My latest: a review of Mark Noll in The Christian Century
In the new issue of The Christian Century I have a review of Mark Noll’s latest book, America’s Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794–1911. Superlatives fail, as they usually do with Noll’s work. The book is more than a “mere” history, though. It has an argument to make. Here’s how I begin to lay it out:
The United States was, from the start, founded and widely understood as a repudiation of and alternative to European Christendom. Whatever the proper relationship between church and state, the federal government would have no established religion—would not, that is, tax citizens in sponsorship of a formal ecclesiastical body. On this arrangement, most nascent Americans agreed. What then would, or should, the implications be for Christian faith and doctrine in the public square? How could Christian society endure without the legal and political trappings of Christendom?
Answer: through the Bible. Not the Bible and; not the Bible as mediated by. The Bible alone. America would be the first of its kind: a “Bible civilization.” That is to say, a constitutional republic of coequal citizens whose common, voluntary trust in the truth and authority of Christian scripture would simultaneously (1) put the lie to the “necessity” of coercive religious regimes, (2) provide the moral character required for a liberal democracy to flourish, and (3) fulfill the promise of the Protestant Reformation. Sola scriptura thus became the unwritten law of the land. Regardless of one’s confession or tradition, the sufficiency of the Bible for all aspects of life—the canon as the cornerstone for religion, ethics, and politics alike—was axiomatic. For more than a century, it functioned as a given in public argument. Only rarely did it call for an argument itself.
Keep reading for more, including a disagreement with Noll regarding how to interpret prior generations’ disputes over how to read the Bible, in this case about chattel slavery.
