The Civil War as a Theological Crisis

The Civil War as a Theological Crisis

Metadata

• Author: Mark A. Noll
• Full Title: The Civil War as a Theological Crisis
• Category: #books

Highlights

• The manifest contradiction in these two interpretations of providence, which was multiplied on every hand during the war years, was not the most telling feature of the appeal to providence. Rather, that most telling feature was the confident assurance with which those appeals were made. This widely shared confidence was, ironically, a major reason for the shallowness of providential reasoning during the war. It was also a feature suggesting that providential reasoning marked a crucial turning point in the broader history of American thought.
• Foreign observers saw more clearly than most Americans what was at stake when interpretations of Scripture and understandings of providence divided this particular people beyond hope of resolution. American national culture had been built in substantial part by voluntary and democratic appropriation of Scripture. Yet if by following such an approach to the Bible there resulted an unbridgeable chasm of opinion about what Scripture actually taught, there were no resources within democratic or voluntary procedures to resolve the public division of opinion that was created by voluntary and democratic interpretation of the Bible. The Book that made the nation was destroying the nation; the nation that had taken to the Book was rescued not by the Book but by the force of arms.
• Despite the absence of serious historical investigation, however, we can surmise that lack of attention to theological profundity in the Civil War is almost certainly related to the fact that there simply existed so little theological profundity. This book is an effort to explain why.
• Third, and most important for understanding patterns of biblical interpretation, religious thinkers also shared in the American appropriation of the Enlightenment. In particular, they assumed that perceiving the causes and effects of political developments was a simple matter, once distracting traditions had been set aside. In keeping with Enlightenment confidence, they also assumed that human beings of the right sort possessed a nearly infallible ability to perceive clear-cut connections between moral causes and public effects.
• During the years of conflict, countless believers illustrated such convictions by assuming that moral or spiritual perception could be crystal clear and that the means of moral action lay entirely within the grasp of well-meaning individuals.
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• Nowhere was the Christian-Enlightenment marriage more clearly illustrated than in the pervasive belief that understanding things was simple. The significance of this marriage was far-reaching. On the one side, it bestowed great self-confidence as Americans explained the moral urgency of social attitudes and then of national policy. On the other, it transformed the conclusions reached by opponents into willful perversions of sacred truth and natural reason. The combination of biblical faith and Enlightenment certainty imparted great energy to the builders of American civilization. It also imparted a nearly fanatical force to the prosecution of war.
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• The cumulative effect of these subtle ideological changes was to convince an ever-broadening number of Christians in the United States that they had the power within themselves to discover the true meaning of sacred texts, the power to see things in general as they really were, the power to act effectively against those in the wrong, and the power to choose righteously when faced by moral dilemmas—if, that is, they would only put their minds to the task.
• Several reasons, which were deeply rooted in broad American circumstances, made proslavery biblical interpretations seem more persuasive than antislavery readings. The first was abolitionist overstatement. When abolitionists maintained that the Bible condemned slavery per se, they contradicted conclusions that the vast majority of white Americans drew from Scripture by using the same interpretive principles almost everyone had employed in drawing on the Bible for evangelizing the nation and constructing American civilization.
• Antislavery polemicists did not succeed, however, in convincing many Caucasian Americans that sinful practices, or abuses, deligitimated the institution itself. The weight tipping the scales against that conclusion was whites’ inability to regard African Americans as fully human, whether defined by classical Christian theologies or defined by American republican ideology.
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