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Oklahoma Study
Group
on the
Renewal of Church Theology and Mission
September 2007 to June 2008
Convenor: Joe R. Jones
The agenda for 2007/08 is Christian Discourses and Practices
Amidst American Politics and Religion: A Drama of Mutual Influence for
Good and Ill. It will involve readings from Mark Noll, Harry Stout,
Craig Carter, and Robert Brimlow. See Agenda for further information.
See Schedule for times and places.
Persons interested in becoming members of the group should
contact Joe R. Jones at joerjones@hughes.net
.
Study Group Agenda
Virtually every Christian church tradition in America today is in confusion
and disarray about its identity, authority, and purpose. It is our hope
that the agenda proposed for this upcoming year [i.e., 9/07-6/08] will
illuminate for us the historical and theological roots of this disarray
in which we find ourselves. The peculiar and extraordinary intermixing
of Christian discourses and practices and the politics of establishing
and maintaining a democratic republic, produced advantages and disadvantages
to both church and state. The fluid yet highly emotive uses of such terms
as ‘freedom’, ‘justice’, ‘virtue’,
‘law’, ‘gospel’, ‘the Bible says’,
and ‘God’s will’—in both church and nation—have
bred and inflamed confusions and conflicts that remain with us today.
Mark A. Noll’s America’s God:
From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford University
Press, 2002, pb) is a sustained historical and theological analysis of
the interface between Christian discourses about God and humanity and
the discourses of the burgeoning American politics from 1730s to the 1860s.
Noll is one of the most distinguished church historians today and is the
winner of the Best Book in American History Prize for 2004 given by the
Historical Society. See also Noll’s The Civil War as a Theological
Crisis (University of North Carolina Press, 2006)
.
Harry S. Stout’s Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral
History of the Civil War (Viking, 2006, pb) is an exceptionally
lucid study of the moral discourses in the church and nation leading up
to and developing during the Civil War. How do Christians in both North
and South construe their going to war and construe their justifications
for conducting the war in the ways they did? How did ‘just war’
devolve into ‘total war’ against all? Stout is the Jonathan
Edwards Professor of American Religious History at Yale University.
In 1951 H. Richard Niebuhr published Christ and Culture, which
became the standard diagnostic typology of the various ways in which Christ
[church] and culture interact. That typology itself has come under serious
critique by such theologians as John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas
in recent years. Craig A. Carter’s Rethinking Christ
and Culture: A Post-Christendom Perspective (Brazos Press,
2006, pb) is a sustained attempt to critique Niebuhr’s typology
and a systematic proposal for rethinking theologically how church and
culture/world should be related.
The most revealing conundrum of church and world/state/culture issues
comes to expression in the obvious fact that Christians go to war so often.
Why is that? Jesus and the New Testament do not seem to urge disciples
of Jesus either to kill or to go to war in the name of Jesus. But can
the church in theology and practice sustain a pacifist discipline and
self-understanding today? Robert W. Brimlow’s What about
Hitler? Wrestling with Jesus’s Call to Nonviolence in an Evil World
(Brazos Press, 2006, pb) soberly and passionately explores these
issues.
It is the intent of the study group to read and discuss these books and
the profound issues they raise for Christian self-understanding and for
the ecclesiological discourses and practices of the church today.
An indicator of how deeply engrained in the American church in all its
various traditions, from the Calvinists, to Baptists, to Methodists, and
to the Stone-Campbell Movement, is the association of faith and piety
with patriotism and the necessity of sacrificial suffering in order to
protect and defend the nation against its enemies.
