The Stream of Liberty from Calvin to the Founders
by Dan Ford, June 8, 2009
The founders of our nation were extraordinary men. Among other impressive qualities, they showed incredible resolve in taking their fight for liberty against Britain, the most formidable military force of their day. Where did they get their resolve; better yet, where did they get their principles of liberty? In tracing the roots, we learn this: From John Calvin’s indelible writings on civil government through the Puritans who carried his standard in England, the literary path of liberty had been paved for over two hundred years.
Liberty’s Legacy in England and America
Founding fathers such as John Adams knew their history well. Adams traced the course of American liberty to a light that had broken the grip of medieval darkness. That light was the piercing ray of the Reformation; the darkness was the old confederacy of the Canon and Feudal Law. “As long as this confederacy lasted,” wrote Adams, “and the people were held in ignorance; liberty, and with her, knowledge and virtue too, seem to have deserted the earth; and one age of darkness succeeded another, until God in his benign Providence, raised up some champions who began and conducted the Reformation.”
It was that merciful God to whom the founders attributed the light of liberty in the Reformation. Adams’ contemporary, John Witherspoon, also spoke of the spectacular providences of God in Reformation-era England. It was God’s gracious Providence and the cruel persecution of Protestants in continental Europe “that brought the light of Reformation so early into Britain.” Witherspoon then narrated the remarkable providences of God in the Puritan opposition to England’s despotic Protestant kings. Their fortitude also led to the early settlements of New England, which were planted amid another kind of hostile environment. Like Adams, Witherspoon used the stalwart examples of their Reformed Christian forefathers to encourage the patriots of their day to embrace the same resolve. He then directed his fellow Americans, who were about to embark upon independent nationhood in 1776, to the same source of assistance:
From what has been said you may learn what encouragement you have to put your trust in God, and hope for His assistance in the present important conflict. He is the Lord of Hosts, great in might, strong in battle. Whosoever hath His countenance and approbation, shall have the best at last.
The founders’ point was that by the mid-1700s, liberty already had a glorious legacy that traversed the previous two and a half centuries. John Adams’ Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law eleven years prior to 1776 had also traced that liberty’s legacy through “the Puritans almost in despair” who “at last resolved to fly into the wilderness for refuge from the temporal and spiritual principalities and powers, and plagues, and scourges of their native country.” Through it all, Adams noted it was those who held to “the Bible and common sense” who had graced his generation with an inheritance of freedom. He then described the manly character of liberty in America:
Tyranny in every form, shape and appearance was their disdain and abhorrence; no fear of punishment, nor even of death itself in exquisite tortures had been sufficient to conquer that steady, manly, pertinacious spirit, with which they had opposed the tyrants of those days in church and state, . . . .
Adams was not only calling his fellow Americans to remember their history, but to fortify their resolve upon the stern obligation facing them. Adams then warned those of his generation: “Be it remembered, however, that liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker.”
That was a good picture of liberty as our founders saw it. Liberty was indeed a sacred right, a right with grave responsibility. All rights were recognized as responsibilities. It was clear to our nation’s founders that liberty was a gift from the Creator. It was a gift that was far too valuable to be driven back into darkness by the ever-encroaching governmental regime across the Atlantic.
Their generation ultimately secured the blessings of life, liberty, and property that had been handed down to them. But they not only secured those blessings for themselves, they were handed down to us as their posterity, and they are to be handed down by us to our posterity.
John Calvin and Liberty
Key among those champions of the early Reformation was John Calvin. He knew what it was to flee his homeland for the sake of Christian liberty. In writing on the subject, Calvin rolled liberty’s scroll out much wider than his Protestant contemporaries. He not only wrote of liberty in its theological foundations, but in its practical reality. Liberty, to Calvin, must enjoy a civil framework, as he wrote in His Institutes of the Christian Religion:
I willingly grant that no kind of government is more blessed than this, where liberty is framed to such moderation as it ought to be, and is orderly established to continuance: so I account them so much blessed, that many enjoy this estate, and if they stoutly and constantly travail in preserving and retaining it, I grant that they do nothing against their duty.
Calvin’s teachings framed the implications of liberty in the terms that the English Puritans and later English colonists embraced. Liberty was defined as a civic responsibility. Yes, rulers should certainly respect the people’s franchise in God-given liberty; and, yes, liberty should enjoy a civil framework. What is more, however, is that the people themselves ought to “stoutly and constantly travail in preserving and maintaining it.” That was the Reformed Christian view of liberty as well as rights, freedom and everything else that pertains to human blessedness. The way to continue in God’s blessings of liberty is to travail in preserving and retaining it. That fact pertains to every generation, not just those of the Reformation era, nor the Puritan era, nor the founding era, but every era.
Calvin put his finger on enduring biblical truths that would be central to Reformed Christianity’s success in England and America. When England’s kings became despotic, the Reformed Christians’ stand for biblical liberty was an imposing check upon their licentious pretenses. Yet again, when the Libertines and Levelers used their freedom as autonomy from all legitimate government, the Reformed Christians’ stand for biblical liberty was an equally imposing check upon their licentious lawlessness. It was against both the tyrants and the libertines, flanking biblical liberty on either side, that Reformed Christianity proved to be the bulwark of civic responsibility.
