Customer Reviews

The Civil War as a Theological Crisis

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is the book that every Protestant evangelical who invokes "the sole authority of Scripture," and who insists upon the "simplicity," "plain meaning," and "clarity" of its message, should read. I wish a similar monograph had existed when I was in seminary, and that my professors had made me read it as a case study in hermeneutics (the study of the interpretation of Scripture). Why instead of unanimity was there an "interpretive standoff" regarding slavery among Protestant believers, an "unbridgeable chasm of opinion" that tore the nation in two? Why was the evil of slavery eradicated not by the theological arguments of Christians but by the military might of armies? How can you argue against slavery when both the Old Testament and New Testament condone it?

Mark Noll, for over twenty-five years a professor at Wheaton College and now at Notre Dame, examines a broad diversity of religious viewpoints-- mainly American Protestant, but also foreign Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic (both American and foreign) -- about the theological crisis provoked by slavery. This was a question partly about what the Bible said (how to interpret the Bible), and partly about what God was doing in history (providence). Disagreements about what the Bible said about slavery, Noll demonstrates, were deeply influenced by American assumptions about common sense rationalism, economic individualism, race, gender, and political democracy (which is why his two chapters on Protestant and Catholic opinions abroad are so helpful). Even worse, the far deeper issue of racism was barely broached; people separated "the slavery question" and "the negro question." No one in their wildest imagination considered the enslavement of whites (as in OT and NT times), even if they thought it acceptable to enslave blacks, and so even though the war abolished slavery, horrific racism and its evil twin economic disenfranchisement continued unabated. Finally, interpreting the ancient text and applying it to our contemporary context was further complicated by the Protestant insistence that there's no authority above the Bible itself, which was another way of saying that everyone and no one had the ultimate authority to say definitively "what the Bible means" about slavery.

It's a short step from Noll's theological case study about slavery to virtually every other important issue that Christians face--women's ordination, homosexuality, abortion, politics, economics, and race. The Scriptures, said the Westminster divines, are "most necessary" for Christian faith and life, and every believer ought to study them often and well. But as Noll shows, earnest appeals to the authority of Scripture, however necessary and well-intentioned, are the beginning and not the end of the serious work of studying the Bible and then living according to the letter and spirit of its message.

This book covers a much needed gap in the history of Religion during the American Civil War. While focusing on the narrow subject of the theological debates raging during the war (both nationally and internationally), this book is a valued companion to the growing collection of works treating Religion during America's most dividing conflict. (Most notably Harry Stout and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese) While numerous historians have explored the economic, social and racial justifications of slavery, few have explored the surprisingly sophisticated arguments put forth by the Southern theologians. Although modern readers unquestionable find fault in using the Bible to justify slavery, one may be surprised at the intellectual nuance of the arguments given by Southern thinkers. By understanding the ideological mindset of both sides, one gets a fuller insight into this period of our past. And that is what history is all about.

Another novel aspect of the work is that it dives into European sources in search of Continental reactions to the war from European religious thinkers. This aspect helps readers to understand that the problem of race and slavery was not unique to American clergy alone but something that leaders in all corners of Christendom had to deal with. This book is highly recommended for four readers: 1) Someone looking for a highly specialized book on the theological battles that took place during the Civil War 2) Someone who is interested in the history of Christian responses to violence and/or war 3) Someone interested in the connections between slavery and Christianity and 4) The armchair historian who reads everything about the Civil War and is looking for a fresh angle on their favorite subject.

Happy Reading.

This book shows how the beliefs and assumptions held by American Christians in 1860 precluded any kind of critical reflection on the Civil War. If you've read Nathan Hatch's Democratization of American Christianity, this serves as an excellent second installment in the saga. Many of the ideals whose development Hatch chronicles played important roles in paving the way for the Civil War ethos. This book is also a nice supplement to Harry S. Stout's Upon the Altar of the Nation. Stout beautifully chronicles Americans' moral ambivalence, but doesn't really go into the root causes to the extent that Noll does. Nor does Stout explore foreign commentary on the war. Noll's exploration of foreign commentary, in fact, was one of the most fascinating aspects of the book. Foreigners seem to have seen fairly clearly what nobody in America could see.

