Prosser Gifford: Good afternoon.   John, are we on?
Male Speaker: Yes.   Prosser Gifford: Okay.
I'm Prosser Gifford, the Director of the Office of Scholarly Programs
and the Kluge Center next door, and we have come to one of those moments
which is both joyful and sad; joyful because we will hear from Mark Noll,
who has been a marvelous scholar in the Kluge Center --
I'll say a little bit more about him in a minute --
and sad because he's nearing the end of his time with us.
So just as we get to know people, they leave.
But that is part of renewal of institutional life,
as anyone associated with universities is aware of.
Mark Noll is at present the McManis Chair of Christian Thought
of Wheaton College in Illinois, and a cofounder and advisor
for the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals,
about which he has written a great deal.
The book which I first came across and was very taken
with is America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln,
but that's only one of a number of books.
Another recent one is The Work We Have to Do:
A History of Protestants in America.
You wrote one in '94 called The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind
and an earlier one in '86, Between Faith and Criticism: Evangelicals,
Scholarship and the Bible in America, and again in '96,
Adding Cross to Crown: The Political Significance of Christ's Passion.
He has received his Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University and has taught
at a number of institutions including the Harvard Divinity
School, the Divinity School at the University of Chicago,
Westminster Theological Seminary and Regent College in Vancouver.
I could go on, but I won't because you're not here to hear me,
you're here to hear Mark Noll, who is going to talk to us
about a subject on which he is deeply knowledgeable;
that is the Bible in American public life, this time in the later period,
from 1860 to the present.
"Dilemmas at the Center, Insights From the Margins."
Mark. Mark Noll: I'm grateful, Prosser, for that kind introduction.
The Library of Congress is an awfully impressive place
when you drive by it.
It's a much more impressive place when you're inside it
and able actually to put it to use, and especially when you're able
to put it to use with as helpful and considerate a staff
as the Kluge Center puts before you.
It's kind of like we would say in the Midwest, academic hog heaven.
[ laughter ]
"This country is, as everybody knows, a creation of the Bible,
and the Bible is still holding its own, exercising enormous influence
as a real spiritual power in spite of all the destructive tendencies."
These words spoken 102 years ago this month came
from an unexpected source, as part of an address delivered
by Solomon Schechter at the dedication of the main building
of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City.
They echoed what was then a common assertion
about the biblical character of the United States.
Yet, much more frequently such words came from Christian commentators,
and with specific reference
to the Christian character of the scriptures.
Thus, only a few years after Schechter's address the Governor
of New Jersey addressed a crowd of about 12,000 in Denver
on the subject the Bible and progress.
The occasion was the 300th anniversary of the publication
of the King James Version.
In his speech, Woodrow Wilson called scripture the Magna Carta
of the human soul, and he summarized the burden of his remarks like this:
"The Bible, with its individual value of the human soul,
is undoubtedly the book that has made democracy
and been the source of all progress."
What Schechter and Wilson wanted to say is
that without full consideration of the Bible, no adequate account
of American history or of American national ideals was possible.
A century and more later, much has changed.
Political, social, legal
and cultural developments have altered the practice of religion
and of everything else in America.
Yet despite manifold changes, reading of the Bible,
reverence for the Bible, reference to the Bible and debate over whether
and how to use the Bible continue as constant features in American life.
Our setting in the Library
of Congress offers a particularly apt venue
for considering this subject.
We are gathered, after all, right next to the room
that houses the library of Woodrow Wilson.
The Library's collections constitute one
of the world's great repositories of printed Bibles
and other materials related to the scriptures.
We are also located only 150 yards south of the Supreme Court,
where six weeks ago the Court heard oral arguments concerning whether
or how the Ten Commandments may be displayed on public property.
Most pertinently, we sit today, literally just down the road
and literally just across the street from the sites
where two notable Americans made the most effective use of the Bible ever
in our nation's public history.
I am referring, of course, to Martin Luther King, Jr.,
and the speech he delivered from the east steps of the Lincoln Memorial
on August 28th, 1963 during the march on Washington
for civil rights, and to Abraham Lincoln
and his second inaugural address, which he delivered
from the east side of the Capitol on March 4th, 1865.
Beyond cavil, the extraordinary force of these addresses owed much
to their anchorage in scripture.
Yet the two speeches were quite different,
and so serve to illustrate the various ways
that the Bible has been put to use in American public life.
First we can see in them a rhetorical or stylistic echoing
of scripture where speakers, in order to increase the gravity
of their own words, employ a phraseology, a cadence or a tone
that parallels the classic phrasing of the King James Version.
