quarrel with
imperial policy. They announced to the world that political authority itself rests
not in dynasty, not in inherited rank, and not in force, but in the God-given rights
of the governed themselves.
In our own time, the phrase American Exceptionalism is often invoked
casually or dismissed reflexively to describe this revolutionary idea and the
grand experiment in self-government that followed. But in this year marking
the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it is incumbent
upon all Americans to probe deeper into that concept. What, precisely, makes
America exceptional? What distinguishes it not only in rhetoric, but in structure,
endurance, and consequence? The answer begins with history.
A People Prepared for Independence
By the time Thomas Jefferson wrote that governments derive “their just
powers from the consent of the governed” in the colonists’ break-up
letter with England, he was describing a political reality Americans had
already been practicing for generations. The colonies were not passive
outposts administered in every detail from London. They had
assemblies, charters, town meetings, and long traditions of local self-rule. The
Mayflower Compact of 1620 reflected an early instinct that political
authority arises from covenant and mutual consent. Over time, that instinct
hardened into expectation. John Adams later observed that
“the Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was
in the minds and hearts of the people.” Independence in 1776 was not the
sudden birth of liberty from abstraction, but rather the formal
declaration of a political entity that already existed. The colonists believed
they were defending the historic rights of Englishmen even as they
extended those rights into something more universal.
American Exceptionalism, then, did not spring from myth or
improvisation. It emerged from a particular people shaped by particular
institutions and experiences—namely, those of Christian Europe, and England
in particular.
English Liberty and Christian Moral Formation
The American founding and revolutionary spirit grew from the soil of
English common law, the legacy of Magna Carta, and the constitutional
struggles of the 17th century. The English Bill of Rights of 1689 limited
royal authority and affirmed protections long before 1776. Colonial
charters carried these traditions across the Atlantic, where they were adapted to
new conditions and expanded. Equally important was the moral
framework within which these political ideas operated. The society that
produced the American Revolution was overwhelmingly shaped by Chris
tian belief. Local churches structured community life, and the language of
covenant, sin, and moral accountability permeated public discourse. The
Great Awakening reinforced the idea that individuals stood equal before
God and were personally responsible for their conduct.
That moral formation mattered because republican government
presumes restraint. It assumes that citizens can govern themselves before
they presume to govern others. As John Adams wrote, “Our Constitution
was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate
to the government of any other.” Adams was not calling for theocracy, but he was
recognizing that liberty untethered from moral discipline degenerates quickly into
disorder and tyranny. To describe America as exceptional is not to claim moral
perfection. Rather, America is exceptional because it was established by a people
shaped by Christian moral assumptions. It was this framework that made
possible a political order capable of sustaining liberty on a scale history
had never before seen.
The Architecture of Liberty
If the Declaration articulated America’s founding principles, the
Constitution secured them. Signed in 1787 and ratified the following year,
it remains the oldest written national constitution still in force. It is also one of the
shortest governing charters in the world. In just a few thousand words, the
US Constitution established a structure durable enough to survive civil war,
economic depression, world conflict, and dramatic social change—amended
when necessary, but never replaced. The framers were students of history.
They understood that republics often collapse into factionalism or dictatorship.
Their solution was not to rely on virtue alone, nor to issue sweeping guarantees
that could be ignored when inconvenient. Instead, they designed a structure that
restrained power by dividing it. James Madison explained the logic behind this
approach in Federalist No. 51: “If men were angels, no government would be
necessary.” In other words, because men are not angels, power must be checked by
power. Congress was divided into two chambers, each elected differently and
endowed with substantial authority. The president would be
independently elected, armed with a veto, and not dependent on the legislature
for his tenure. The judiciary, meanwhile, would stand apart, insulated
from political retaliation. Authority would be further divided between
federal and state governments. Ambition would counteract ambition.
Former Justice Antonin Scalia once observed that Americans often
misunderstand what makes their Constitution distinctive. When asked
why America is such a free country, he explained, many instinctively point to
freedom of speech or the protections of the Bill of Rights.