If you're looking for a rousing or moving narrative, this isn't the book for you. But if you'd like to understand why American theology was paralyzed in the face of the slavery crisis, this little book is ideal.

That it's a "little" book is also nice. Noll says a whole lot in only about 160 pages.

Noll makes an important and accessible contribution to studies on the religious dimensions of the Civil War. Noll demonstrates how views of Biblical interpretation fueled the intensity with which both sides engaged each other over the slavery question. Especially helpful is Noll's analysis on Roman Catholics' views of the War. All around, the book was a great read.

M. Noll simply is one of the best writers i am currently enamored with, both for his research ability, his writing clarity but most importantly the topics and ideas he writes about. I really could do no better than to return the mountain of partially read library books on my desk, just buy everything he wrote and read it in chronological order. He is that good, important and significant.

I've had an interest, inherited from my mom, concerning the American Civil War. Not so much the battles but the meaning of it all. Not the generals but the theologians of the war, why do men fight? why do they kill brothers? why is there such passion about this most UnCivil War? Since i spent a year working on and delivering a Sunday School class on the History of American Presbyterianism i have been aware of the overarching significance of the Civil War in the history of ideas. It marks the end of one world and the birth of another, the one we live in now. And M. Noll and this short book go a long ways towards filling in some of the blank spots and questions i have about it.

in several important ways it is a continuation of:
chapter 18 "The 'Bible Alone' and a Reformed, Literal Hermeneutic", and
chapter 19 "The Bible and Slavery"
from his _America's God_

there is more both historical and theological work to be done on the issues. as a reviewer wrote earlier the issue at heart is the perspicuity of Scripture.

In school we learn that the Civil War was a huge crisis. It was a moral crisis over slavery. It was an economic crisis over the cotton economy in the South and the Northern mills that turned that cotton into products for sale. It was a constitutional crisis over the meaning of the Tenth Amendment or States' Rights. Mark Noll persuasively argues that it was also a theological crisis of immense proportion that affected all Americans down to the present day. Here is the problem as he presents it. Almost everyone from the founding of the Republic sought guidance and justification for all areas of life from the bible. They worked under Protestant assumptions that the bible was God's inspired Word and sufficient for all life and worship. They also worked under the Enlightenment assumption that human beings could understand the bible and make decisions, unaided, drawing from the text and common sense. The problem was that these same people who agreed on almost all major doctrinal issues could not agree on the issue of the morality of slavery. Noll sets out to show the reasons for this problem, the different points of view from both inside outside the U.S. ,and from Protestants and Catholics. It is an amazingly balanced look at a very specific aspect of Civil War history that will enrich your understanding of the era he is writing about, but also of the so-called "culture wars" of recent years.

Noll's lectures in book form are a goldmine for both Civil War enthusiasts and those seeking to understand the current theological morass of today's evangelicalism. His conclusions regarding the theological roots of the conflict are as applicable to the Civil War as they are to the nature of the 'cultural war' that is raging around us today.
Challenges to biblical authority, the way we view God's work in the world, and the way we exercise spiritual authority in our world are not new. They are rooted deep within our culture as Americans. His book is in insightful review of historical data and a helpful guide to navigating the current state of affairs.

Noll has done a splendid job identifying the theological considerations that neutralized the ability of Christians to help the nation avoid the recourse to arms to settle the slavery question. His examination of how various Christian leaders, north and south, viewed divine providence is enough to make anyone uncomfortable with a self-assured approach to understanding the ways of God. His inclusion of European theological perspectives on slavery and the American scene are an added treat. This is a fine book.

