Book Review and Reflection
The Civil War as a Theological Crisis by Mark A. Noll
Summary
The American Civil War was a defining event in the life of the nation. Most of us know the war's political and economic ramifications. What has not been so clearly understood is the theological impact the Civil War had on the Church in the United States. In The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, Mark A. Noll reveals the nature of Christianity in the United States leading up to the war and reflects on the impact he believes these events have had on the nation.
Noll shows that in the years between the nation's founding and the Civil War, Americans took for granted the role of religion in shaping public policy and personal morality. Commonsense moral reasoning was the order of the day. Protestant Christians believed that the meaning of Scripture, unaided by creeds, traditions, and hierarchies, was self-evident to readers of the Bible. Noll also writes of a marriage between republicanism and the Christian faith:
Republicanism was always easier to evoke than to define, but for most Americans through the time of the Civil War, it usually meant, on the one side, virtuous character and action linked with political liberty and the flourishing of society and, on the side, vice (usually defined as luxury, indolence, deceit in high places) linked with corruption in government, tyrannical politics, and the collapse of social order. (23)
Republicanism was revered almost as highly as Scripture. The issue of slavery put this form of Christianity to the test.
If you accept the commonsense moral reasoning approach, the pro-slavery argument was remarkably sound. God cursed Canaan, the son of Ham, to be slaves. God established slavery. (At the time, Canaan was believed to be the progenitor of Africans.) There is no direct condemnation of slavery in the Bible. Jesus was silent about the issue. Paul instructed slaves to obey masters and called upon believers to obey the authorities as God had established them. On pages 34-35 of the book, Noll lists eight passages that played a significant role in the debates.
Then there were radical Abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, who held republican virtues to be paramount. He disregarded the passages of Scripture that conflicted with his Enlightenment republican template. This approach led to charges by pro-slavery advocates that the abolitionists did not hold the Word of God to be authoritative. They were essentially correct about many abolitionists.
Meanwhile, Noll notes that some offered reasoned biblical attacks on slavery. He writes:
To oversimplify a complicated picture, the most direct biblical attacks on slavery were ones that relied on common sense, the broadly accepted moral institutions of American national ideology, and the weight of “self-evident.” They were also easy to refute. More complicated, nuanced, and involved biblical attacks against slavery offered more formidable opposition. But because those arguments did not feature intuition, republican instinct, and common sense readings of individual texts, they were much less effective in a public arena that had been so strongly shaped by intuitive, republican, and commonsensical intellectual principles. (40)
Noll then looks at the American debate through the lenses of Protestants outside of America, and especially the perspective of conservative Roman Catholics from Europe. They more clearly saw linkages between driving economic issues of the day and the theological perspectives of the various parties involved. They also clearly saw the central role race played in the debate. (i.e., White America's widely shared belief, north and south, about African inferiority.) This wasn't just slavery. It was the enslavement of one race to another. This was something many American figures seemed unable or unwilling to grasp.
The upshot of this was that the Christian religion and Scripture failed to provide a resolution to the conflict. This has had a profound impact on the American psyche. While religion continued to play a powerful role in terms of personal piety, it lost its influence in shaping public policy. That led to an increased secularization of the public sphere of life, making it more difficult for deeply religiously rooted convictions to shape public life. Noll suggests that this absence of moral critique facilitated the ongoing racism over the next century and more, as well as the rise of individualist consumer capitalism.
Noll writes:
In their perceptions of the theological crisis of the Civil War, foreign observers clearly identified a significant issue. How, in fact, are Bible believers, especially Protestant Bible believers, suppose to act in harmony when intpretations of the Bible seem to fly nearly everywhere – when, as the Europeans put it in the 1860s, the is no “autoria riverita” (respected authority), no “Ehrfurcht or den bestehenden Ordnungen und Obrigkeiten” (respect for the established orders and authorities)?
