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Book Review
| America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. By Mark A. Noll. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. xiv, 622 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-19-515111-9.)
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| The personages who serve as bookends to Mark A. Noll's narrative of the rise and fall of "America's God" are Jonathan Edwards, who supplied a metaphysics of virtue and volition grounded in belief in a sovereign God, and Abraham Lincoln, who wondered publicly whether America was the chosen nation and opined that "'the Almighty has his Own purposes'" beyond the ken of men (p. 431). In the intervening decades, Reformed biblicism joined forces with Scottish commonsense moral philosophy and republican ideas about freedom to produce a characteristically American Protestant evangelical theology. That theology reached its peak in the first few decades of the nineteenth century when trust in human initiative as a course to virtuous living all but supplanted reliance on transforming supernatural grace, when vaunted secular theories about the ordering of public life comported with claims for intuitive knowing in individuals, and when American Protestant theology clearly distinguished itself from European outlooks. Persons felt moral truth, were free to choose it, and did so with an eye to the facticity of the Bible, which legitimated their choices. These developments, which represented a joining of republican ideology to theological reasoning (in which each shaped the other), included as well a time bomb of undercutting ambiguities and tensions that led to the gradual unraveling of the synthesis after 1849. Toward the end of the Civil War, as the theological project lay spoiled, it was left to a martyr-president to imagine America as a nation still unfolding its destiny under the supervising eye of a providential God. |
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Edwards matters in this interpretation for his insistence that "'piety of heart'" was not instrumentally linked to the virtuous society (p. 45). Subsequent Protestant theology departed from that claim largely through its borrowings from Scottish thought, which enabled recognition of doctrinal truth through "feeling" self-evident principles, an exercise facilitated by the flowering of a culture of freedom in a vibrant society. Trust in human capability freely to assent to truth in biblically grounded propositions undergirded the efflorescence of a Reformed theological discourse that consequently envisioned the construction of a moral society—a moral nation—out of the evidences of that feeling. |
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America's God is itself an ambitious work of synthesis. Noll has come to terms with a vast historiography bearing on the Republic, Scottish philosophy, and evangelical theology. The argument likewise draws upon an exceptionally rich and lengthy catalog of primary sources, many of which can be understood only through their connections with others in the running debates about human nature, knowledge, and salvation that taken as whole constitute early-nineteenth-century evangelical theology. The narrative is for the most part careful and judicious, Noll occasionally observing that parts of his case rest on "circumstantial evidence" (p. 103) even as he systematically presses the claim for a golden age of evangelical theology in America across a wide front of people, texts, and events. At its best, the book is an authoritative, compelling case for the historical mingling of secular discourses about freedom, choice, and human agency with religious language about sin, salvation, and virtue. At times the analysis of the give-and-take in this process is brilliant, and the precision and depth of the argumentation frequently inspire mental applause. |
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