There is no question that Prof. Knoll is an excellent scholar, easy to read author and has dedicated a great deal of attention to this book. The fact that the book is difficult to read is not the fault of the author but the publisher. Unless you are highly motivated to read this, or you have excellent eyesight, I would have to suggest you pass on this book. It is not a lengthy book and I can only assume the publisher picked a small indistinct type to save money on printing costs. Enough grousing. Let's examine the content of this volume.

"Neither ideological evolution nor the separation of church and state nor the sanctifying of American republicanism would have made evangelical Protestants important at the time of the Civil War if the United States had not witnessed from 1790 to 1860 an unprecedented dynamism within the churches considered primarily religious institutions. [Page 17.]" Prof. Noll continues to place religion in a prominent consciousness during this period. He cites Garrison on the legitimacy of slavery: "to discard a portion of Scripture is not necessarily to reject the truth, that may be the highest evidence that one can give of his love of truth." [Page 32.] In the 1770s Thomas Thompson published a book supposedly proving that God had ordained slavery and the slave trade. "The power of the proslavery free scriptural position -- especially in a Protestant world of widespread intuited believed in the clean every inspiration of the whole Bible -- lay in its simplicity." Thompson made use of the epistle to Philemon showing the apostle Paul returning the slave Onesimus to his master Philemon [page 33]. In my opinion the author very succinctly explains the popularity of Bible defense of slavery. "The primary reason that the biblical defense of slavery remained so strong was that many biblical attacks on slavery were so weak. [Page 40.]"

Prof. Noll addressing the question of race and slavery refers us to the work of Dr. Laura Mitchell "as she describes them, antebellum Bible readers encountered difficulty where they attempted scriptural interpretations of American events because the Old and New Testaments `describe specific situations whose applicability to the antebellum United States was complicated and imperfect. The passages raised many questions that could not be answered within the body of the text.'" Anyone even vaguely interested should peruse the work of Laura Mitchell. [Page 57.]

The author again brings in the important biblical worker epistle to Philemon by quoting the contemporary Count Gasparin: "does anyone fancy Philemon shrinking Onesimus, after this epistle, as the fugitive slaves are treated in America?" [Page 120.] A considerable portion of the book is dedicated to the reaction of Europe and Canada, both with Catholics and Protestants, and the prevailing interest in the American Civil War and the American slavery. One entire chapter is dedicated to the Catholic viewpoint expressed in the following: "the basic argument maintained that, unlike radical liberals, the Catholic Church could never categorically condemn slavery, but that they had nonetheless work consistently through this entire history to mitigate the wrongs of slavery, to move toward gradual and peaceful emancipation, and to act for the benefit of slaves and Masters in harmony together." [Page 146.] The book ends with another succinct quote from the author: "how, in fact, I Bible believers, especially Protestant Bible believers, supposed to act in harmony with interpretations of the Bible seem to fly nearly everywhere..."

This is an excellent book well worth the effort it might take to read it because of the print. I can not to highly recommend it to anyone interested in the Civil War, American society, religious history or the Bible interpretation of slavery.

Noll does a masterful job walking the reader through the theological issues of the Civil War. I grew up hearing about the brave Christians that called for an end of slavery. In recent years there was a decent movie and book about William Wilberforce and his explicitly Christian work to abolish slavery in England. I went to Wheaton College, which was a stop on the underground railroad and started by Jonathan Blanchard an outspoken Abolitionist. (Noll taught at Wheaton for 15 years, including while I was there.)

But the story is not so simple. Many people are aware that people on both sides of the Civil War thought that God was on their side. Abraham Lincoln has a famous quote, "The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong."

Noll contends that the Civil War was a theological crisis not only because of slavery, or the problems of war, but because it called into question the way the United States understood scripture, religion in public life, America as a chosen nation and the connection between scripture and American democracy.

