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.)

Abstract

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.