The Civil War as Theological Crisis

Mark Noll has a new book, The Civil War as Theological Crisis.  One reviewer, writing in The Christian Century, explains Noll's central claim that the "political crisis" leading to the war "was necessarily a theological one, because theology and republicanism shared the same rhetoric," and:

The key to the antebellum synthesis—and, for Noll, the heart of the problem—was a widespread belief in a commonsense approach to the Bible. A faith available to all had for its authority a book accessible to all. The Bible yields its plain meaning to the believer. And so if the apostle Paul commanded, "Slaves, obey your masters," and told a Christian slave to return to his master, no sophistication was needed to see that the Bible condones slavery. "We hold these truths to be self-evident," Jefferson wrote of the nation's founding ideals, and Noll sees the same democratic instinct guiding biblical understanding. No bishop or Harvard scholar was needed to tell the unordained evangelist or even the man in his cabin reading the Bible by firelight what the Bible does and does not say.

But common sense applied to morality as well as to understanding the Bible. To some, including many readers of Uncle Tom's Cabin, the moral reprehensibility of slavery became more and more obvious, and the simplicity of an individual verse less decisive. Stowe's novel was powerful because it showed the limits of a morality shaped by exegesis alone.

The ensuing theological crisis was in some ways, then, a battle between moral common sense and exegetical common sense.

Protestant America lacked the theological resources to avert the stalemate; Noll praises the Catholic thinkers of the time as offering resources to fill the void, including Orestes Brownson, with his famous insistence that "popular liberty can be sustained only by a religion . . . speaking from above and able to command."  Two quick points: first, for an evangelical like Noll to praise 19th century Catholics as the authentic defenders of political liberty, he must be making a well-timed effort to curry favor and minimize hazing by his new colleagues; second (and more seriously), our need for resources to avert the stalemate between exegetical common sense and moral common sense continues, particularly on the question of homosexuality.  Another important contribution from one of my favorite scholars.

Rob