The Virtue of Limited Government
It was amid the changing political environment sweeping over western Europe in the 1500s, that Calvin observed, “it most seldom chances that kings so temper themselves that their will never swerve from that which is just and right.” That was an understatement in light of the magnitude of the tyranny in his day. Calvin, however, drew his principles from Scripture in saying that the surest safeguard for “that which is just and right” was “either the government of the chiefest men or a state tempered of it and common government.”
That idea fit what the Puritans would later call a mixed government. Some men served in the administration of government; others served as the representatives of the people, and the people kept their important voices in electing their representatives. The representatives did not serve as a slavish body under the whims of a king but as ministers of God for the people’s good, and thus, they represented the “common government.” For Calvin, all forms of government had their weakness, but because of every ruler’s propensity toward license and tyranny, a government of many was preferable to the rule of one or a few.
[T]he fault or default of men, makes that it is safer and more tolerable that many should have the government, that they mutually one help the other, one teach and admonish the other, and if any advance himself higher than is meet, there may be overseers and masters to restrain his willfulness. This has both been proved by experience, and the Lord also has confirmed it with His authority when He ordained among the Israelites a government of the best men very near the common government.
For Calvin, godly rule had much to do with the role of godly magistrates, who deserve the people’s respect and honor: “The Lord has not only testified that the office of magistrates is allowed and acceptable to Him, but also setting out the dignity thereof with His most honorable titles, . . . . “
Those points made, Calvin was no opponent of monarchy per se. Absolute monarchy was absolute tyranny and even limited monarchy was always at tyranny’s doorstep. He believed that the form of government that was best in any particular realm “consist in the circumstances.” Each form of government, monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy was at risk where man’s corruption ruled. Any form of government is always at risk, either to sink into anarchy or tyranny. So, in all, only governments that remain accountable to God and that are restrained by the people’s vigilant exercise of responsible liberty will bring honor to themselves and good to the commonwealth.
Lineage and the Legacy
Though Calvin’s ideas helped reform many nations in whole or in part, each with impressive stories of their own, America’s lineage of liberty runs though England. Our nation’s civic inheritance was one of being privileged to have been English. The American colonists being the most Reformed of the English, they planted the legacy of responsible civil government deeply in the fertile soil of the New World.
That legacy came most prominently to America in the great Puritan migration of the 1630s. The governor first chosen by the Massachusetts Bay Company was also a jurist with an impressive legal pedigree. The later American historian Cotton Mather called Governor John Winthrop: “The Father of New England and the founder of a colony.” Well trained in both theology and law, Winthrop was a principled magistrate of whom Mather also admitted: “he would rather have devoted himself to the study of John Calvin than of Sir Edward Cook.” Winthrop’s preference was for reading the works of the great Genevan reformer rather than those of his famed Common Law contemporary in England.
In America, Winthrop had greater opportunity than most Puritans of the era to actually apply the Genevan reformer’s ideas of liberty. Winthrop once spoke of the covenantal nature of liberty before the council of Massachusetts, saying:
But there is a civil, a moral, a federal liberty which is the proper end and object of authority; it is a liberty for that only which is just and good; for this liberty you are to stand with the hazard of your very lives; and what ever crosses it is not authority, but a distemper thereof.
That “civil, moral, federal liberty” was the Reformed idea of covenantal accountability, recognized as a contracted agreement pledged between the rulers and the ruled. It was the same idea of obligatory and responsible liberty that had been espoused by Calvin, and it laid the foundations for the various bodies of local rule that spread across New England and beyond.
Throughout the colonial era, those same principles of liberty under responsible civil government were expressed in the literary legacy of America. From the child’s first primer to the law books that ruled the land, the colonist read of their accountability to God and one another. It was in America, then, in the mid-1700s that those same principles forged a nation that devoutly carried liberty’s legacy in its thirteen original states. It is that same legacy that we find in the proclamations, declarations, and the civic literature well into the nineteenth century. Those same principles were part of the American state and federal constitutions. And, those were reflective of the principle Calvin had stated long before: “that no kind of government is more blessed than this, where liberty is framed to such moderation as it ought to be, and is orderly established to continuance.”
It was one of the strengths of the founding era that America’s leaders relied upon the governing principles of liberty as they were passed on from earlier times. We now read Calvin’s Institutes, his printed Sermons, and his Commentaries with the greatest regard for the influence they had upon our English and American inheritance.
More importantly, we read the source book from which Calvin derived those precepts with the greatest thanks of all. Without the great revival of God’s printed Word, there would simply not have been a Calvin, nor a Puritan, nor an English colonist to carry the legacy. The Bible is the common link of them all, and the God of that Bible continues to be the only source for hope in our own trying times. In recalling the words of John Witherspoon from 1776, we may also take courage from liberty’s literary legacy: “From what has been said you may learn what encouragement you have to put your trust in God, and hope for His assistance in the present important conflict.”