Consider Stout:
The United States was first and foremost an idea built on a foundation
of ideology and theology. So, when America was put to the ultimate internal
test, it would require not only a war of troops and armaments—the
stuff of geopolitics—but also a war of ideas. This war would require
each side, especially the South, to establish a legitimate identity as
a moral “nation.” It would also demand a moral campaign to
establish the justness of a resort to arms. Abstract political arguments
would not suffice. They would have to be augmented by moral and spiritual
arguments that could steel millions of men to the bloody business of killing
one another. Above all, it is crucial to understand how both sides needed
to enlist God in their cause as both justifier and guarantor of their
deliverance. Here the voices of clergymen in thousands of churches North
and South would become especially meaningful as critics or cheerleaders
of the war’s conduct. Tragically…the clergy were virtually
cheerleaders all. [xvi-xvii]
While few judged or questioned the recourse to total war, many saw in
the unprecedented destruction of lives and property something mystical
taking place, what we today might call the birthing of a fully functioning,
truly national, American civil religion. It was a meaning difficult for
anyone to articulate at the time; yet some—including soldiers, clergy,
and, most notably, Abraham Lincoln—began to posit a moral ground
in the creation of a powerful national or “civil” religion.
As the Civil War progressed onto increasingly eroded moral ground, something
transformative simultaneously took place that would render the war the
defining phenomenon in American history. Patriotism itself became sacralized
to the point that it enjoyed coequal or even superior status to conventional
denominational faiths. [xvii-xviii]
As the war progressed, there appeared increasing contemporary references
to Union and Confederate casualties as “martyrs.” The language
of martyrs stands out as religious language. In the case of the Civil
War, it is religious language dedicated to political religion rather than
to Christianity. By the war’s most devastating years in 1863 and
1864, no Americans were said to be dying for their Christian faith, but
plenty of “martyrs” were dying for their country. …
The language of martyrdom reveals how, at least subconsciously, this war
was generating through sheer quantity of blood sacrifice a living and
vibrant civil religion. By linking patriotism to Christianity and paying
lip service to the superiority of the eternal over the temporal, ministers
and people could embrace the new faith without fully acknowledging exactly
what they were doing.[xxi-xxii]
Schedule
[On alternating months, the seminar will meet at the First Christian Church
in Okemah, OK and at the First Christian Church in Okmulgee, OK]
2007
Sept 11 [Okemah]
Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to
Abraham Lincoln (Oxford University Press, 2002, pb.).
Ch. 1: Introductory, pp. 3-50
Ch. 2: Synthesis, pp. 51-157
Oct 9 [Okmulgee]
Noll: Ch. 3: Evangelization, pp. 159-224
Nov 6 [Okemah]
Noll: Ch. 4: Americanization, pp. 225-364
Dec 4 [Okmulgee]
Noll: Ch. 5: Crisis, pp. 365-445
2008
Jan 8 [Okemah]
Harry S. Stout, Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History
of the Civil War (Viking, 2006 pb).
Introduction, pp. xi-xxii
Prologue, pp. 1-5
Part I: Preparation: Patriots All, pp. 9-58
Part II: Romanticization: The Making of Heroes, pp. 61-124
Part III: Descent: Hard War Spilled Blood, pp. 125-164
Feb 5 [Okmulgee]
Stout: Part IV: Justification: The Emancipation
War, pp. 165-219
Part V: Transformation: Hearts Invested, pp. 221-292
Part VI: Proportion: The Soldiers’ Total War, 293-349
Mar 4 [Okemah]
Stout: Part VII: Discrimination: A Civilian War, pp.
351-422
Part
VIII: Reconciliation: Making an End to Build a Future, pp. 423-456
Afterward,
pp. 457-461
April 1 [Okmulgee]
Craig A. Carter, Rethinking Christ and Culture: A Post-Christendom
Perspective (Brazos Okmulgee Press, 2006, pb).
Preface, pp. 7-11
Introduction: Reading Niebuhr in a Post-Christendom Situation, pp. 13-31
Part 2: Rethinking Christ and Culture after Christendom, pp. 35-108
May 6 [Okemah]
Carter: Part 2: A Post-Christendom Typology of
Christ and Culture, pp. 111-198
Conclusion, pp. 199-212
June 3 [Okmulgee]
Robert W. Brimlow, What about Hitler?Wrestling with Jesus’s
Call to Nonviolence in an Evil World (Brazos Press, 2006,
pb).
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