The most dramatic example in our entire history
of such a biblical tone may, in fact, be King's speech
in August 1963, which is filled with biblically sounding phrases:
"The Negro finds himself in exile in his own land," "Now is the time
to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation
to the sunlit path of racial justice," "Let us not seek
to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness
Second, use of the Bible may be called evocative,
where speakers put actual biblical phrases to use,
but as fragments jerked out of context in order
to heighten the persuasive power of what they are trying
to say for their own purposes.
Lincoln used the Bible this way in his second inaugural
when he took the phrase from Genesis 3:19 to say, "It was strange
that any man should dare to ask a just God's assistance
in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces."
Third, in political deployment of scripture the Bible is quoted
or paraphrased to make a direct assertion
about how public life should be ordered.
The difference of merely rhetorical
or evocative use is a speaker's implicit claim the scripture is not
just supplying a universe from which
to extract morally freighted vocabulary,
but that it positively sanctions the speaker's vision
for how public life should be ordered.
Thus, Martin Luther King toward the end
of his great speech quoted Isaiah Chapter 40, verse four,
in order to enlist the divine sanction for his vision
of a society free of racial discrimination: "I have a dream
that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill
and mountain shall be made low, the rough places shall be made plain,
the crooked places shall be made straight,
and the glory of the Lord will be revealed
and all flesh shall see it together."
In his second inaugural, Lincoln did something similar
when he combined resignation before the workings of providence
with an indictment of the ones who had asked God's assistance
in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces.
For that combination of opinions, a quotation from Matthew Chapter 18,
"The prayers of both sides could not be answered;
that of neither has been answered fully.
The almighty has his own purposes.
Woe unto the world because of offenses, for it must needs be
that offences come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh."
Political use of scripture is at once more dangerous
and more effective than the rhetorical or evocative.
It is more dangerous because it risks the sanctified polarization
that has so often attended the identification
of a particular political position with the specific will of God.
It can also be dangerous for religion.
In the telling words of Leon Wieseltier, the surest way
to steal the meaning and therefore the power from religion is
to deliver it to politics, to enslave it to public life.
Yet, political use of scripture can also be remarkably effective.
When a specific political position is successfully identified
with the purposes of God, that position can be advanced
with tremendous moral energy.
And the energy of the vocal chords can also be enhanced
with a little drink.   [ laughter ]
When a specific political position can be shown to be biblical,
then you have moral energy.
And with these two speeches, strategic quoting
from the Bible played a significant part in reassuring many Americans
that Lincoln's opposition to slavery and King's opposition
to racial discrimination really did embody a divine imperative.
Finally, after rhetorical, evocative and political usages,
there is the theological deployment of scripture
where the Bible is quoted or paraphrased to make an assertion
about God and the meaning of his acts
or providential control of the world.
In American public life this use of the Bible is by far the rarest.
Lincoln's second inaugural may, in fact, represent its only instance.
What he said pertained not primarily to the fate of the nation
and not even to a defense of his own political actions,
but to the sovereign character and mysterious purposes of God.
For that statement a quotation from Psalm 19:9 provided the last word:
"If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses
which in the providence of God must needs come,
but which having continued through his appointed time he now wills
to remove, and that he gives to both North and South this terrible war
as the woe due to those by whom the offense came,
shall we discern therein any departure
from those divine attributes which the believers
in a living God always ascribe to him?
Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray that this mighty scourge
of war may speedily pass away.
Yet if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled
up by the bondman's 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk,
until every drop of blood drawn with a lash shall be paid
by another drawn with a sword, as was said 3000 years ago,
so still it must be said: the judgments of the Lord are true
As one of those believers in a living God whom Lincoln referred
to here, I am convinced that only his public articulation
of scripturally derived theological principle about the sovereignty
of God can explain the unprecedented humility that followed
in the second inaugural's pareration   [ spelled phonetically ]
. In other words, without a scriptural theology concerning the
righteousness of God's ultimate judgment,
there would have been no proclamation
of malice toward none and charity toward all.
The orations by King and Lincoln were unusual
because they brought a panoply of biblical testimony to bear
on circumstances of great public moment at times
of evident national crisis.
King's dramatic address underscored a turning point
in the nation's moral history, when nearly a century after the end
of the war to end slavery the United States was moving haltingly
to confront the bitter realities of racial discrimination.
For Lincoln, an unexpectedly calm meditation near the conclusion
of an unexpectedly violent war became the occasion
for profound reflections on the inexorable cost
of justice displayed, the counterintuitive blessing of charity
for all, and the unfathomable mysteries of divine providence.
