America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln - download pdf or read online

non secular existence in early the USA is frequently equated with the fire-and-brimstone Puritanism top embodied via the theology of Cotton Mather. but, by means of the 19th century, American theology had shifted dramatically clear of the serious ecu traditions without delay descended from the Protestant Reformation, of which Puritanism was once within the usa the main influential. as a substitute arose a singularly American set of ideals. In America's God, Mark Noll has written a biography of this new American ethos. within the a hundred twenty five years previous the outbreak of the Civil conflict, theology performed a very very important function in American private and non-private existence. Its evolution had a profound effect on America's self-definition. The adjustments occurring in American theology in this interval have been marked via heightened religious inwardness, a brand new self belief in person cause, and an attentiveness to the industrial and marketplace realities of Western existence. Vividly set within the social and political occasions of the age, America's God is replete with the figures who made up the early American highbrow panorama, from theologians akin to Jonathan Edwards, Nathaniel W. Taylor, William Ellery Channing, and Charles Hodge and religiously encouraged writers reminiscent of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Catherine Stowe to dominant political leaders of the day like Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. The contributions of those thinkers mixed with the spiritual revival of the 1740s, colonial struggle with France, the eating fight for independence, and the increase of evangelical Protestantism to shape a standard highbrow coinage in response to a emerging republicanism and common-sense ideas. As this Christian republicanism affirmed itself, it imbued in committed Christians a conviction that the Bible supported their ideals over these of all others. Tragically, this feeling of spiritual function set the degree for the Civil struggle, because the conviction of Christians either North and South that God was once on their aspect served to deepen a schism that might quickly rend the younger state asunder. Mark Noll has given us the definitive historical past of Christian theology in the US from the time of Jonathan Edwards to the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. it's a tale of a versatile and inventive theological strength that through the years solid a guiding nationwide ideology the legacies of which stay with us to this day.