Created Equal

Pastor’s Epistle—July, A.D. 2018 B

Independence Day is our opportunity as Americans to celebrate our country by blowing up a small piece of it. My childhood memories of the Fourth of July entail firecrackers, sparklers, and picnic blankets spread over the grass on warm, late nights, waiting for the sky to darken enough that the fireworks might commence. But if I might, I’d like to recommend an additional commemoration for our holiday celebrations: reading together the Declaration of Independence.

The Declaration is a remarkable document, a broadside fired against “legal positivism,” which is the notion that we have basic rights only because the government invents them for us, and could, by extension, just as easily take them away. As the Declaration defiantly declares:

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

Our rights, in other words, come from God, who has created every man, woman, and child in His image, possessing equal dignity, equal value, and equally inalienable rights. Moreover, these truths are so obvious as to prove self-evident to all persons of reason and goodwill, regardless of what the rich, the righteous, or the rapacious might say.

From the beginning, the Church has spoken of God in two distinct ways: de Deo Uno, on the oneness of God—that is, of divine truths available to all people by right reason—and de Deo Trino, on God as Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, specially revealed in the Incarnation and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Declaration speaks de Deo Uno, a clarion call to peoples of all faiths, obstinately insisting on the dignity of every single human being—simply by dint of their being human—in defiance of any and all tyrannical powers which would insist that some lives matter less than others.

So let us embrace the truths of this great national document, knowing that all truth is God’s truth, whether it flows from reason or revelation. And let us also, as a people, reaffirm our commitment to live up to the ideals expressed in the Declaration by our Founding Fathers, who for all their shortcomings and sins nevertheless have passed down to us this torch of liberty as our shared inheritance. Would that we might live lives worthy of its light.