In both cases, the Bible was indispensable
But now, long after Lincoln applied his words to bind
up the nation's wounds, and more than a generation removed
from King's appeal to let freedom ring, we inhabit a cultural
and political landscape in which it is considerably more difficult
to draw on the resources of scripture as Lincoln and King did.
The difficulties concern both narrowly religious
and more broadly political factors.
In the first instance, since World War II the Bible has shrunk
to a smaller place in the American cultural landscape.
The issue may not be primarily a decline in the distribution
of scripture, since Bible sales continue very strong,
so much as an incredible expansion in the distribution of other media.
Bible content can hold its own in an age of proliferating media,
as evidenced by the considerable success of electronic products
like the Jesus film, Mel Gibson's, "The Passion of Christ,"
or the children's programming provided by "Veggie Tales."
Bible content cannot, however, dominate in an entrepreneurial age
of Democratic media in the way
that the King James Version once provided a conceptual canopy
for the entire English-speaking world.
Reference to the once dominant place
of the King James Version draws attention
to the good news/bad news constituted by the proliferation
over the last half-century of new Bible translations.
The good news is that modern translations present the Bible
as an open, accessible book in a way that it was ceasing to be
when the archaic King James prevailed as the Bible
of the English speaking world.
The bad news is that not one of the new translations comes anywhere near
to the broad linguistic
and conceptual currency the King James Version once enjoyed.
When Lincoln in 1858 spoke of a house divided,
or in 1865 of judging not that ye be not judged,
almost all educated people who heard him recognized not only
that he was citing the Bible, but that he was using the very words
of scripture that they themselves had also read,
heard and inwardly digested.
The gain and accessibility that the new translations all genuinely offer
is matched by loss in familiarity with the King James Version
that once provided the culture as a whole.
Difficulties in the public use of the Bible caused
by the multiplication of modern media and the proliferation
of new translations are, however, puny when compared
to the difficulties caused by contemporary political realities.
Part of this difficulty is structural,
and for traditional Christian believers, nicely ironic.
The United States may be today the most religiously pluralistic nation
that has ever existed on the face of the earth.
It has become so, at least in part
because of political values encouraged
by the American Democratic appropriation of teachings derived
from the Hebrew and Christian scriptures.
With the religious pluralism resulting from an explicit policy
of religious freedom, it risked misunderstanding,
if not also offense for leaders to employ the Bible
as if the Bible necessarily spoke to and for the citizenry as a whole.
Yet, difficulties with the public use of scripture arising
from American religious pluralism are not what spring most easily
to mind when, at least in Washington, D.C.,
at least in the wake of the 2004 presidential election,
questions are raised about the public use of the Bible; rather,
it is the clamor of partisan political polemics.
Naturally in such a climate, extreme voices attract the most attention.
On the one side we hear rhetorical, evocative and political use
of the Bible on behalf of partisan, national or political goals.
Thus in one well reported kerfuffle from late in 2003,
a Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence was reported
as delivering speeches before local churches in which he proclaimed
that the real enemy in the battles against Al-Qaeda
and Saddam Hussein was a spiritual enemy called Satan, and that America
as a Christian nation needed to come against these enemies in the name
of Jesus in order to achieve military success.
Such sentiments were intended to do what Abraham Lincoln
and Martin Luther King, Jr. had done with similarly biblical rhetoric,
but this effort was so clearly advanced
to promote a contested moral position
and to combat domestic opponents of the war that its striving
On the other side we hear partisan panic about how public invocation
of scripture heralds the dawning of a theocratic dark age.
Thus, in a recent issue
of The American Prospect an author introduced a consideration
of President Bush and his supporters with a fusillade of fear mongering.
History judges religious zealots harshly,
particularly those wielding state power.
The Crusades slaughtered millions in the name of Jesus.
The Inquisition brought the torture and murder of millions more.
After Luther, Christians did bloody battle with other Christians
Apart from a loose grasp of historical fact,
assertions like these betray an incredible confidence
in the moral power of merely secular norms,
which in actual historical situations have never lived
The combined result from recent changes
in the religious landscape touching the translation and circulation
of the Bible, and recent changes
in the political landscape touching polemical uses
and polemical resistance in scripture is a series of dilemmas.
These dilemmas can be expressed as a vicious cycle.
The more religiously plural the nation becomes,
the less it is natural for the citizenry as a whole
to grasp the significance of the Bible.
The less it is natural for the citizenry as a whole
to grasp the significance of the Bible, the more it is likely
that the Bible is used to appeal to only some of its citizens.
The more it is likely the Bible is used to appeal to only some
of the citizens, the greater the likelihood of partisan
and therefore superficial use of the Bible.
