John Quincy Adams, Scripture, and American Protestantism
In 1815, John Quincy Adams (JQA) was not quite convinced of the “Athanasian Trinity,” though he could not refute it either and did not care to try. Unequivocal, however, was his affirmation of the divinity of Christ who was not, as his Unitarians relatives claimed, merely a great moral teacher like Socrates, but the “Redeemer” and “Messiah” of whom Isaiah had prophesied. All this to the chagrin of JQA’s parents.
“I find in the New Testament, Jesus Christ accosted in His own presence by one of his disciples as God, without disclaiming the appellation. I see him explicitly declared by at least two other of the Apostles to be God, expressly and repeatedly announced not only as having existed before the worlds but as the Creator of the worlds; without beginning of days, or end of years; I see him named in the great prophecy of Isaiah concerning him to be the mighty God.”
In other passages, JQA seems more amenable to Trinitarianism, and would never deny it, as he identified multiple allusions to it in scripture and (rightly) satisfied himself that, like the workings of providence, the doctrine was ultimately incomprehensible to human reason. His trouble with the doctrine was not owed to rationalist skepticism but biblicism. Contrary to the assumptions of some scholars, while attentive to genre distinctions and the foreignness of ancient near east narrative, JQA comes off as, in fact, a biblical literalist who maintained a closed canon and was generally unwilling to entertain extra-biblical explanatory supplements. Neither was John Quincy a “deist,” just as his biological father nor his “second father,” Thomas Jefferson, were not deists. Belief in active providence and effective prayer—the antithesis of deism—was shared by all three, but the son believed quite a bit more than his fathers.
John Quincy avoided, if narrowly, Socinianism in his biblicism as well as the Unitarianism of his parents even as he remained aloof from creedal formulations. Though JQA’s interest in his biblical commentary, such as it was, was on the moral teaching of the text, he repeatedly affirmed Christ’s divinity and atonement—the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy—as well as the divine inspiration, necessity, and perspicuity of scripture, all doctrines, as well as that of original (and personal) sin and miracles, that earned JQA the invective of “Calvinist” from his father. But the son wasn’t really Calvinist, though he was the champion of New England political Protestantism.
JQA’s Christianity, though more orthodox than his father’s, was above all emphasized the benign influence of ecumenical Protestantism and the virtue of Christian republicanism. If his marriage to the half-Brit, southern Episcopalian, nominally Unitarian, Catholic schoolgirl, Louisa, is any indication, JQA, a cultural Calvinist, was nondenominational in the most literal sense. He owned pews at both Second Presbyterian and St. John’s Episcopal in Washington D.C. and was a member of his home Congregationalist church in Quincy all during his presidency. We could say, JQA was a harbinger of what the Mainline used to be before it apostatized: loosely orthodox, morally traditional, and civically virtuous, and non-sectarian. Though he departed in important ways from the doctrine of his parents, it was still his New England upbringing that shaped his posture toward the young nation’s indigenous religion.
It was Protestant unity, John Quincy believed, that had enabled American republicanism to triumph over tyranny. Indeed, it was only Protestant Christianity that could supply morality for true republicanism, something antiquity had lacked. Pagan gods were cruel and vengeful; the Christian God was benevolent and magnanimous. It was Christianity that tempered men and instilled requisite public spiritedness in them, and it was America’s brand of Protestantism that fueled the constitutional order.
Christopher Flannery, in his superb recent article at the Claremont Review of Books on JQA’s Independence Day orations, is right to situate his most famous line in context. “America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” but this restraint rested on the confidence that the world would follow America’s republican trajectory. Adams was nearly certain of this. What is less often, if ever, accounted for is the clear preconditions for such progress. If the world would, in time, go republican, then the world must first convert to civilizational Protestantism, the sine qua non of true, as opposed to merely pagan, liberty.
Surveying the history of America, JQA was convinced he had encountered a providential moment wherein, unlike on the continent, a Protestant laity had finally and sufficiently developed in virtue and independence (and anti-clericalism) to handle republican governance. Sara Georgini captures JQA’s epiphany well. That “Protestantism powered and preserved American union… became central to John Quincy Adams’s lifelong commitment to Christian patriotism.” Evangelical proponents of the New Divinity were, as he saw it, a potential threat to this solidarity. We must keep this mission in the back of our minds when considering JQA’s approach to the Bible, viz., the constant moral, ethical emphasis and aversion to contentious questions.
What is clear, if not all JQA’s doctrinal commitments, is that his study of the Bible was a lifelong, deadly serious, passion that he elevated above any other literary pursuits. For the Bible was the oracles of God, and especially sacred “universal” history, not one among many special books. Writing to his father in 1816, he complained (“deep and constant regret”) that he did not know Hebrew or the “Chaldaic Characters,” and so could not yet consider himself to have “studied” it. Thus far, he had settled for English, French, and German translations, and had not yet acquired a Greek Septuagint or Latin Vulgate.
