Ma's Literary Corner

Ma is reading a most interesting book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, by Mark A. Noll. The publisher is Wm. B. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan and the year, 1994.

I realize that I'm not following strict rules for citation, but I do have to get on with school for the kiddos, which wraps it all up into one of life's sweet little ironies.

Since I've given the basic info, I'll just tack on the page numbers after each paragraph(s). Words in bold are words that were italicized in the original text. Putting them in quotations for this blog post makes them automatically italicized, thus the different emphasis on my part.

In the following excerpts, the word 'republican' refers to a government where power rests in the citizens, not a dictator or monarch. It is not to be confused with the Republican Party.

"Two crises dominated the political history of this era. The first was a crisis of the British Empire and was resolved by the American Revolution. The second was a crisis of government in the new United States and was resolved by the delegates who convened in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787 to write the Constitution. Both crises represented an effort by Americans to preserve the virtues of republican government." (p 69)

"Republicanism was critical for the bond between religion and politics in the Revolutionary era because the beliefs of American Christians paralleled republican principles in many particulars. This in turn led to the widespread assumption that republican principles expressed Christian values and that they could be defended with Christian fervor.

Together, the republican and the Puritan traditions shared many formal similarities. In the first place, each held to a view of human nature that recognized the human capacity for evil as well as for good. Puritans dwelt at length on the natural tendency toward evil that arose as a consequence of Adam's fall. Republicans dwelt at length on the natural tendency to abuse official power as a consequence of the corrupting nature of power itself." (p 70)

"A lively tradition of millennialism also helped to forge a link between political freedom and Christian liberty. Speculation of this sort encouraged the notion that the great conflict between God and Satan was somehow being played out in the struggle with Britain, and that a victory over Parliament might signal the near approach of God's rule on earth, the millennium." (p 71)

"The long-term effect of evangelical republicanism in America was to short-circuit political analysis. So deeply entwined were republican and Christian themes that there seemed to be no need for reexamining the nature of politics itself. It could simply be assumed that the American way was the Christian way. That assumption is not necessarily baseless. But as long as it functioned as an assumption, that belief was not conducive to the development of a Christian mind. For practical questions, the overwhelming evangelical commitment to this assumption created difficulties for missionary efforts in other political cultures, it made for problems in understanding the role of the United States in the world, and it led to confusion in the treatment of non-Protestants in the United States. Theoretically considered, however, the greatest damage from the assumption that linked Christian faith and republicanism was its very character as an assumption. If the Christian truth about politics was so clear, there was no need to think about politics at all." (pp71-72)

 

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