Book Review: America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln by Mark A. Noll

Book Review: America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln by Mark A. Noll

Introduction

For at least a quarter of a century Mark A. Noll has been one of the most prolific of church historians. He is one of the great historians of Christianity in United States. He has written many books on the issue of theology and Christianity related to the United States. His books are aimed at the general reader, and in particular the college undergraduate. One of the great works of Noll “America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln “will be reviewed in this paper. In this paper, his book will be critically analyzed along with its brief summary and its application and importance for its readers.

Discussion

Summary

America's God is Noll's most significant work to date, for this work, formidable in both size and content, traces the course of mainstream Protestant thought from the 1730s through the 1860s. He describes in detail the shift from the European tradition, descended from the Reformation, towards an evangelical theology shaped by its engagement with post-revolutionary America. Noll makes vivid such supposedly obsolete debates as the incapacity of human nature in light of original sin, the effect of Adam and Eve on later generations, the best way to describe Christ's atoning work on the cross, and the possibility of human perfection (Williams, 2005).

This book is the sociological history of theology in America that was witnessed from the colonial era to the Civil war. This book claims to change the way we think about religion in America along with the American history. Noll is the teacher of history at evangelicalism's premier liberal arts college at Wheaton and in this book he draws the developments and changes in the American theology. However, he did not carry out this task of approaching such a narrow and technical topic from an old-fashioned historical perspective. He challenges that the American theology or the Protestant theology remarkably differs from the European theology. He contends that a particular American evangelicalism was implemented during the Revolution and early Republic era. Noll has ended his story with discussing the Civil War which was; according to him was a theological tragedy. He says that the complications and the contradictions of American religion came into view when the American intentions proved wanting (Noll, 2002).

In terms of stressing in the social history, the attention is drawn on both the contemporary historians such as Wood and Hatch along with the classic social theorists who include Habermas and Weber. Throughout his book he emphasizes upon the social causes and results of a different American account of evangelical Christianity along with special stress on its power which helped create an integrated social order in the stir of deeply troublesome Revolution. According to him the unique American Christianity came into existence by the integration of three different logical strains that are republican political ideology, post-Great Awakening evangelical Protestant religion and reasonable ...