He preferred Luther’s German translation above all and thought the Genevan French “not quite equal” to the King James English. His self-diagnosed linguistic deficiencies aside, he would continue in “seeking the fountains,” and he would not comment further (on the matter of divine inspiration) until he drank more deeply. He was methodical. His biblical study is that of an earnest layman willing to depart from the indoctrination of his youth but not quite willing to insult his first tutors. On the topic of inspiration itself, he seemed to have been proceeding book by book: he was undecided on the book of Jude’s canonicity, for example, and sympathetic to certain deuterocanonical inclusions.
What did seem evident to him was that the quality, the style, of the Bible commended itself. If John Milton, Homer, and Virgil could be said to be divinely inspired, as some claimed—or maybe the Declaration of Independence—then it was “unquestionable” that John’s Apocalypse and Solomon’s Song were inspired by the same standard. JQA was, as we know, sensitive to rhetorical quality, but recall that even the Westminster Standards recommend the “majesty of the style” as proof of inspiration. JQA too was taken by the “heavenliness of the matter, the efficacy of the doctrine… [and] the consent of all parts.”
Benjamin Rush implored schoolmasters and parents to instruct their children in Scripture. Noah Webster produced an abridgement (and translation) for the same purpose. But few, if any, of the early republic luminaries provided detailed instructions on how to do it.
JQA could not have been trusted with teaching Presbyterian Sunday school; his honest intellectual openness, anti-clericalism, and innocent biblicism would have sowed doubt in lesser intellects. His “cultural language” of Christianity more than once got away from him when waxing eloquent on his country’s beginnings. He could be said to have taken Philippians 2:12 (work out your own salvation with fear and trembling) a little too seriously and too individualistically. Maybe his father should have called him a hyper-Calvinist, though Georgini, who paints a picture of JQA as a religious sociologist abroad, is probably right to say that soteriologically and culturally he followed the trajectory of his generation from “rigid Calvinism to liberal [or ‘cosmopolitan’] Arminianism.”
JQA’s example reminds us of the necessity of confessions and catechesis and of the deleterious reverberations of Unitarianism itself. But his guide to reading the inspired word of God is nevertheless inspirational, and it is easier to trust the mostly orthodox JQA—certainly the most orthodox of the Quincy clan—than it is to twist, say, Jefferson or the elder Adams into something more than dogmatic Christian heretics.
While on diplomatic mission to St. Petersburg, Adams corresponded with his son, George Washington Adams, surely about many things, but for a significant portion, their topic was Bible study, with the elder instructing the younger. (JQA’s parents were ever resentful that he had named his first son after the first president rather than the second.) JQA’s instructions span two years (1811-1813) and nine letters. The correspondence would become public posthumously in 1848.
JQA’s approach to the Bible is, for lack of a better term, utilitarian which is not to say unthoughtful, partial, or flippant. There are people who boast of their reading, numbering the pages or volumes consumed or hours spent on books. Adams recalls spending at least an hour per day reading the Bible and read through the whole of it once every year, but that is not the point. The measure of study is qualitative not quantitative.
The point is “the use and improvement of what you have read.” Adams wants his son to compete in virtue, not reading lists. People who elevate the latter “ought to be ashamed of having wasted so much time, to so little profit.” As Erasmus instructed his Christian knight, it is not a course of study we are after but a course for life. The point of reading works of morality, even divinely authored, is to become “wise and more virtuous.” Adams is explicit, the primary purpose of his commentary is “merely to consider the Bible as a system of morality,” but the course he charts to this end leads to more expansive musings and admissions.
Adams, ever self-aware, admits that his time perusing heavenly oracles is not always “fruitful to good works.” Men are infirm, distracted, forgetful; the mind wanders. Montaigne said something similar in Of Liars. Perseverance and discipline, thankfully, are virtues themselves, and knowledge compiles over time through repeated exposure. There is no choice anyway. The Bible alone communicates our duties to God and man. “The Bible contains the revelation of the will of God,” and “piety to God is the foundation of all virtue.”
Indeed, Adams, though steeped in antiquity, was surprisingly condescending at times toward the ancients. While reading the Iliad, he noted in his Diary his surprise how so many men and women “of taste and learning” develop an “extravagant partiality for the ancients.” Perhaps, some of their “customs and manners” were laudatory, but their religion was barbaric. “Surely our ideas of a God, are much more perfect at this Time. To say that this owing to no merit of our own, but to our having been favour’d with Revelation, is no argument against us, but on the contrary assigning the cause of our improvement.”
