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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