Who Reads an Early American Sermon?

Abstract

Sacred Scripture, Sacred War: Bible and the American Revolution JAMES P. BYRD New York: Oxford University Press, 2013 243 PP Preaching and the Rise of the American Novel DAWN COLEMAN Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013 293 pp. Jeremiah's Scribes: Creating Sermon Literature in Puritan New England MEREDITH MARIE NEUMAN Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013 265 pp. American Zion: Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution the Civil War ERAN SHALEV New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013 239 pp. The sermon's neglect, Dawn Coleman frankly confesses, might be traced the perception that the genre is dull (5). Having fallen asleep more than once in my march through Thomas Hooker's thousand-plus pages on Application of Redemption, I am willing acknowledge that can, occasionally, act as a soporific. But the pulpit riffs described by Meredith Neuman, in whose general movement from theme variation resembles and its almost limitless potential for elaboration and exploration ... crescendos and shifting rhythms, are a reminder that the textual evidence of preaching often preserves theology better than it does the emotions prompted by aural experience (112). Scanning the score for Juan Tizol's jazz standard Caravan (1937) is hardly the same experience as listening Duke Ellington's orchestra from the front row of a crowded concert hall, and for English colonists in North America, listening Sunday was a profoundly affective experience. As James Byrd argues, preaching not only persuaded colonists to be willing die but also to be willing kill in their struggle for independence (74). And sermons on issues from independence war, constitutionalism federations, Eran Shalev suggests, inspired citizens of the new republic think of the United States as a chosen land, an American Zion (4-5). In the hands of these four scholars, the early American sermon is more stimulant than soporific, a genre rife with interpretive possibilities and surprising sociopolitical implications. That these four books, each taking the colonial or antebellum sermon and related forms of religious discourse as its focus, should be published in a single year suggests that Sandra Gustafson no longer need lament the relative neglect ... of religion and in early American studies (1). scholarship of Byrd, Coleman, Neuman, and Shalev attests a vigorous and interdisciplinary resurgence of interest in the textual record of religious experience; the sermon, in their capable hands, is an instrument of provocation, inciting intercontinental war and personal guilt, congregational unity and the jealousy of novelists (Neuman 11). Collectively, these writers demonstrate the essentially democratic character of sermon literature, debate the utility of close reading as a methodology, and illustrate the direct influence of an American sermonic tradition on genres--such as the novel--that few have ever found dull. To read Neuman or Coleman or Byrd in isolation is peer into the future and see how advances in book history, the digital humanities, and other relatively new fields will transform our understanding of the sermon. To read all three at once is both trace the evolution of a broadly influential genre across three centuries and acknowledge the unstated assumptions that have cultivated an unfortunately narrow scholarly approach the genre. Together, these books make a compelling case that far more scholars and students should be reading early American sermons. Every anthology of American literature includes pastoral exhortations from at least two preachers: John Winthrop's A Modell of Christian Charitie and Jonathan Edwards's Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God are omnipresent. …