Those protections are essential. But, as Scalia bluntly put it, “if you
think that a bill of rights is what sets us apart, you’re crazy. Every banana
republic in the world has a bill of rights.” On paper, even the Soviet
Union’s constitution contained impressive guarantees. They were, however,
what the Founders would have called "Parchment Guarantees.:
What distinguished the American system was not the poetry of its
promises but the architecture of its government. In much of Europe, the
executive emerges from the legislature and can be dismissed by it. In many
systems, upper chambers are largely ceremonial.
The American Constitution, by contrast, makes lawmaking
deliberately difficult. It requires concurrence across institutions that represent
different constituencies and are elected on different cycles. Critics call this grid
lock. The framers called it protection of liberty.
The Constitution’s brevity and durability testify to its design. In a
world crowded with charters that promise everything and deliver little,
the US Constitution says relatively little and enforces much. Its genius
lies not in expansive declarations but in the sober arrangement of powers.
The Ordeal of Union
No honest account of American Exceptionalism can ignore the central contra
diction of the early republic. Slavery, present in the colonies long before
independence, endured into the life of the new nation. The same Constitution
that established ordered liberty also contained compromises with a system
fundamentally at odds with the principle that “all men are created equal.”
What makes the American story distinctive is not merely the existence
of that contradiction, but the manner in which it was confronted. By 1861,
sectional tensions had hardened into secession and war. The conflict that
followed was a catastrophic internal reckoning. More than 600,000
Americans died in four years of brutal combat—an almost
unimaginable toll in a nation of roughly 31 million people.
Few republics survive civil war. Fewer emerge with their constitutional
framework intact. The United States did both. The Union was preserved,
slavery was abolished, and the Constitution was amended rather than
abandoned. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments expanded
the meaning of citizenship and liberty within the existing constitutional order.
In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln reflected that if
“every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn
with the sword,” the judgment would be just. That language was unmistakably
biblical. Lincoln did not portray the nation as innocent, but as accountable.
At Gettysburg, he called the conflict a test of whether “any nation so
conceived and so dedicated can long endure,” and he summoned the
country to a “new birth of freedom.” The war did not repudiate the
founding; it renewed it. This was the terrible price Americans paid for
human bondage—an entire generation of young men lost in a brutal
slaughter of father against son, brother against brother.
But the framework of the nation proved strong enough to survive its
greatest trial and to correct itself with out collapsing into permanent
despotism or fragmentation. This alone makes America exceptional among the
nations of the world.
The American Century
In the 20th century, the United States moved from continental power to
global actor. Twice in a generation, it crossed oceans to confront totalitarian
regimes that had plunged entire continents into darkness.
In World War II, American industry and manpower helped defeat
fascism. In its aftermath, the United States financed European
reconstruction through the Marshall Plan, helped stabilize currencies under the
Bretton Woods system, and anchored a global order that encouraged trade
and cooperation. The Cold War that followed was not only a military contest but a
test of systems. The United States contained and ultimately outlasted Soviet
communism, demonstrating that free societies generate prosperity and innovation
at a scale command economies cannot match.
Once again, the United States emerged from this test of wills
stronger than before. Under the ominous specter of nuclear Armageddon,
Americans nevertheless created the highest standard of living in world
history, landed a man on the moon, revolutionized medicine, invented the
Internet, and literally built the future. The global order that emerged
after 1945 has not been flawless, and American interventions have some
times been misguided. Yet the broader pattern is impossible to ignore.
During the era of American leader ship, extreme poverty declined
dramatically across much of the world. In recent decades alone, roughly a billion
people have been lifted out of a state of destitution—a transformation
unprecedented in human history. Expanding trade, technological innovation,
and relative geopolitical stability, all underwritten in significant measure by
American power, drove that change.
250 Years Later
As the nation approaches the 250th anniversary of the signing of the
Declaration, many of us are faced with the temptation either to
indulge in nostalgia or to fixate exclusively on shortcomings.
