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Prominent theologian Noll considers the Civil War as a major turning point in American religious thought, as both Northerners and Southerners generally agreed on the authority of the Bible but disagreed about what it taught about slavery. He also surveys the observations of foreign Protestants and Catholics, who saw clearly that regardless of how much voluntary reliance on scriptural authority had contributed to the construction of national civilization, if there were no higher religious authority than the personal interpretation of scripture, public deadlock over conflicting interpretations would amount to a full-blown theological crisis.
In an informative account of the theological dramas that underpinned and were unleashed by the Civil War, Noll (America's God) argues that mid-19th-century America harbored "a significant theological crisis." Quite simply, ministers disagreed about how to read the Bible-and as much as it was a result of fierce disagreements about slavery or Union, Noll says, the Civil War was a crisis over biblical interpretation. The Bible's apparent acceptance of slavery led Christians into bitter debates, with Southern proslavery theologians detailing an elaborate defense of the "peculiar institution" and Northern antislavery clerics arguing that the slavery found in the Old Testament bore no resemblance to the chattel slavery of Southern plantations. Noll detours, for several chapters, to Europe, analyzing what Christians there had to say about America's sectional and scriptural debates. He suggests that religious upheaval did not evaporate at Appomattox. In the postbellum years, Americans grappled with two great problems of "practical theology": racism, and the convulsions of capitalism. This book's substantive analysis belies its brevity. As today's church debates over homosexuality reveal a new set of disagreements about how to read the Bible, this slim work of history is surprisingly timely. (Apr. 24) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
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