Great American Sermons with John Wilsey and Daniel K. Williams [FULL EPISODE]

What does it mean for a nation to read its own sermons? This America 250 conversation takes up four of them — Winthrop's A Model of Christian Charity, Edwards's Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, Lincoln's Second Inaugural, and King's Mountaintop Sermon — tracing covenant and city-on-a-hill exceptionalism, the personal terror of revival preaching, Lincoln's strange theological restraint amid civil war, and King's prescient final words. The episode closes on what it means to read the dead with charity, and on John Wilsey's new book, God and Country. With host Nadya Williams, John Wilsey (SBTS), and Daniel Williams (Ashland University).

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Chapters

• 00:00 - Reading Winthrop
• 02:12 - Welcome and Introductions
• 04:11 - Why Read Classic Sermons?
• 06:54 - Winthrop and the Puritan Errand
• 12:12 - City on a Hill: Promise and Warning
• 16:37 - Edwards and the Great Awakening
• 25:18 - Reading the Room in 1741
• 35:40 - Lincoln's Second Inaugural
• 43:31 - The Passive Voice and Providence
• 46:33 - King's Mountaintop Sermon
• 55:27 - Loving Our Historical Neighbors
• 1:03:06 - Why History Is Who We Are

Christians Reading Classics is a podcast from Mere Orthodoxy and is listener-supported. If you would like to support this work, become a Mere Orthodoxy Member today at http://mereorthodoxy.com/membership.

Apply for fall 2026 admission to Beeson Divinity School's MDiv and be considered for a full-tuition scholarship. https://bit.ly/beesonscholarships 

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:18

Thus stands the cause between God and us. We are entered into covenant with him for this work. We have taken out a commission. The Lord has given us leave to draw our own articles. We have professed to enterprise these and those accounts upon these and those ends. We have hereupon besought him of favor and blessing. Now, if the Lord shall please to hear us and bring us in peace to the place we desire, then hath he ratified this covenant and sealed our commission, and will expect a strict performance of the articles contained in it. But if we shall neglect the observation of these, which are the ends we have propounded, and dissembling with our God shall fail to embrace this present world and prosecute our carnal intentions, seeking great things for ourselves and our posterity, the Lord will surely break out in wrath against us in the revenge of such a people, and make us know the price of the breach of such a covenant. Now, the only way to avoid this shipwreck and to provide for our posterity is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together in this work as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities for the supply of others' necessities. For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world. So said the Puritan leader John Winthrop in a sermon he delivered in 1630, so nearly 400 years ago. While normally on this podcast we discuss classic books, in this particular episode, we are considering four classic sermons from American history, an appropriate task in this year of America's 250th birthday. So the first of these is the one from which I just read an excerpt, John Winthrop's A Model of Christian Charity. The second will be Jonathan Edwards' famous sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. Third, we'll turn to Lincoln's second inaugural, and we will conclude with MLK Jr.'s Mountain Temp Sermon. And now I'm delighted to introduce the two guests for this conversation. John Wilsey is professor of church history and philosophy and chair of the Department of Church History and Historical Theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is a dear friend and is also the author of many books that we love in this home, including Religious Freedom, a Conservative Primer, which came out with Erdman's in 2025, and the recent God and Country. So, John, welcome. It's great to have you here today.

SPEAKER_04 3:50

Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 3:52

The second guest is Daniel Williams, who, of course, is my husband. He teaches history at the Department of History and Political Science at Ashland University. He is likewise the author of many books, which we also like in this house. Most recently, In Search of Rational Faith, Reason and Belief in the History of American Christianity. So thank you both for making time for this conversation.

SPEAKER_03 4:16

Thanks for having us.

SPEAKER_02 4:18

So let's start with really some framework before we talk about each sermon a little bit separately. Why should we read classic sermons?

SPEAKER_03 4:29

I guess I would say that sermons were a way of communicating profound truths. Truths about God, truths about ourselves, truths about our place in community, but to large audiences. So especially when we're looking at these particular sermons, some of these sermons uh reached hundreds of people, uh, especially when we're talking about the last two, thousands of people, uh, when they were delivered. And they've become classic texts that are read over and over. And so their reach probably rivals that of some classic books that we've discussed on the program. And certainly they tell us something about how Americans viewed their relationship with God, their relationship with others, viewed their community's place in the world in ways that I just don't think we can get in the same way from most other texts.