The greater the likelihood of partisan
and therefore superficial use of the Bible,
the more the Bible loses its integrity as a public force.
The more the Bible loses its integrity as a public force,
the more irrelevant it looks in a religiously plural nation.
But the more irrelevant or partisan or superficial the Bible becomes
in a religiously pluralistic nation, the less likely
that leaders can use scripture for the self-sacrificing, altruistic
or prophetic purposes that within shouting distance
of where we are assembled today, Abraham Lincoln
and Martin Luther King, Jr. put the Bible so dramatically to use.
At this point I'm more than happy as a historian to hand this series
of dilemmas over to pundits, political theorists and theologians.
But as a historian, and especially a historian given the privilege
of spending an academic year at the Library of Congress,
more can be said, especially by shifting attention away
from these dilemmas that are now so obvious at the center of power.
If we move to the margins --
that is, to voices or groups with strong opinions
about the American use of the Bible, but with little standing
in American public life --
we discover a set of engaging observations,
and perhaps even intimations of a way forward.
And so in the second part of the lecture I would
like to draw attention to four such perspectives from the margins,
which I will treat in order from farther away to closer at hand.
First are the opinions of European Catholics before
and during the American Civil War.
Second are the opinions of French Quebec nationalists during the last
part of the 19th century.
Third are the opinions of Jewish immigrants to the United States,
especially from the start of the 20th century.
And fourth are the opinions of African Americans
to the era of the First World War.
Foreign Catholic commentators on the Civil War paused often
to note the prominence of scripture in debates that led
up to the outbreak of conflict,
and that transformed the conflict into a religious war.
What struck foreign Catholics most forcibly was the moral confusion
that resulted when a fervent trust
in scripture was exercised democratically.
For southern whites and a substantial number
of northern moderates and conservatives as well,
it was obvious that the Bible in some manner
or other legitimated slavery.
Thus at a fast day sermon in December 1860,
a Presbyterian minister, Henry van Dyke of New York --
New York, not South Carolina --
examined the many New Testament passages
that simply accepted Roman slavery as an incontestable fact of life.
Van Dyke's conclusion spoke for a wide swath of American opinion.
To him it was obvious that the tree of abolitionism is evil
and only evil, root and branch, flower and leaf and fruit;
that it springs from and is nourished
by an utter rejection of the scriptures.
But of course, for many abolitionists the Bible spoke just
as clearly in opposition to slavery.
For them, biblical passages like the golden rule as recorded
in the gospels, "Therefore, all things whatsoever ye would
that men should do to you, do ye even so to them,"
or the egalitarian mandate of Galatians Chapter 3, verse 28,
"There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free,
for all ye are one in Christ;" these scriptures completely ruled
out the practice of slavery.   From abroad, this division
in interpreting the same sacred text drew sharp criticism.
The Paris politician Augustin Cochin,
who was one of the elite liberal Catholics of his generation,
published in 1861 a substantial tome
with the straightforward title Abolition de l'esclavage,
The Abolition of Slavery, which mounted one
of the era's most thorough biblical, theological
and historical attacks on the institution.
But this book's abolitionism differed from American efforts
by including a strong defense of Roman Catholicism,
especially with respect to the scriptures:
"The manner in which men find in the Bible all
that their interest desires fills me with astonishment,
and I thank God once more for having caused me to be born in the bosom
of a church which does not abandon the holy books
to the interpretations of caprice and selfishness."
Of all foreign Catholic attention to the American Civil War,
it was a substantial journal edited by Italian Jesuits,
La Civilta Cattolica, that made the sharpest criticism.
To the Italian Jesuits, all of American history was tied in knots
because of problems related to biblical interpretation.
American religion began with the Puritans,
who tried to found a new social and political life on the basis
of their own religious doctrine.
The result was an extensive despotism over every detail of life.
But then, in reaction to Puritan despotism the United States lurched
to the other extreme by setting
up an absolute separation of church and state.
The separation did offer unprecedented liberty,
but so great was that liberty
that it undercut the Protestants' professed desire
to order all of life by the Bible.
The sacred text, in the words of the Italians,
is explained by each one according to his own will,
and under the influence of a rationalistic philosophy.
These circumstances explain why Americans were constantly founding
new churches on the claim of new effusions of the Holy Spirit.
Civilta Cattolica's interpretation of the Civil War tied the breakup
of the United States as a political entity to its history
as an experiment in Protestant public order.
The Jesuits expressed mingled admiration and humor
in finding that, as they put it,
suddenly both parties had become theologians;
the one side quoting the pentaduke   [ spelled phonetically ]
to justify slavery, the other side quoting the gospel to condemn it.
