The Religious Test Oath,
The Heart of Puritan Government,
Is All Over The Old Testament

The central feature of Puritan government was the religious test oath. The civil magistrate was required to swear an oath of allegiance to govern in submission to God and/or the Bible.

Elsewhere, we have noted how the religious oath was built in to the charters of at least half of the American colonies. The natural question is where did this Puritan fixation on the religious test oath come from?

It all began with Moses and the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai. In Exodus chapter 20 God gave the Ten Commandments to Moses on tables of stone. The transcendence of God was seen in the fact that the mountain was shrouded in smoke, and quaked and the people were not permitted to touch it on pain of death.

Along with the Ten Commandments were given the ordinances for civil government, recorded in chapters 20-23. These were the practical outworking of the Ten Commandments in their social application.

They included things like double restitution for theft and various marriage laws. These were the ordinances that the Puritan government took verbatim for the Massachusetts Body of Liberties.

In chapter 24 the entire nation entered into covenant with God with these words, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient” (Ex. 24:7).

After deserved chastisement God in mercy always renewed the covenant when the nation called to Him in repentance. After the incident of the golden calf, God renewed the covenant with these words, “Write down these words, for in accordance with these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel” (Ex. 34:28).

After 40 years of wandering in the wilderness, the promised land was conquered under the leadership of Joshua. In the final chapter of the book of Joshua, Joshua leads the people in renewing the covenant with God.

“And the people answered and said, ‘Far be it from us that we should forsake the Lord to serve other gods’” (Joshua 24:16). Three times Joshua challenged their commitment and three times they vowed, “We will serve the Lord our God and we will obey His voice.” So “Joshua wrote these words in the book of the law of God…” (Joshua 24:26)

But alas, the very next book of the Bible, the book of Judges, records a series of betrayals, judgments, repentance and covenant renewals. After this the Lord raised up Samuel and he led the people in covenant renewal with the words, “If you return to the Lord with all your heart, remove the foreign gods… from among you and direct your hearts to the Lord and serve Him alone” (I Sam. 7:3).

But alas, the very next chapter records the tragic story of how the people rejected God from being king over them and asked for a king “to judge us like all the nations” (I Sam. 8:5). Samuel warned them that the king would tax a tenth of everything they had and they would thus become his slaves.

Would that our modern task masters would be content with a tenth. But all the modern nation-states extract on the order of 50% or more from their allegedly free citizens. Citizens of Rome under the worst of the Emperors never experienced this much tyranny.

The history of the kings of Israel is a repetition of the pattern above.

Falling away
Judgment
Oppression
Crying out in repentance
Restoration via covenant renewal

For example, we have an example of the biblical covenant model in King Josiah’s reform where… The king stood by a pillar, and made a covenant before the Lord, to walk after the Lord, and to keep His commandments…and all the people stood to the covenant.

This biblical covenant model, such as we find in the Puritan government of Massachusetts, involved a covenant oath to rule the state according to the law of God. The officeholder was required to take an oath to that effect and to be a member in good standing of the Christian church. This was a covenant of life ensconced at the heart of Puritan government.

The only fly in the ointment was their failure to maintain a biblical separation between the institutions of church and state. They failed to recognize that it is entirely possible to have a civil government formally committed to God and His law and not have a state church.

By contrast, the U.S. Constitution went to the opposite extreme, with the Preamble clearly written as a social contract with no reference to God. “We the people of the United States…do ordain and establish this Constitution for ourselves and our posterity.” They compounded this error by outlawing the religious test oath in Article VI: No religious test shall ever be required for any office or public trust under these United States.

The people rather than God are the source of governing authority. Thus, did the sons of the Puritans reject the Puritan government and liberty under law of their fathers.