This book points to another. Mark Noll has already set his sights on a future work examining the United States’ “informal Christendom” during the long nineteenth century. In that prospective volume, he plans to tackle the distinctively American circumstance in which official church establishments became wholly anathematic, even as the Bible and certain Christian commitments exercised tremendous public authority. To understand this nineteenth-century combination of countervailing approaches to religion's place in civic life, he argues, one should seek out its colonial antecedents. Ergo, this book. It serves as a powerful testament to the historian's creed that we must pay attention to what went before.
That this volume stands so steadily on its own historiographical merits bears witness to the depth of Noll's commitment to that principle. Much more than mere prelude, the book provides an extensive survey of the Bible's public power in Britain's North American colonies. In the Beginning Was the Word effectively establishes the Bible's enormous presence, tracing its history through the colonies’ racialized landscapes and cultural differences, though with a particular attention to puritan New England. This very ubiquity has made the study of the Bible in America problematic. As generations of scholars have realized, it can be rather difficult to say anything meaningful about a scripture that seems to be almost everywhere, referenced by almost everyone, and invoked in almost every way.
Did the Bible function “deeply” in colonial life, didactically establishing ethical restraints on the colonists’ civic behaviors? Or did it operate “thinly,” providing the rhetorical resources by which colonists could sacralize their material interests? It did both, Noll quite reasonably asserts. But he offers much more than that. Through a simple taxonomy of thin and deep uses, Noll brings analytical clarity to the Bible's complex colonial history. Like any such cohering frame, when imposed on the messiness of the past, this one occasionally smacks of contrivance; such moments notwithstanding, however, the approach effectively does its appointed work of making the biblical evolutions of colonial culture more intelligible.
After a nod to Catholic roots, the book's argument picks up in earnest in the Protestant Reformation, with its much-quoted cry of sola scriptura. By emphasizing the “Bible Alone” ideal, Noll's biblical history opens with an ambiguity. Does sola scriptura mean the Bible above all other authorities or the Bible to the exclusion of all other authorities? The early Reformers showed sympathy for both ideas, with influential magisterial Protestants emphasizing the former and controversial radicals like the Anabaptists fighting for the latter. The predominant commitment to the idea that other authorities—theological tradition, learned clergy, and even political elites—could legitimately place limits on the scriptures’ interpretive possibilities allowed the Reformation to continue the longstanding European pursuit of formal Christendom. Formal Christendom entailed the close intertwining of religious and political powers, secular laws that unapologetically reflected religious commitments, and the presumption of a unifying religious identity throughout the community: elements that often required the presence of extra-scriptural religious authorities.
Many, indeed most, early English emigrants to North America carried a commitment to Christendom with them. As Protestants, they also inherited the ambiguity of the “Bible Alone” ideal. New England's Congregationalists exemplified the tensions that the differing conceptions of sola scriptura could generate. The likes of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson evinced what most other early modern Protestants could hardly have conceived of: the Bible, when deeply believed and highly elevated, might subvert the other elements on which Christendom depended. The Quakers in Pennsylvania would replicate that evidence on a grand scale. The space that the American continent provided for post-Christendom community building enabled such evidence to multiply and persist. This pitting of what Noll calls biblicism against formal Christendom began to set the stage for the informal Christendom of the nineteenth century—and the reader is always made aware of that telos in the distance.
Perhaps surprisingly, some of the steps toward that end involved the thinning as well as the deepening of American approaches to the Bible. As the seventeenth century wound down, Reformed biblicism was temporarily pushed off the colonies’ center stage—at least for white colonists—by a variety of forces. It was replaced with an intensifying concern for empire building. This imperial emphasis had the tendency to “thin” the Bible's usage. That is, the colonists turned to the scriptures less for the didactic construction of founding principles, and more for a sanctifying stamp on Protestant Britain's imperial competition against papist adversaries. Politicized and nationalized biblical rhetoric thus spread far and wide, justifying the actions of the state and contributing to a sense of unified civic identity.
Even as these uncritical political uses of the Bible came to define British-American identity in the mid-eighteenth century, a deeper and more devotional engagement with the book reemerged with a vengeance in the revivalism of the 1740s and 1750s. This period of evangelical awakening brought with it the conspicuous restoration of didactic invocations of the Bible in religious realms. As Noll rightly notes, converted African Americans particularly illustrated the book's deep power beyond its imperial uses. The burgeoning evangelical movements had reason to believe that their sola scriptura commitments could effectively resist the repressive actions of Old Light leaders and the political power the established churches wielded. Once again, they demonstrated that biblicism and Christendom could be—and often would be—at odds.
Thus, by the time the Revolution got underway, all the ingredients for the eventual production of the American “Biblical civilization” of the nineteenth century were present: a pervasive political commitment to the Bible, a sense of the scriptures’ place as a part of national identity, an evangelical commitment to the good book as a source of authoritative instruction, and fresh resentments toward the traditional Christendom of the British Empire. The new United States’ distinctive place for the Bible would thus reflect two centuries of colonial developments.
Contrary to current scholarly orthodoxies, Noll believes in a kind of American exceptionalism. One can hold, he argues, that the nation has an exceptional religious history without concluding that this imparts a national moral superiority. Indeed, as he has proposed before, he suggests here that much of what makes American religious history distinctive can be regretted. Noll's version of exceptionalism is that of the particularizing historian. Particular places have particular pasts, he holds. And the story of the Bible's distinctive history in Britain's North American colonies has here been told exceptionally well.