While the Jesuits did find much to praise in American religion,
they nonetheless saw a great mistake; a missing principle
that is dissolving a great union.
That missing element was religious unity.
Reconciliation would elude the Americans because they are divided
on a moral question, and moral questions are fundamentally grounded
in religious dogma.
But if Americans understood the true character of religious authority,
then it would be possible to use scripture with greater effect.
If the Americans lived with their rights, and in their trust
in scripture were, quoting the Jesuits,
assured by an authority respected by both parties,
then the Bible could come into the conflict not as a plaything but as
in a contest of truth over, against falsehood.
Such an authority, which obviously meant the Roman magisterium,
could exercise an almost invincible strength over the two parties
so that one would surrender
or they both would be reconciled to each other.
As it was, however, their lack of independence makes it impossible
to find a solution to their quarrel both
because they lack a central religious authority
and because they lack moral honesty, which is itself a consequence
of not having a central religious authority.
The conservative Roman Catholic solution to American problems, even,
I might say, this week, in the use of scripture hardly seems a solution
that could be promoted today.
To make it work, a massive campaign would be required
to convince Americans both that the Bible should be regarded
as an authoritative norm for public life, and that the interpretation
of the Bible should be given over to one particular Christian authority.
Nonetheless, to contemplate a situation in which
as the Italian Jesuits put it, the Bible could be used not
as a plaything but as a contest of truth over,
against falsehood deserves at least for citizens who believe
in the beauty of truth and the peril
of falsehood a moment of calm reflection.
A very different kind of commentary in the American use
of the Bible arose in the second half of the 19th century,
when Quebec Catholics developed an extensive scriptural interpretation
of their own country.
Here the commentary in the United States was indirect
but no less thought provoking.
These Catholic Qubcois knew very well that many
in the United States looked upon their nation,
as in Solomon Schechter's words, a creation of the Bible,
but they were not at all impressed with this American conceit.
Rather, to them it was French Canada that deserved
to be considered the sinecure of providence, and the antitype
of biblical narrative; the view that, as a moderate scholar puts it,
French America was nothing less than the new Israel of God.
It was promoted for the better part of 50 years by a number
of prominent clerics and provincial authorities.
Their number included Monsignor Louie Adolph Pakai
[ spelled phonetically ]
, who in 1902 delivered a memorable address to the Socit Jean-Baptiste
in which he applied Isaiah Chapter 43,
verse 21 to the French Canadians: "This people have I found
for myself; they shall show forth my praise."
Especially prominent in promoting a providential history
of Quebec was the third bishop of Trois-Rivieres,
Louis Francois Laflche, who in 1865 and '66 published a series
of 34 articles in his diocesan paper that were then collected
as a book entitled Some Considerations on the Connections
Between Civil Society and Religion and the Family.
Laflche is particularly relevant for American examination
because of how thoroughly he employed the Bible in setting
out his conviction that, as he put it, "our mission is the extension
of the kingdom of God by the formation of a Catholic people
in the valley of the Saint Lawrence."
In making such assertions, Laflche ranged far
and wide in Holy Scripture.
By his public use of the Bible, Laflche hoped
to provide not only an inspiring vision for Quebec nationalism,
but also a practical antidote
against what he considered the gravest threat to Quebec society.
That threat he called the fever of immigration to the United States,
which he described as an epidemic no less terrible in a sense
than the typhus attack of 1948.
The theology driving Laflche was an interpretation of scripture
that saw nationhood as the direct product of divine action.
In his view, God's call on Abraham as described in Genesis Chapters 12
and 13 provided a norm for all of human history;
each nation has received from providence a mission to fulfill
and a determined goal to reach.
Biblical history as well as secular history showed in addition
that God blessed or judged nations depending
on how they fulfilled the mission given by God.
In Laflche's understanding, the exemplary record established
by the founders and early martyrs of French Canada,
Jacques Cartier, Samuel Du Champlain   [ spelled phonetically ]
, the pioneering Jesuit missionary John de Brebeuf,
and Canada's first Bishop, Francois Moranseilles
[ spelled phonetically ]
had verified the sacredness of Quebec's destiny.
On the basis of this scriptural theology,
Laflche then urged his readers to do their duty by not immigrating
to the United States, as well as by supporting God-given authorities
in family, government and church.
In presenting these opinions, Laflche was also a master
in using the Bible evocatively, and infusing what he wrote
with a persistent biblical rhetoric shaped by both the Latin Vulgate
and the authorized French Catholic translation of the Bible.
For Americans, there should be great benefit in observing Laflche
and his French Catholic compatriots as they read the history
of Quebec out of the sacred text.
Serious internalizing of biblical narratives
and themes has always been a multinational phenomenon.