For JQA, he central ethical principle of the Bible, from Adam to Christ, is obedience to God and his commands, the necessity of which, in turn, authenticates the scripture itself. “[O]bedience to the will of God is the first and all-comprehensive virtue taught in the Bible… the second is justice and judgment toward mankind.” Obedience to the will of God is “the universal and only foundation of all moral duty.” When God said, “let there be light, and there was light,” all else, all morality, all duties, all worship was immediately apparent, at least to those with eyes to see and ears to hear.
The most basic morality, which is known without the aid of revelation, is the existence of God who created and governs the universe, the immortality of the soul, and a future state of rewards and punishments. All reasonable men know these things and if they don’t or pretend not to then they are incapable of governance, of an orderly life. Even the threat of death cannot direct them to wisdom, virtue, or happiness. Of course, these three fundamentals, along with the divine authority of the Bible itself, were included in most religious tests in the state constitutions.
But human reason is sufficient only to “get an obscure glimpse of these sacred and important truths, but it cannot discover them, in all their clearness… natural reason might suffice for an obscure perception, but not for the clear discovery of these truths.” For Adams, special divine revelation is necessary, as it was for the first Adam. Supreme confidence in natural religion is confronted with the endless varieties of false religions throughout history. Persians worshipped the sun; Egyptians worshipped animals “and even garlics and onions.” The Greeks deified natural elements; Ovid could only identify an omnipresent “chaos.” Pagan light never acquired the truths of Genesis. Adams avers that if God’s creative power is revealed to man, then all else follows, viz., that man is made to obey the Creator’s will, a realization that induces search for further revelation.
JQA’s father could not stomach the idea that Plato and Cicero required any such thing. But how could Cicero’s piety and, by extension, justice, JQA asked, be sound “when he did not know whether there was one God or a thousand—whether he, or they had or had not any concern in the formation of the world, and whether they had any regard to the affairs or the conduct of mankind?”
In the letters to his son, the “Calvinism” of JQA that his father so reviled is exposed often, Christ’s divinity regularly affirmed, and he even suggests, if timidly, that the Trinity is discernable from Genesis 18 and 19. Unitarian inclusiveness of the “dissolute debauchees of the heathen mythology,” and the “fantastical imaginations of the Grecian philosophers,” is not found in Adams the younger when instructing Washington the younger, though he may have still harbored some universalist soteriological sentiments. It is hard to say. Again, JQA’s constant refrain, his focus, is on the Bible as the definitive vessel of virtue, a revelation of true piety and justice. Though his survey is more focused in latter letters, he cannot help but delve into redemptive-historical distractions along the way.
Obedience is the central ethical theme of scripture, but the central theological theme is Christ, or rather Christ as the fulfillment of redemptive history. The restoration of man was not found in Adam’s or Abraham’s obedience. Rather, it was “obtained by no ordinary proof of obedience; the sacrifice of mere personal blessings, however great, could not lay the foundation for the redemption of mankind from death.” Only the “voluntary submission of Jesus Christ to his own death… was to consummate the great plan of redemption.”
In general, JQA is disinterested in “controversial divinity.” He rarely cites secondary sources. When he does, it is usually to question them. To him, for all his admissions about the difficulty of Hebrew and Greek, the text is perspicuous and practical. (He aligns himself with Peter for whom Paul was hard to understand as well.) The divide between literal and allegorical in Genesis, for example, or in Job, is uninteresting to JQA, and so he is not susceptible to doubt or confusion. For one, the morality of these books is clear. For another, the undeniable fact is, God created the world and governs it by an active providence discernable in his calling of Abraham and establishment of Israel, and that such a God reveals clearly the standard of obedience, righteousness, and worship. JQA’s favorite trait of the Bible as literature is its simplicity and brevity, an opinion that may seem absurd to contemporary readers of shorter attention spans.
Certain difficult passages aside, the history of redemption is easy to trace and the fundamental genre of the Bible, for Adams, is history. A “man of liberal education,” is marked by his knowledge of history. The Bible presents the fundamental history from which all else flows and against which all else is to be measured, and JQA takes this history literally—Adam, Abraham, Noah, Moses, and David. The important point is that all the threefold promise made to Abraham was fulfilled in Christ. Indeed, the “whole history” of the Bible “appears to have been ordered from age to age, expressly to prepare for the appearance of Christ upon earth.” To this end, Adams walks through prominent episodes of the Old Testament, the portion of scripture to which he dedicates the most attention.
More than once, JQA cites the formation and life of Israel as essential reading. It is the only record of a nation formed from the ground up, so to speak. He seems to take the peculiarity of the Old Testament genealogies as a leading proof of the Bible’s divinity, so singular was the style in ancient literature.