But a better approach is to take stock of what has endured.
The Constitution drafted in Philadelphia in 1787 still governs a nation
of more than 330 million people. Its structure continues to channel political
conflict into lawful processes rather than coups or purges.
To speak of American exceptionalism is not to deny complexity or
ignore failure. It is to recognize that a particular people, drawing on English
constitutionalism and Christian moral formation, constructed a durable
framework of ordered liberty, endured civil war, and, at the height of their
nation’s influence, fostered an era of global flourishing unmatched in scope.
When Lincoln called the United States “the last best hope of earth”—a
phrase echoed by Ronald Reagan a century later—he was not claiming
that America was flawless. He was asserting that constitutional
self-government on this scale remains rare—indeed, exceptional—in the history
of nations. Today, 250 years after 1776, the question is not whether America
has been perfect. No nation is. The question is whether we understand
the great blessings that we have inherited—and whether we
possess the moral fiber and civic stamina required to preserve them.
THE BIRTHMARK
A BEAUTIFUL, TRUE ADOPTION STORY
NOBODY KNOWS
By Ruth Lyberger September 1999
[Birth Mother of Roger Meir]
Nobody knows what a
mother goes through
When she gives up her baby so tiny and new
Nobody knows what
lies ahead
Sometimes a life that the mother dreads
Nobody knows the hurt
and the pain
Of not knowing if she will ever see him again
Nobody knows how it
feels
To know that time does not heal
Knowing your son is
somewhere out there
Not knowing what his parents will share
Nobody knows how a
mother longs
To know her son and to see how he’s done
Nobody knows if
you’ll ever meet
The son you gave up when you were weak
Nobody knows what joy
it is to
Hear the words “I forgave you”
Nobody knows what God
has in store
He gave me a son and a whole lot more
Nobody knows how
happy I’ve been
To meet my son and start over again
Only God knows that
this was His plan
And now with joy and love we are both in God’s hand
So till you walk in
this mother’s shoes
You’ll never know
what she’s been through
THE ERRORS OF THE GAP THEORY IN GENESIS 1
Scofield
and McGee – Scofield first published his cross
reference Bible in 1905, and revised it with dispensational notes in 1917.
McGee began his Thru the Bible ministry in 1967. Both were influential about
the Gap Theory, based on a misinterpretation of two Hebrew phrases.
Scofield
annotates Genesis 1:2 to the effect that the word
translated was in that verse can
also mean became. Now if we read ‘and the earth became without form and void,’ it does
suggest that something evil happened, something against what we know as the
perfect character of God and His works, and this paves
the way for a theory about pre-Adamic beings in a world spoilt by Satan, before
the Fall of man recorded in Genesis 3.
What
are the facts about the Hebrew word hayethah? First, it normally means ‘was,’ not ‘became.’ A typical example is Genesis 29:17 which says Rachel was (hayethah) beautiful and well favored. This
word hayethah is
the one used about the earth in Genesis 1:2, and there is no difference in the
construction of ‘Rachel was beautiful and well favored,’ and ‘the earth was without
form, and void.’ There is therefore no need to suggest that it
has the rare meaning ‘became’ on the
grounds of context.
But is there something about the actual words translated ‘without form, and void’ which would force us to choose the rarer reading? Scofield seemed to think so, probably because he took the Hebrew words tohu wa bohu to mean ‘chaotic.’ Today, this word is very negative, but of course the Hebrew doesn’t say it was, or became, chaotic. It merely points to a condition of shapelessness, or unformedness.
But
they were not the firsts to promote the Gap Theory.
In 1814, Dr. Thomas Chalmers, a respected Scottish Presbyterian minister began to advocate the idea of a gap between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2. The reason for this was not theological—it was geological. By interpreting the first two verses of Genesis in this way, Dr. Chalmers felt that he could accommodate the views of the geologists of his day who were teaching millions of years, while at the same time maintaining a literal interpretation of the Genesis account of creation.
