The Bible, Pastors & War

The ministers were very involved in war and colonial New England, as well as other areas of the colonies.

People went to war, and they went to war a lot, and ministers were alongside them. Ministers were oftentimes giving divine sanction to the wars. This was a long tradition. This was not unique specifically to the colonies. This was part of the culture. So preaching in wartime, preaching war sermons was something that they did a lot.

We can expect to see that in the revolution because we saw it in the wars leading up to the revolution, the Seven Years War, often called the French and Indian War in the colonies and that phase of it. It was one of several Anglo-French wars that preachers were involved in throughout the 18th century.
Before that, in the end of the 17th century with King Philip's War, preachers were very much involved in interpreting the war and motivating people to join up, or in some cases, in trying to motivate people not to and trying to proclaim the pacifist view of war. But either way, ministers are involved in war in various ways, using the Bible to make various arguments.

They naturally looked to the Bible to live their daily lives. You know, it was a guide. It was the authority, and so as they tried to do what they thought they needed to do, they brought the Bible with them and doing it. And so people never read the Bible from a completely neutral point of view. People read the Bible from their point of view, from where they are. And that place of reading scripture drew them in to the themes of war as they were fighting these wars. So they would take a biblical text and justify their point of view. And the opposite side would take another biblical text to justify their point of view. And that that went on, of course, and that happens in conflict. Of course, it happens later in a larger scale, even in the Civil War. So you have the Bible there as a war story as they they saw it because there's just war throughout it.

They could not really imagine their wars without applying scripture to them.And when they looked at scripture, they found that it was inseparable from war because there's all kinds of war in the Bible. There's actual military conflicts going on that they found. And then they saw, especially throughout scripture, spiritual warfare that the Christians thought of it. That the Christian life was a war between good and evil within every human soul. New Testament passages often refer to that battle language

It was just literally everywhere.