Now that you have started this, what are you gleeming from looking at the carols? Is the final project a group caroling? I’ve tried to get Mrs. Grotto to partake in something like that as I believe she’d enjoy it, but thusfar I’ve had no luck.

I couldn’t make it through Dobson’s whole letter. I think the good doctor should have stuck to helping parents and stayed out of politics. Needless to say, I didn’t see Wallis’ reaction, though I can guess at what he said.

It is not the glory and authority of God that is held up as the standard. Rather it is the offended rights of man that are to be avenged and secured. The justification for independence was thus laid on a foundation of rationalism (self-evident truth) and secularized social contract theory (consent of the governed).

In the culminating chapter, Peter Marshall fails to recognize this same spirit at work in the Constitutional Convention. Regrettably, he treads close to the line of Constitutional idolatry when he states that it is “almost beyond the scope and dimension of human wisdom” (p343).

The author ignores the Constitution’s declaration that it is illegal to require an officeholder to swear to govern by the Bible (Article VI, Section 3). In the teeth of this covenant-breaking provision he draws a mind-boggling conclusion. The Constitution he declares “is nothing less than the institutional guardian of the Covenant Way of life for the nation as a whole.”

This is followed by several pages in which the ring-leaders of this rebellion against God – Washington in particular — are lifted up almost as demigods. The entire concluding chapter (Ch.1 is laced with contradiction. Rev. Marshall struggles in vain to reconcile the inconsistency in his position.

By his own concession he shatters his own thesis: First, he gushes, “The Constitution is the finest contract ever drawn by man for his own self-government.” Then in the very next sentence he confesses, “But as precious as the Constitution is, it is nonetheless a secularizing of the spiritual reality of the covenant. It can thus never be the substitute for a covenant life totally given to the Lord Jesus Christ” (p.34

We can’t say it much better than that. We are left shaking our heads in disbelief. With this single statement the bankruptcy of the ConFed position is laid bare.

When there’s a mist in the pulpit there is a fog in the pew. It is a deadly fog indeed. The church in the 21st Century continues to grope in darkness, following her ConFed guides who can’t decide which god to worship. Rev. Marshall thus led the 20th Century church out of Egyptian bondage directly into 21st Century wandering in the wilderness.