There are many different versions as to what supposedly happened during this gap of time, but most versions of the gap theory place millions of years of geologic time (including billions of animal fossils) between the Bible's first two verses. This version of the gap theory is sometimes called the ruin-reconstruction theory. Most ruin-reconstruction theorists have allowed the fallible theories of secular scientists to determine the meaning of Scripture and have, therefore, accepted the millions-of-years dates for the fossil record.
Many people assume there is a great gap in time between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2. Most of these do this to accommodate the geological age system of billions of years of supposed earth history in the Genesis record of creation. The idea is something like this: billions of years ago God created the space-mass-time universe. Then the geological ages took place over billions of years of earth history. The different forms of life developed that are now preserved in the fossil record. These life-forms represent those ages - the invertebrates of the Cambrian Period, the dinosaurs of the Cretaceous Period ... finally the mammals, birds and ‘ape-men’ of the Tertiary Period - just before the recent epoch.
· Then the idea is that, at the end of these geological ages, a great cataclysm took place on earth, with Satan having rebelled in heaven and many of the angels following him in that rebellion. God, therefore, cast him to the earth, and the earth underwent a great cataclysm, leaving it finally without form and void, and with darkness on the face of the deep, as described in Genesis 1:2.
·
Subsequently, according
to this idea—usually known as the ‘gap’ theory—God then re-created
or reconstituted the earth in the six literal days of creation recorded in the first chapter of Genesis. The
argument for this theory makes verse two read, ‘The earth became without form and void’ (some would render it ‘The earth became waste and desolate’), as though
it had previously been a beautiful world. But now, because of the cataclysm, it
was a devastated remnant of a world, so that there was a change of condition.
It became without form and void.
In the book 100 Christian Books That Changed the Century, William J. and Randy Petersen acknowledge the long-term impact of The Genesis Flood: “Creation science has been controversial within the evangelical community as well as in society at large, but there is no doubt of the impact of this book by Whitcomb and Morris. . . . By the end of the century the book had gone into its forty-first printing. . . . Creation science became a major force . . . and has a substantial presence in the fields of science and education, all stemming from the influential book by Whitcomb and Morris.”
How did this happen? By
the mercy of God, through His inspired, infallible
written Word.
We firmly believed that all compromise views, such as the gap theory, the day-age theory, and the framework hypothesis, which had been taught in one form or another for over one hundred years, would eventually be crushed by the rock of Holy Scripture. Our Lord Jesus Christ was there when the earth was created, for “all things were made through Him” John 1:3. His account of creation and the Flood are perfectly true because He “cannot lie”(Titus 1:2) and He “is the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Hebrews 13:8). (John Whitcomb & Henry Morris – 1961)
For non-Hebrew readers like me, there is another easy way to show that there cannot be a gap. Exodus 20:11 plainly says, “In six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them.” So God made everything in six days, including things in the heavens.
Sources: Answers in Genesis / Scofield Bible / Wikipedia / Modern Times / The Genesis Flood
Our mission board made it a policy never to pay ransom, a policy that spread rapidly by word of mouth. As a result, none of our missionaries was ever held for ransom. One, however, was killed in cold blood.
“Uncle” Jack Vinson was recovering from an appendectomy when bandits pillaged a village inhabited by a number of Christians. He insisted on going to check on them. While he was there, the bandits returned and Uncle Jack was captured. After being roped together with a long line of prisoners, he was ordered to start walking. Because of his recent surgery, he was unable to keep up.
A young Chinese girl heard a bandit threaten to shoot him if he did not hurry. Uncle Jack replied, “If you shoot me, I shall go straight to heaven.” The soldier shot him.
When “Uncle” Ham heard this account, he wrote a poem that I think reflects the feelings of all those missionaries under whose influence we were reared:
My humble words can not express the emotion I feel in viewing what others have felt in composing these thoughts. How amazing.
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