The Mosaic law especially is worthy of study. A combination of universal and particular laws, Deuteronomy and Leviticus surpass all competitors. “It is one of the greatest marks of Divine favor bestowed upon the children of Israel, that the legislator gave them rules not only of action but for the government of the heart.” Greece and Rome cannot compare. The “gods of Homer… dwindle into the most contemptible pigmies.” It would be “vain,” Adams concludes, to look in the “writings of profane antiquity” for “so broad, so complete and so solid a basis for morality as this decalogue lays down.” Solomon was wiser than all the “Grecian sages” combined, and all the moral advice of the same appear “feeble” before the example of Christ.
The law of Moses was relatively imperfect. Matthew Henry puts it the same way in his commentary on the Gospel of John. Only Christ would perfect it. For the sanctions, rewards, and punishments only presage “him who brought life and immortality to light in the gospel.” All was anticipation of “Immanuel, the God with us.” The “Christian dispensation” is a “perfection of the law delivered at Sinai.” Without the promise and fulfillment of Christ, the law only secured temporal order and only for a particular people. Christ brought eternal life to the Jew and Gentile.
But considered as a human institution, the Mosaic code surpassed all others, even if the history of Israel was “little else than a narrative of idolatries and corruption.” JQA’s theory is that the periodic captivity and dispersion of the Jews providentially brought elements of their legislation into “almost every civilized nation upon the globe,” a residual blessing. And, indeed, the first four commandments, though “religious,” are the foundation of piety which is the “foundation of all human virtue.” And the “parts of the Jewish law adapted to promote the happiness of [all] mankind, under every variety of situation and government… were all recognized and adopted by Christ” in the Sermon on the Mount. Those ceremonial things particular to Israel were “abolished by Christ” who was the fulfillment of the law. Yes, the “Unitarian” Adams affirms “Christ’s atonement and propitiation.”
Just as all men, whether they recognize the divine inspiration of scripture or not, can theoretically apprehend the fundamentals, so too can they acknowledge the superiority of Christian morality: self-denial (and control), “brotherly love,” “conquest of our own passions,” and benevolence. The Stoics and Cicero acquired only components of this morality. The Bible communicates it in full. Only Christianity identifies the true impediment to adopting this morality, viz., not folly but depravity. It is important too to recognize the authority of the Christian morality. Christ “spoke as one having authority, not only to his disciples, but to his mother, to his judges, to Pilate the Roman governor, to John the Baptist, his precursor.” Christ did not merely present a model to imitate but an image of divine command, the will of God, one that could correct and extend the law to “teach all nations.”
Authority, but also superiority recommends Christian morality. Peace, benevolence, meekness, and charity had grown in western civilization since the “birth of the Savior,” and was threatened by “the incontrovertible decline and approaching dissolution of the sensual and sanguinary religion of Mahomet,” he warned in his 1837 Independence Day speech. Christianity had brought liberty to the captive in more ways than one.
JQA’s instruction was, at least in some regard, effective. In his Independence Day oration, George told his audience at Quincy, Massachusetts in 1824 that “The Christian Revelation, that mild and beautiful religion, which has taught man his duties and his hopes, is the true source of human happiness. With its establishment commenced the course of improvement, which succeeding ages and wonderful events have carried onward to our own age and time.” His father had evidently convinced him of the civilizational superiority of Christian virtue. The Adamses were ecumenical, as suited their social station, but said ecumenism only extended so far—not to Islam, for example—and the “Christian nationalism” of JQA echoed his distant cousin, Samuel, more than his father, albeit he substituted a more democratic “Athens of America” for the more militant “Christian Sparta.” John Adams (the first) had recommended the importance of New England history for understanding the colonial struggle, but his son had made it definitive for national identity.
Speaking again of sons, Geroge Washington Adams was a tragic figure. An alcoholic who fathered one child out of wedlock that died in infancy, George committed suicide—at least it was widely believed—by throwing himself from the steamship Benjamin Franklin in the Long Island Sound. He was 28 years old. George’s brother, John II, also died young of alcoholism. Out of JQA’s sons, only Charles, named after JQA’s younger brother who had succumbed to alcoholism, distinguished himself and achieved old age. Admirably, JQA’s faith carried him through these sorrows. But losing children in adulthood was less common, even then, then losing them in infancy, and in many ways more difficult to bear. Adams took the loss hard and, it is said, was thereafter softer on his younger children, especially Charles.
For all of his encouragement to virtue—and his exacting standard of it—scholastic instruction, promotion of the moral system of the Bible, and even ecumenism, in the course of his letters to George, notably absent is any recommendation of the Bible as a source of comfort, as the revelation of a heavenly father that is near and personal, something the son of an “affectionate” but often absentee parents might have profited from.
That John Quincy Adams had endured an even more chaotic, atypical upbringing amidst even thinner catechesis and emerged more if not perfectly orthodox on the other side attests all the more to his remarkable fortitude, curiosity, and character. That he made Biblical revelation central to his personal and national life should inspire us this summer as we reflect on the great works of providence in, and attempt to emulate the great men of, America.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons
