By Douglas V. Gibbs
Are we built on the rock or, the sand? The Founding Fathers understood through their own Faith that America’s Unchanging God had a hand in their endeavors. I feel like we’ve forgotten those basic principles. We’ve gone from critical thinking and a solid foundation to shifting sands and a foundational crisis.
We must begin our road to understanding with a basic declaration that has somehow become counter-cultural: God is not like us.
The modern world has fashioned a deity in its own image, and has given God human attributes. According to modern scholars, we have an anxious God who learns, who suffers with the age, and who revises His promises when the culture shifts. This is the God of therapeutic religion, the “crucified God” who bleeds with history rather than governing it. In their eyes, He is a He/She/They cosmic therapist who validates rather than saves.
We must reject this idol.
The God of the Scriptures, and of the Founders, is without body, parts, or passions. He does not discover; He decrees. He does not react; He rules. When Genesis says He “repented” of making man, it accommodates our language; it does not report a divine mood swing. When Hosea says His heart “recoils,” it describes the effect of His unchanging justice, not a fluctuation in His being.
He is the Rock. Not a drowning lifeguard swept away by the same current that drowns us, but the granite foundation upon which everything stands or falls.
This is not cold theology. It is the only theology that makes love trustworthy. A God whose mercy depends on His emotional state is a God who might withdraw it tomorrow. A God who can be wounded by His creatures is a God held hostage by His world. We need a Savior stronger than our suffering. He must be one who can pull us out without going under Himself.
This God (impassible, immutable, sovereign) is the foundation upon which America was built. Not because the Founders were all orthodox Christians (they were not), but because they built upon classical theism whether they fully knew it or not.
If God is unchanging, then truth is unchanging. If truth is unchanging, then rights are not grants of government but endowments of the Creator. If rights precede the state, then the state is limited by something higher than itself. And if the state is limited, then liberty is possible.
This is why the Declaration of Independence appeals to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” and closes with “firm reliance on the protection of divine providence.” They were not merely being pious. They understood God’s Covenant, His Love, His Care for His Creation, and the foundational beams that would become the United States Constitution. Only a God who cannot change can guarantee that “unalienable rights” will remain unalienable when the political winds shift.
The balance they achieved (a Christian country that was not theocratic, a strong but limited system, federal yet the states remained sovereign) reflects their understanding of transcendence. God is above the chaos of human affairs, yet intimately concerned with justice. Our system of a federal government, supreme in its duties, leaves the local issues to the states.
The Founding Fathers divided power because they knew man is fallen. The reality of human nature guided their decisions. They limited government because they knew God is sovereign. They led with religion because they knew the state could not save, nor survive without God’s Hand.
The Founding Fathers thought in biblical categories even when they didn’t realize it.
When Jefferson wrote of “self-evident” truths, he echoed Psalm 19: “The heavens declare the glory of God.” Truth written into creation, discernible by reason, not imposed by authority.
When they declared independence from a tyrant, they stood on Psalm 2: “Why do the nations rage… He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh.” No earthly power is ultimate. The Rock remains when kingdoms crumble.
When they established checks and balances, they enacted Psalm 33: “The Lord bringeth the counsel of the heathen to nought.” Human schemes fail; divine purposes stand. Divided power acknowledges that no man can be trusted with absolute authority because no man is absolute.
The hymn “How Great Thou Art” captures what they knew: “When I in awesome wonder consider all the worlds Thy hands have made… Then sings my soul.” Creation implies a Creator. Wonder implies transcendence. And transcendence implies limits… on us, and on our institutions.
But here is the crisis: We have traded the Rock for the sand.
Modern America has embraced the passible God. A humanly devised deity who evolves, who suffers, who changes with the culture. And having abandoned the unchanging God, we have abandoned the possibility of unchanging truth.
If God is malleable, law is malleable. If law is malleable, rights are privileges granted by the state – and what the state grants, the state can revoke. We have replaced “endowed by their Creator” with “evolved by consensus,” and the result is tyranny wearing the mask of compassion.
We see it everywhere:
Judicial activism: courts creating law rather than applying it, because we have come to believe that if the Constitution is “living and breathing,” it is dying. Only dying things change their meaning with every generation.
Administrative overreach: unelected bureaucrats wielding legislative, executive, and judicial power combined, because we have forgotten that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
The erosion of federalism: the states reduced to administrative districts, the Senate made a popular body (1913), the Tenth Amendment a dead letter. When the center cannot hold because we no longer believe in a Center above us, everything flies apart.
The transformation of God-given Rights to Government-defined and distributed rights. False promises. False guarantees. New “rights” seem to be discovered weekly, which means rights are no longer grounded in nature or nature’s God, but in human desire. And desire is fickle.
This is the pattern of fallen civilizations. Rome traded its republic for an emperor when the people demanded bread and circuses. France traded its monarchy for the Terror when they made man the measure of all things. We are trading our Constitution for administrative tyranny because we have made God in our image, and a God who looks like us cannot save us from ourselves.
We are a ticking time bomb. Either we rediscover the truth, or we fade away as Babylon faded, as Rome faded, as every civilization that forgot the Rock has faded.
The rediscovery must be theological before it can be political. How can we get out political house in order if we can’t get our religious house in order? We must return to the God who cannot be destabilized by our suffering, who does not change His mind when we rebel, whose promises are not reactionary feelings but eternal decrees. We must recover the God of the hymn; the awesome, transcendent, unchanging Lord who “the universe displays.”
Only then can we recover the architecture He made possible: limited government, divided power, federalism, enumerated rights, and the confidence that “providence” still protects those who rely on Him.
The alternative is clear. A passible God produces a passible constitution. It then becomes a constitution that changes with every emotional surge of the culture. And a constitution that changes with the culture is not a constitution at all. It is merely the temporary advantage of the powerful, dressed in legal language.
Other civilizations have faced this moment. Some recovered. Most perished. The difference was whether they remembered the Rock from which they were hewn.
We stand at that same fork. The God of our fathers (impassible, immutable, sovereign) still reigns. The question is whether we still want Him to.
“He only is my rock and my salvation; He is my fortress; I shall not be moved.” — Psalm 62:6
— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
