Originally posted by flywise
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Frazer: Yeah; and, by the way, let me just say, one of the things that’s critical to note here as well is that I don’t make any claims concerning the founding fathers in general. I don’t think you can make any claims about what the founding fathers believed or the religion of the founding fathers in general because they were, just like people today, they were individuals who disagreed in a lot of ways. They didn’t share all the same beliefs; they held a diverse set of beliefs in various areas, so what I focus on is eight key individuals who I refer to as the key founders. That is, those who are most responsible for the two founding documents: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. And John Adams is, of course, a key figure here because he was one of the three most responsible for the Declaration of Independence and, obviously, the second president of the United States, and also in other positions: vice president, ambassador to Europe and so forth. John Adams, I argue, is sort of the quintessential theistic rationalist. That is, he wrote the most about theology of any of the key founders and studied the most. He read any and all theology that he could find around the world and he wrote the most about it and revealed his own views the most, and it’s really quite shocking what he came up with. He fundamentally denied basically all the fundamental tenants of the faith. He was raised in a Calvinist community; although, and again this is where denominational affiliations can get you in trouble, his church was listed as Congregationalist and they kept that name, but the church turned Unitarian when he was a young man, and so just the label Congregationalist can get you sort of off-track. But he denied the deity of Christ; he denied the Trinity; he denied the atonement. He actually said what I think is the most striking statement of all the things that I’ve found in all of my study, which was in his explaining his opposition to the Trinity, he actually said that if he were standing on Mount Sinai with Moses, where God gives revelation, and God Himself told him that the Trinity was true, he said he wouldn’t believe it.
Mohler: You look at a statement like that and you think Thomas Payne; you don’t think John Adams.
Frazer: Right. He referred to the deity of Christ and the atonement as absurdities, talked about the fabrication of the Christian Trinity. He talked about the incarnation and said it has been the source of almost all the corruptions of Christianity—the belief in an eternal self-existent, omnipresent, omniscient Author of this stupendous universe suffering on a cross—says that that’s the source of most of the problems in Christianity. Speaking of the Bible, he said that philosophy is the original revelation of the Creator to His creature, and no subsequent revelation supported by prophecies or miracles can supersede it, so philosophy trumps the Bible.
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