The conclusion that the Bible speaks directly
to an individual's nation has flourished at different times
in Poland, Ireland, South Africa, Russia and several other nations,
as well as Quebec and the United States, at the least.
Realizing that such usage has taken place might key Americans
to the fact that what they have seen in the Bible about themselves,
other nations with less power and apparent influence have just
as easily found out about themselves.
At the most, putting the United States' own history of Bible usage
in the context of other nations, having done the same thing,
might raise questions about the consequences
of entertaining such interpretations.
In the case of Catholic and French Quebec,
the belief in a scripturally defined destiny would seem to have done less
for good and far less for evil,
than when the same convictions have been entertained
To move from Quebec Catholic opinion to the opinions of American Jews is
to remain at the margin defined by ethnicity and religion,
but to relocate the margin geographically closer
to the American center.
Jewish organizations do certainly continue
to be understandably nervous about efforts
to define the United States as a Christian nation.
Jewish voters shy away in droves from appeals
by the Republican Party featuring biblical values,
and influential Jewish spokespersons regularly protest
against any trespassing of the divide between church and state.
At the same time, it is noteworthy that from the founding
of the nation, a prominent strand
of Jewish opinion has embraced the proposition
that the United States can be identified
as an unusually biblical nation.   Thus, David Galantner
[ spelled phonetically ]
recently wrote in commentary to praise what he calls Americanism,
and to claim that the Bible is not merely the fertile soil
that brought Americanism forth; it is the energy source
that makes it live and thrive.
More often, ambiguity has prevailed in Jewish assessments
of the Bible and American life.
Thus in the 1850s, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise of Cincinnati spoke
out against the practice of required readings from the King James Bible
in the public school, but Wise also in 1854 published a book,
A History of the Israelitish Nation, in which he suggested
that American principles
of Democratic Republicanism had been adumbrated in the Hebrew scriptures.
The tension between Jewish identity
and American identity also defines the context
in which Solomon Schechter expressed the opinions
with which I began this lecture.
Commentary from Schechter is especially interesting
since his wide range of experience before coming in 1902
to the United States and the Jewish Theological Seminary included birth
and early years in Romania, education in Poland, Austria
and Germany, teaching assignments at Cambridge and the University
of London, and much esteemed work on ancient biblical text in Egypt.
The great impression made on Schechter
by reading Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address as a youth
in Foscani, Romania, perhaps in a Yiddish translation,
may have influenced his later views, for Schechter reported
that when he contemplated the sentences of this address
that I quoted earlier he could scarcely believe
that they formed a part of a message addressed in the 19th century
to an assembly composed largely of men of affairs.
Instead, Schechter imagined himself transported into a camp
of contrite sinners determined to leave the world
and its vanities behind, possessed of no other thought than that
of reconciliation with their God.
A fuller account of what Schechter had to say
in defending the biblical character
of the United States is particularly pertinent since his words
from 1903 were spoken when Schechter himself was actively supporting
Jewish efforts to end Christian Bible reading
in New York public schools, when he was working
to establish an independent network of private Jewish day schools
and when he was offering full support
to the Jewish Publication Society's efforts
at producing its own translation of the Hebrew Bible.
Given these activities, Schechter's willingness to assert
that this country is, as everybody knows,
the creation of the Bible deserves close attention.
He first suggested that it was particularly the Old Testament
that gave the United States its biblical character.
Then he expanded upon problems he saw when Americans took
such a conviction seriously, including an excess of zeal,
a spate of caricature revelations in the presence
of what he called quacks who create new tabernacles here
with new Zions and new Jerusalems.
Schechter was using a Jewish vocabulary,
but students of America's Christian churches could describe all
of these excesses and a whole lot more in any fair-minded account
of how American Christians have expressed their zealous attachment
to scripture.
Though Schechter was willing to acknowledge problems
in the bibliocentric character of the United States,
even more that he wanted to defend that character.
He was thus pleased that trust in the Bible was standing up well
against what he called all the destructive tendencies,
mostly of foreign make.
And he was convinced that despite genuine difficulties, the large bulk
of the American people have in matters
of religion retained their sobriety and loyal adherence
to the scriptures as their Puritan forefathers did.
Schechter's final point in praising the biblical character
of the United States came back, however,
to the Bible rather than to America.
For his audience in New York City in 1903 he wanted to stress
that they were celebrating the foundation
of a Jewish Theological Seminary.
As he explained what such a foundation meant, Schechter spelled
out in great detail how it would be appropriate
for ancient Jewish teaching to adapt to the American context by,
for example, respecting American Democratic traditions.
