Religion’s Role In American Civil War Topic Of Brose Lectures At Penn State’s Richards Civil War Era Center
April 1, 2003
University Park, Pa. —Mark A. Noll, the McManis Professor of Christian Thought and professor of history at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Ill., will deliver three lectures as part of the 2003 Steven and Janice Brose Distinguished Lecture Series in the Era of the Civil War. The Brose Lectures will occur on April 10, 11 and 12, in Pattee Library’s Foster Auditorium on Penn State’s University Park campus.
Held every spring semester, the Brose Lectures feature leading writers, historians, and intellectuals whose work focuses on the era of the American Civil War.
Over the last decade and more, according to Noll, historians of the Civil War have begun to focus on the many ways in which religion contributed to the conflict. Noll’s lectures will try to extend that work by focusing on what America’s leading theologians wrote about the war. To put a complex situation simply, study of that writing shows the war posed a first-order theological crisis.
Noll’s main primary sources for his first two lectures will be writings in the nation’s theological quarterlies, which were published by many denominations and especially by their leading theological seminaries. He adds, “At a time when there were no graduate schools and when college and university faculties were small, the theological quarterlies provided some of the weightiest, most thoughtful writing in the country, not only on religious matters but on secular questions as well.”
The three lectures will deal with distinct theological crises of the time. The first, to be delivered on Thursday, April 10, at 7 p.m., is titled, “A Crisis Over the Interpretation of the Bible.” A problem arose when equally committed religious believers, relying with equal intensity on the written words of Scripture, came to diametrically opposed conclusions about what the teachings of Bible had to say about the national crisis. This lecture explores why that situation developed, and what the nation’s articulate theologians had to say about the era’s sharp clashes over biblical interpretation.
A second, more general crisis arose from the theologians’ efforts to discern what God was “doing” in and through the war. Noll says, “The difficulty there was, again, that rival theologians came up with very different answers, but also that over the course of the war God himself seemed to be changing directions with great regularity.” Noll will examine both how theologians interpreted providence and why the clash of those interpretations posed fundamental problems in picturing the ways of God among humans.
The lecture, titled “A Crisis Over the Interpretation of Providence,” will occur on Friday, April 11, at 7 p.m., and afterward will feature a book signing by the speaker.
On Saturday at 3 p.m., Noll will deliver the final lecture, “The Crisis Viewed from Outside the United States.” The talk will consider how individuals from outside the United States considered American efforts to interpret the Bible and providence. According to Noll, foreign observers (even those with close sympathies to the particular religious convictions of American writers) were baffled by the deployment of theology in America’s Civil War. The lecture will chart some of those foreign reactions and explore what they tell us about the character of American theological reflections on the war.
Noll has twice won National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, grants from the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Lilly Endowment, Inc., and is the author or editor of more than 20 books, including most recently, “America’s God, from Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln” (Oxford University Press, 2002), “The Old Religion in a New World: The History of North American Christianity” (Eerdmans, 2002), “The Work We Have To Do: Protestants in America” (Oxford University Press, 2002), and “Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity” (Baker, 2000).
In 1998, he was the inaugural McDonald Family Visiting Professor of Evangelical Theological Studies at Harvard Divinity School. He earned his bachelor’s degree in English from Wheaton College, a master of arts in comparative literature from the University of Iowa, a master of arts in church history from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and a doctorate in American religious history from Vanderbilt University.
The Steven and Janice Brose Distinguished Lecture Series in the Era of The Civil War is supported by an endowment established by the Broses in 1998, originally to support a single lecture by a distinguished visitor. The Broses added to the endowment in 2001, allowing a distinguished lecturer to deliver three related lectures over three days. The Brose’s generosity has enabled Penn State and the Richards Center to enter an agreement with the University of Virginia Press, which will publish the lectures as part of a series of scholarly monographs.
For more information on the lectures, the speaker, or the Richards Center, contact the Center at 814-863-0151, or via e-mail at L-RichardsCWEC@lists.psu.edu