What most struck me about this book is that it was the theological conservatives that defended not only slavery, but a plain reading and literal interpretation of scripture. Defenders of the institution of slavery (whether they thought it was appropriate in the US or not) could point to a number of scriptures where slavery was either explicitly authorized or implicitly understood as the normal way of things. On the other hand, those that opposed slavery could not point to a scripture that said, "slavery is evil" or "do not have slaves".

In fact, many abolitionist rejected the authority of scripture precisely because there was not an easy way to illustrate from scripture the evil of slavery. This meant that defending scripture and defending slavery became combined in many people's minds, both in the North and in the South.

Another significant theme of the book is that cultural issues impact the understanding of scripture. This comes out in a number of ways. One, for virtually all of US White Christians, from the North or the South, there was an unquestioned assumption that Whites were better or more favored by God than Blacks. So the implicit racism of the US at the time (and for a long time since) has influenced the way that the scriptures were read. Slavery was defended because there was slavery in Israel. But Israel slavery was not based on race, nor was the Roman slavery at the time of Christ. A few radical voices agreed that slavery was not immoral according to scripture, if and only if it was operated on a racially neutral basis. But White slavery was anathema, not on the basis of theology, but on the basis of culture.

Another cultural blind spot was the economic system that encouraged slavery. A few Southern theologians spoke against consumption or currency as a God, but they were blinded to the problems of slavery. Very few Northern theologians saw any problems with either the Northern or Southern economic system and read their scripture as a confirmation of God's blessing on the United States, in spite of the decimation of Native Americans, the slavery of Blacks and the urban poverty created under the new economic models.

One of the best parts of Noll's book is the time he spends looking at how Christians outside the US looked at US slavery and the Civil War. It is interesting that virtually all countries outside the US had made slavery illegal prior to the Civil War. The problems of orthodox scriptural interpretation and slavery just did not exist in Europe or Canada. And what is more, there were strong voices outside of the US that identified the problems of race and economics as the blind spots that did not allow US Christians to see that neither slavery nor biblical interpretation were the primary problems. Catholics, both inside and outside the US, were a particularly interesting case. The US's republican values (free speech, universal human rights and universal voting) were at the time condemned by the Catholic church as a rejection of God's authority. But at the same time the Catholic church was also rejecting slavery and the inherent racism within the US. Catholic policy was for a single racially mixed Mass. So the democratic North and the slavery supporting south were both against the Catholic church.

There are a number if implications for current theological and social concerns. One is that there are other issues that are currently defended by the `plain reading' of scripture on one side and the `whole view of scripture' on the other. The death penalty is a prime example. The US is one of the few countries that still authorizes the death penalty and Evangelical Christian are some of the staunchest supporters. I have had people tell me that until I can point to a scripture that says that the death penalty is wrong, they will support it because the Old Testament says `an eye for an eye'. Christianity Today has an article last week about spanking and addressed this very issue because there are scriptures that say `spare the rod' (Proverb 13:24), while others like William Webb paint a broad picture of scripture that would seem to indicate that there is a type of progressive interpretation that leads us away from spanking as a discipline method. Other issues would include women in ministry, environmentalism, use of alcohol, divorce, etc.

There are also evangelism implications. In the 19th century, Native Americans rejected Christianity in part because there was a fear (both rationally and with historical examples) that if they became Christians and lived peaceful lives, that they would become enslaved or be pushed off their land that had been agreed to by treaty. European visitors to the US rejected the evangelicalism of the 19th century in part because those evangelicals supported slavery and economic models that were considered barbaric to cultured Europeans. I have had people tell me that they reject a God that supports the death penalty or one that does not allow women to speak in church.

In many ways this is a very good book to read in conjunction with Christian Smith's The Bible Made Impossible. Some of the issues are different, but many of the issues that Smith brings up were very real problems 150 years ago. This is a history book, Noll spends very little time in his conclusion thinking about modern ramifications. But Christian Smith's solution of submitting to a community (and converting to Catholicism) seems like one that has historical support from Noll. (Although Catholicism has had its own blind spots.)