1. Kevin DeYoung has a good critique of reparations here.
2. Peter Lillback, president of Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia, has an excellent piece on the importance of public theology here. The seminary is seeing the need to train future pastors to have a developed theology of politics, and to tackle the rise (and I'd say current triumph) of cultural Marxism as the threat to Christianity that it is.
3. Just read this clear article defending the American Revolution. The four take-aways at the end are very good.
But I still have questions.
1. If colonial charters with the king were revoked in 1689, as the article says, how can the whole argument here hinge on those very charters establishing the colonies' relationship with the king, and not with parliament?
2. Didn't the king have the right to use parliament to administer his relationship with the colonies? Seems reasonable to me.
Where the rubber hits the road for me is this:
- Was there a principled problem that we were not being represented in Parliament, or that the king wouldn't hear us reasonably, while our rights were trampled upon? Did George violate Magna Carta-like common law in his treatment of the American colonies?
- Or was it that the colonists had to pay their fair share for the benefits of the empire, and just didn't like it - e.g., taxes to fund a war (French-Indian) that had benefitted them?
I lean toward the first.
Yet I'm suspicious of the strength of the argument that the colonies didn't have to listen to Parliament, only the king.
The better argument seems to be:
- taxation without representation
- rights trampled (harboring troops in homes, etc.)
- Magna Carta obligations the king has to his subjects' rights
https://crosspolitic.com/rebellion-to-tyrants-the-principles-behind-the-just-war-for-independence/
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