ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CUENet AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION DOGMATICS 2 LESSON 63 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> I'm curious now. Something you said really caught my attention. Can you say more about whether or not America really is a Christian nation? >> DR. DAVID MAXWELL: Well, yes, David. I think this is something that's pervasive in our culture. As Dr. Scaer told you, this is not something that you're going to be able to fix is that people -- Americans just somehow naturally think that America is especially favored by God. And this is something that -- I mean, it's been said that America is a country with the soul of a church. But this is something that's not new in America. In fact, it was much more prevalent as the pilgrims were coming over. And I would like to call your attention to a sermon by Jonathan Winthrop called "A Model of Christian Charity." And he is one of these pilgrims that Dr. Scaer referred to. And this is really an astounding sermon because I think it lays out all of these themes we hear. It even lays out certain phrases that we hear in American political contexts such as City on a Hill, Thousand Points of Light. You know, all of these kinds of things that we hear American presidents saying are coming from the sermon of Jonathan Winthrop. But the point of the sermon -- and I think this is incredibly instructed for the way Americans think about our country -- is that America has a special covenant with God. And that as long as we uphold our end of the deal, that God will bless us. And I think that is fundamentally the notion that stands behind the language you hear today about people wanting America to be a Christian nation and wanting to pass laws that bring the American legal system more into conformity with the Bible. And the problem with it is that it's directly contradictory to the doctrine of justification. Because in the doctrine of justification, we learn that God himself is the one who blesses us and makes us to be innocent in his sight. Not that we are able to accomplish that by a work ethic or by passing the right laws or by doing the right works. And so Lutherans have never bought into this idea that America has a special relationship with God or a special covenant with God and that God will bless us if we keep up that covenant. As I said before, it's the doctrine of justification that prevents us from going down that road. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***