Then, Slavery and Scripture; Now, Homosexuality and Scripture

I thought of the similarity between *their* debate and *our* debate when I read this short piece on Mark Noll's new book.  (Not that we're about to have another civil war.)

Atlanta Journal-Constitution
August 26, 2006

Slavery, Scripture: An explosive mix
John Blake - Staff

Before the Civil War was fought on the battlefield, it was fought in America's pulpits.

Southern ministers claimed Scripture sanctioned slavery. Abolitionists said it condemned the practice. The colossal political issue of mid-19th century America might have been the preservation of the Union, but it turned on a deeper question: What does the Bible say about slavery?

Those positions form the basis for author Mark Noll's "The Civil War as a Theological Crisis" (University of North Carolina Press, $29.95).

The "book that made the nation was destroying the nation," because the Bible could not provide a moral consensus on slavery, said Noll, a professor at Wheaton College in Illinois.

"The political standoff that led to war was matched by an interpretive standoff," Noll writes. "No common meaning could be discovered in the Bible, which almost everyone in the United States professed to honor and which was, without a rival, the most widely read text of any kind in the whole country."

Noll, speaking by phone from his Wheaton office, said he was drawn to the subject because few writers had explored the theological conflict that preceded the Civil War. Deeply felt Christian beliefs drove participants and leaders on both sides.

"This was far and away the most religiously engaged conflict in American history," Noll said. "There's a strong religious dimension in the American Revolution ... but nothing like that of the armies and populace in the Civil War."

It may be difficult for people today to understand how Christians could use the Bible to support an institution as brutal as slavery, but Noll said the power of the pro-slavery position was its theological simplicity. The Old Testament and New Testament were filled with passages that sanctioned slavery. In a nation where most people believed in the infallibility of Scripture, those passages settled the debate.

"You had very serious people who said the Bible certainly supports slavery, and any attack on the slave system was therefore an attack on the Bible," Noll said.

The difficulty in the abolitionists' position was its nuance. They had to reject an inerrant approach to the Bible and appeal to the broad sweep of Scripture, which opposed the oppression of a group of people. Those arguments, however, never gained traction among ordinary people who were accustomed to treating the Bible as infallible, Noll said.

Noll said he grew depressed while writing the book because unprecedented reverence for the Bible led not to peace but to the bloodiest war in history.

"Once positions hardened," he said, "the Bible became a bullet rather than a book."
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