In this chapter, Noll provides a sketch of theology in the American colonies up to 1750. He contrasts this period with later, post-Revolution theology:

Christian believers in colonial America, though overwhelmingly Protestant, still assumed that God had structured society like a pyramid and that contentment with one’s created place was a godly virtue. The respect owed to pastors was an instance of the deference due to all whom God had placed in their superior stations. (19)

Noll reviews the major theologians and theological traditions in colonial American, beginning with the Puritans and their well-developed Calvinism. New England Puritans “took for granted that the central religious task was to orient the self to the prerogatives of God” as revealed in Scripture (21). Noll notes the “landmarks” of Samual Willard’s Compleat Body of Divinity (1726) and the considerable works of Cotton Mather (1663-1728). Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) is the final and preeminent example of Puritan Calvinism. Noll then examines briefly Presbyterianism outside of New England, Anglicanism in Virginia, and other groups (like Quakers) throughout the colonies. All of these, even the sectarian groups, tended toward a traditional understanding of God’s covenant with the people of God.

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I’m currently reading Mark Noll’s America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln, and I’d like to blog along with the book to capture my understanding of Noll’s thoughts. The book introduces itself as a “contextual history of Christian theology” (1) specifically in America from the 1730’s to the 1860’s. Noll is more concerned with Christian theology than with the history of the United States, and especially with the development of a distinctly “American” theology. Throughout the nineteenth century, this American theology is an “evangelicalism” marked by four characteristics (here, Noll paraphrases the British historian David W. Bebbington):

1. Biblicism - a “reliance on the Bible as ultimate religious authority”
2. Conversionism - “an emphasis on new birth”
3. Activism - “energetic, individualistic engagement in personal and social duties”
4. Crucicentrism - “focus on Christ’s redeeming work as the heart of true religion” (5)

Noll notes that, in the United States during the nineteenth century, a “surprising intellectual synthesis” (9) grows up between orthodox Christianity and republican government, a synthesis wholly different than in any other nation on earth. The purpose of this book is to examine the creation of this synthesis, its climax, and its ultimate collapse in the Civil War. Noll concludes this introduction with an outline of his plan for the book, which traces the beginnings of this American synthesis, explores in detail the various features of the synthesis in post-Revolutionary American, and then closes with a “theological history of the Civil War” (16). Ironically, the American emphasis on “simple” readings of Scripture (in Noll’s terminology), especially regarding slavery, leads to an “impasse [that] is far from simple” (17). Noll observes that, in no other country, did evangelical Christians attempt to defend slavery from Biblical arguments, as they did in pre-Civil War America.

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