President John Quincy Adams, Believer in God and Student of the Bible (Part 1)
I recently saw on the internet that the president with the highest IQ (at 163) was John Quincy Adams. Even if this is mere guess work, it is still impressive.
But what is seldom noted is that JQA (his usual designation) was a believer in God and a devout student of the Bible.
The Pulitzer Prize winning historian, James Truslow Adams (unrelated to JQA), in his The Adams Family, write: “John Quincy Adams believed profoundly in God. For him God was not a rarefied philosophical abstraction, a mere name for the Unknown, but a Being who ruled the universe. If his rule were not a beneficent one, all meaning would drop out of human existence and human morality. To deny that there was meaning to existence, and reality to moral belief and conduct, would be to commit intellectual and spiritual suicide.
“For Adams no amount of material comfort and well-being, either for the individual or the nation, could compensate for the void created by the denial of a God, and consequently of meaning in a moral universe. Adams also believed that man had been given mind, and its product, science, for the purpose of improving the condition of the race. He had also profoundly believed in his country”
When John Quincy Adams died, the American Bible Society passed the following resolution on April 6, 1848:
“He was a diligent student of the Word of God. It was the delight of his great and discriminating mind to be daily refreshed at this fountain of Divine Wisdom; and it is our deliberate judgment that not only the stern integrity of his private life, but his widely extended influence, as a ruler and legislator, as advocate of human rights, and a patriot and philanthropist, is to be attributed to his long and intimate familiarity with the eternal laws of truth, love, and righteousness, which are revealed in the Holy Scriptures.”
Lanny Tanton is the Pastor at The Bible Church of the Lakes in Horseshoe Bay, Texas – just outside of Marble Falls. Pastor Tanton welcomes you to our website and hopes that you’ll enjoy reading these insightful blog posts. Please contact us if you have further questions!!