Yet in the end, Judaism was more important than America.
He said any attempt to confine its activities to the borders
of a single country, even be it as large as America,
will only make its teachings provincial, narrow and unprofitable.
Rather, the point of a Jewish Theological Seminary must be
to teach the doctrines and the literature of the religion,
which is as old as history itself and as wide as the world.
An American setting for studying Judaism was important precisely
because of how much Bible had gone
into the shaping of the United States.
But because the study of Judaism took in all of history,
it implicated the whole world.
It, rather than the United States, had to remain the highest concern.
To those today who downplay the importance of scriptural grounding
for the American experiment, Schechter would appeal
for a more positive assessment
of what biblical convictions have contributed
to American history and American ideals.
To those who focus only on excesses of Christian imperialism
in American history, he would claim as a Jew
that this Christian heritage has provided an unusually commodious
home for Judaism to thrive.
But to those who equate the Bible with America, he would assert
that because scripture embraces all of history and all of the world,
it must be able to assess, evaluate
and even judge the United States, rather than the reverse.
When now we turn to African American understandings of the Bible
in public life, we come much closer to the center.
Yet because of the particular circumstances
of African American existence,
we are also approaching the most persistently marginalized
The great national confusion that bore down upon African Americans
with special weight was once well described by David Brian Davis.
In the United States, he wrote,
"the problem of slavery had become fatally intertwined
with the problem of race."
Quite apart from its devastating impact on economics and politics,
the confusion spotlighted by Davis between race
and slavery profoundly affected Christian interpretations
of scripture during the first decades of nationhood.
From the early 1830s onwards a great flood of authors labored intensely
to interpret the many scriptural passages that seemed simply
to take slavery for granted as a natural part of society.
By contrast, far less attention was devoted to what the Bible affirmed,
also in many passages, about the equality
of all races and peoples before God.
For African American Bible believers the result was doubly unfortunate.
On the one hand, they could see more clearly than any of their peers
that studying what the Bible had to say
about slavery could never illuminate the American dilemma unless the
Bible was also studied for what it had to say about race.
On the other hand, because of the race's character
of American public life, including prejudices about which writings had
to be noticed and which could be safely ignored,
the considerable writing that African Americans produced
on the Bible and slavery received almost no general attention.
Despite this disadvantage, black Americans
in the antebellum decades regularly offered their own forceful arguments
arising from a universal application of scriptural teaching.
As an example, the appeal to the colored citizens of the world
by David Walker, a free black from Boston, which was published in 1829,
used the Bible extensively in crafting a powerful manifesto.
In one of the many contrasts Walker drew between the universal teachings
of scripture and its particular use by Americans, Walker referred
to the great commission from Matthew, Chapter 28,
where the resurrected Christ sent out his followers
"to teach all nations to observe all things whatsoever I have
commanded you."
Walker berated his white readers with a challenge:
"You have the Bible in your hands with this very injunction.
Have you been to Africa, teaching the inhabitants thereof the words
of the Lord Jesus?   No, far from it.
Americans entered among us in Africa and learnt us the art
of throat cutting by selling us to fight one against another,
to take each other as prisoners of war and to sell to you
for small bits of calicoes, old swords, knives, etcetera,
to make slaves for you and your children."
To Walker, such behavior was a direct contradiction of scripture.
Can the American preachers, he said, appeal unto God, the maker
and searcher of hearts, and tell him with the Bible in their hand
that they made no distinction on account of men's color?
A particularly intriguing example
of African American biblical interpretation that followed
in the train of David Walker by appealing to the universal norms
of scripture came early in the motion picture era,
more than a half a century after the constitutional prohibition
of slavery.
The huge success of D.W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation,"
which was released in 1915 is a cinematic version
of the Reverend Thomas Dixon's novel The Clansman
that posed a particularly compelling challenge to African Americans
and a small number of whites who agreed with them
that this film represented an egregious example
of the worst kind of public racism.
Several times in "The Birth of a Nation," biblical words
or images were used to make a point about the degeneracy
of African Americans and the triumph of the noble Ku Klux Klan
over the despicable regimes of reconstruction.
Most dramatic was the movie's closing scenes and mixed visions
of civilized whites triumphing over bestial blacks,
with the apocalyptic images of Jesus coming
to establish the millennial reign of joyful peace.
In response to these provocations, leaders of the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People promoted plans
with other instituted parties to produce their own film
to counter what had appeared in "The Birth of a Nation."
Out of this effort came eventually a movie directed
by John W. Noble entitled "The Birth of a Race,"
which was released in 1919.
Though neither an artistic nor commercial success,
the film did offer a very different understanding
of the Bible and its teachings.