In fact, biblical interpretation in American, even biblical interpretation by individualistic Protestant evangelicals, has never been as chaotic in practice as democratic assertions about the right of private judgment would lead a neutral observer to expect. But American interpretive chaos has still been bad enough. …” (162)
Reflection
Noll's book is a fascinating contribution to understanding a seminal event in American history. But it also had some very important things to say in our present context. One of the issues that resonated with me was the plight of the biblical abolitionists in this conflagration. On one side, they had the commonsensical conservatives who condemned anyone (including biblical abolitionists) for not accepting the "plain teaching" of Scripture. On the other side, they had radical abolitionists who were prepared to jettison any portion of Scripture that did not comport with their Enlightenment republicanism. Anyone not on board with them (including biblical abolitionists) was unenlightened at best, and a bigoted monster at worst. As someone who has been around social policy debates in mainline Protestant hierarchies over the past few decades, the sense of being hammered from two sides feels eerily familiar.
First, there is the issue of women in church leadership. That issue was settled in the PCUSA long before I appeared on the scene. Yet as I examine the history of how women came to be in leadership in the PCUSA, it seems that the justifications have had more in common with Enlightenment republicanism notions of "equal rights" than biblical fidelity. The biggest friction I have with many evangelical types outside the PCUSA is that I am told I don't follow the "plain teaching" of Scripture on women's subordination.
Then there is the issue of homosexuality. There are those in my denomination who literally use the term "ordination rights." They justify homosexual behavior because it has genetic roots, indicating that it was in God's creation design for them. (As someone with two siblings suffering from genetically based muscular dystrophy, I can tell you that genetics is not a determinant for God's plan.) Prevailing social/psychological theories drive the advocacy. On the other side, I see some of the most inane uses of Scripture and callous condemnations of homosexuality by people who have accepted "the plain teaching" of Scripture.
Third, I have been through classes and seminars that purport to teach Christian financial principles. Rarely have I seen more verses and passages of Scripture lifted completely out of context to support a perspective than I have at these events. Yet, from the Christian progressives, I saw economic critiques that have far more to do with Enlightenment notions of communitarianism than theology.
One of the persistent commonalities I see in radicalism and commonsensicalism is a low regard for the testimony of the saints that have gone before us. I have heard ministers on the floor of presbytery (PCUSA) question why we should give any weight to a bunch of "old dead white guys" (i.e., the creeds). I also see similar strains of this within some corners of the Emerging Church conversation. I have also heard that the creeds and traditions of the Church are pointless because a commonsense plain reading of the Scripture will be able to guide us. These attitudes are more heavily influenced by an Enlightenment faith in autonomous unaided reason than anything else.
Another commonality is to see Scripture as a "point-in-time" document instead of part of a dynamic flow of God's work in history. Scripture is the story of applying transcendent truth and doctrine to the space-time realities of the ancient Near East and first-century Greco-Roman world. New Testament teaching contrasts the Old Testament teaching that preceded it and the coming Kingdom that will follow it. It is a trajectory point in an unfolding redemption that runs from the fall of humanity to the New Jerusalem.
American conservative Christians treat the New Testament as the "once and for all time" instruction manual. They are looking for direct propositional instructions about ethical applications today from applications made in a culture that is thousands of miles away in the distance and two thousand years removed in history. The ethics are frozen in time. Meanwhile, liberal Christianity views Scripture as hopelessly bound to context and unable to speak a "word of truth" to us today in anything other than sweeping generalities like "love" and "justice," but whose content is synonymous with modern psychology, sociology, and political philosophy. In either case, Scripture loses its transformative power as the infallible rule for faith and life.
While I found Noll's book very helpful, I admit it was a little depressing. It illustrates to me how deep-seated are the dysfunctions of the American Church. On the other hand, my faith is not in the institutional expressions of God's work in the world but in the author of the unfolding story of redemption. The book is a bit tedious in places, but it is worth reading if you want to understand both the immediate historical context Noll is writing about and how that has set the stage for the ongoing struggles we still live in 140 years later.
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