Modern Age - Spring 2016 - 65

ORESTES BROWNSON

reliance on the providential constitution is to add to Brownson's
analysis by remembering that even the source of our abstract
principles, the Declaration of Independence, was the product of
a legislative compromise driven by the multiple sources of our
written Constitution.
Here we do well to recall the French Catholic priest (and chaplain to the French Resistance in World War II) Father RaymondLeopold Bruckberger's scholarly account of our Declaration of
Independence with its unique mixture of natural theology (in
its second paragraph) and the providential God (featured in the
last section). Bruckberger reminds us that our Independence Day
is not owned by philosophers but by the Continental Congress,
which added to Jefferson's deistic formulation of "Nature's God"
two descriptions of God: as a creator and as a judge-as a personal God.
Their dry public argument reconciled the difficulty "that Congress and Jefferson had different concepts of God" leading them
to "two profoundly different philosophies." Jefferson's Lockean
philosophy was grounded in an impersonal, past-tense God, more
of a "what" than a "who." The fundamentally Christian members
of Congress thought of God as a personal and relational "who."
Their Christian contribution produced a founding compromise
between a Jeffersonian God of nature and a personal, judgmental, relational, and providential (and so loving) God.
"The greatest luck of all for the Declaration," Bruckberger claims,
was its compromise of the Puritan tradition and what Jefferson
wrote, giving America a "philosophy that most manifests the equality of all men in their natural and supernatural dignity." As such it
truthfully relies on appeals to both Lockean and Christian anthropology, thus serving as an intermediary for individual freedom,
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Modern Age - Spring 2016

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