Like "The Birth of a Nation," "The Birth
of a Race" eventually made a series of grand statements
about American patriotism, but most of the film, 70 of its 90 minutes,
was devoted to four biblical episodes: the creation of Adam
and Eve, Noah and the flood, Moses and the exodus from Egypt
and the life and passion of Jesus.
Throughout, the Bible was referenced as the charter
of equality for all humanity.
Thus Noah's family, which for many Americans had provided the source
for a racist exploitation of the curse of Canaan,
was described in this film as living together harmoniously.
Moses was given the movie's greatest block of time, as the one who called
for the liberation of these people.
As head shots of listeners from Africa, the Far East
and Europe flashed on the screen,
Jesus was portrayed as teaching all races.
Christ made no distinction between them; his teachings were for all.
Christ's passion, moreover, was portrayed as Roman retribution
against Jesus' effort to teach equality instead of slavery.
Even in the film's last 20 minutes, with its rapid jumble
of Christopher Columbus, Paul Revere, signers of the Declaration
of Independence, Abraham Lincoln
and racially integrated troops marching off to World War I,
a universal message predominated, with dubious theology
but a clear intent to maintain the film's major themes.
It described Lincoln's assassination as kindling the torch of freedom,
which today is the light of the world.
In a word, where the "The Birth of a Nation" used race as a device
for identifying heroes and villains, "The Birth of a Race" used the word
in its more general sense of encompassing all people.
This African American usage of the Bible echoed much
of the standard patriotic usage of white Americans.
Where it differed was in the contention that the race singled
out for special divine consideration and scripture was the human race.
I hope it's clear from this brief attention to four sets
of marginal opinions that the question of the Bible
in American public life looks very different depending on the angle
from which the question is viewed.
To the foreign Roman Catholics during the Civil War,
the Quebec nationalists of the 19th century, to American Jews
in the first generations of immigration and to African Americans
in the period before the exercise of full civil rights,
the Bible was held to be a living book, and it was held
to be relevant to the United States.
But it was not relevant in the way that those at the center
of American influence, be it the Bible believers
or Bible deniers, felt it was relevant.
Another lecture, probably a pretty long book would be required to move
from description to prescription concerning how the Bible should now
be put to use.
But let me attempt, in conclusion, a cautious excursion
For this purpose I would like to use a statement
from the Translation Committee of the new Revised Standard Version,
chaired by the venerable Bruce M. Metzger
of Princeton Theological Seminary.
Its perspective sets out an essential beginning point.
In traditional Judaism and Christianity,
the Bible has been more than a historical document to be preserved
or a classic of literature to be cherished and admired;
it is recognized as the unique record of God's dealing
with people over the ages.
The Old Testament sets forth the call of a special people to enter
into covenant relation with the God of justice and steadfast love,
and to bring God's law to the nations.
The New Testament records the life and work of Jesus Christ,
the one in whom the word became flesh, as well as describes the rise
and spread of the early Christian church.
The Bible carries its full message not to those who regard it simply
as a noble literary heritage of the past, or who wish to use it
to enhance political purposes and advance otherwise desirable goals,
but to all persons and communities who read it so that they may discern
and understand what God is saying to them.
The angle provided by this statement --
let me propose three premises arising from my own convictions,
and then three political implications.
Premise one: in terms of an NRSB statement, the Bible is true
for all people in all times and all places.
Premise two: therefore, the Bible can never be the possession
of only one modern nation or of only one faction
within a particular nation.
Premise three: while everything in the Bible can be construed
as political, politics can never exhaust,
equal or contain the message of the Bible.
Implication one: American society would be immeasurably poorer
if it was no longer possible to bring the universal message
of scripture to bear on the particulars of American public life
as Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King,
Jr. did with such memorable effect.
Implication two: narrow use of the Bible for partisan,
political advantage violates what the Bible itself says
about the dignity of all human beings under God,
and also what it says about political power
as only a stewardship bestowed by God for the maintenance of order,
the guarantee of justice and the care of the powerless.
Implication three: given the current American situation,
the only hope for using the Bible in public life that conforms
to the Bible's own message is to employ it humbly,
The Library of Congress, sitting in the shadow of the Supreme Court,
directly over, against the steps of the Capitol and very close
to the Lincoln Memorial can hardly avoid being caught up in questions
about how best to put the Bible to use in American public life.
My hope, in fact, my prayer is
that the Library's nonparallel resources may continue
to be sustained, noticed and employed so that
from these resources others may continue
to address fundamental questions essential for the future well being
of the United States, and indeed,
for the future well being of human kind.
Thank you very much.
[ applause ]   [ end of transcript ]