SPEAKER_04 5:30

Yeah, the uh sermons um offer a window into the inner life of a community. Um uh and and that's uh a special kind of historical artifact. It's not like reading even a letter. Um, that of course, when when a letter is written um uh between it's between two people, uh obviously they they didn't believe that someone was going to be reading this 50 years or 100 years or 200 years later. Um but um and a and a and a preacher may have uh an awareness that his words might be read later at a later time, maybe not in 200 years, but but at a later time. But a sermon does, just like what Dan just said, um, a sermon does give a window into the way a preacher is, or a pastor especially, is a diagnosing um the inner life of a congregation or a community or a group of people. Um also um it's a way, it's a window into um how a preacher looks ahead, looks forward into the future, into the future of his of the of the community and also his own future. Um and that's a this is a great example of of that, and the portion you just read from this one of the most famous sermons in American history.

SPEAKER_02 6:54

So let's start with this one: a sermon delivered almost 400 years ago. John Winthrop, a model of Christian charity. So tell us about it. What's the occasion? Who is this guy anyway? I mean, hopefully people remember, but maybe not. It's okay. This is a safe space. Educate us.

SPEAKER_03 7:12

What's interesting, I think, about this sermon is that John Winthrop was not uh an ordained minister. And actually, as I was selecting some of these texts, they're they're in some ways unconventional uh in our conception of a sermon. I guess if you just ask people imagine a sermon, they would say, well, I imagine a church, a pulpit, uh, an ordained minister uh preaching from the Bible. And that's only partly true of some of these. In fact, it's only fully true, I guess, of the second sermon that we'll be discussing, uh delivered in a church by an ordained minister to a church audience from a pulpit. Uh, this sermon was uh delivered aboard a ship uh coming into New England, coming into Boston Harbor. It was given by the uh by the leader of this community, John Winthrop, who was a devout Puritan but a lawyer. And yet it has a structure of a sermon. Puritan sermons had a particular structure. They they had a text, uh, they had an exposition of that text, they had an exhortation. And that's what we see in this sermon. It is designed to connect the particular covenant community that was getting ready to settle New England with the biblical community of God, the ancient biblical nation of Israel, and to draw some very close parallels and issue an exhortation that's both a promise and a warning. And it was a memorable sermon because it was written about later and and it was commented on, and it really took on a life of its own, I think, long after it was delivered. Uh, in the 19th century, people were commenting on it. And then it became even more well known in the late 20th century when certain phrases, particularly city on a hill, were used in a different context uh by President Ronald Reagan. And so today it is commonly included in readers of early American history, even on secular college campuses. So if you go to a state university and you take a U.S. history one class, it would not be unusual to read an excerpt of this sermon. It's that well known.

SPEAKER_04 9:21

There's been some good books on uh this sermon uh written in the last 10, 15 years. Including yours, right? Well, I referenced it. I didn't write a whole book on it. Um Richard Gamble wrote a whole book on this sermon, In Search of a City on a Hill. And then um, oh, the author's name is escaping me. It's called City on a Hill. Um Dan, do you remember the author's name? And it came out maybe four, four or five years ago, sitting on my shelf somewhere. Um, anyway, uh two, so two books at least that I can think of have been written on this sermon. Um, and the the the reception of the sermon, the history of the sermon itself, um, separated completely from uh who John Winthrop was and who these people were that were coming to America, why they were coming to America. And I do find, I mean, it it is a uh the the line that you the the lines that you read, um there there is um it's it's um it's just freighted um with uh with biblical consequence. Um I think of Deuteronomy 28 and 29, uh in the in the covenant, the Mosaic covenant, where the blessings and the curses curses of uh either obedience or disobedience to the covenant are found. Um that motif is coming through. Of course, the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew chapter 5, is uh is coming up coming through. Um and the the context I think is is you know most compelling. Um here are what a thousand people that are crossing the ocean at the same time, um fleeing the persecution of James I. Um you know it it's uh it it must it's it's a it's a heck of a thing. And you know, when you think about their project, from their perspective, um leaving home, they're they're never going back, um, coming to across 3,000 miles of cold ocean uh to an unknown land, to a wilderness, which a wilderness has enormous significance, um, emotional and spiritual and intellectual significance, to say nothing of the physical challenge that are awaiting them. Um it's just as radical as you can get. You were leaving, you're never going back. It's like it's like if we got on a ship and went went to another planet. Um, what they did was uh it took a great deal of courage. And um, so this this the con the background context of the sermon itself is is is is amazing. Um and it's no wonder that we're still reading it 400 years later. No wonder at all.

SPEAKER_02 12:05

So, what would you say is the most important thing we need to take away from it reading it in the 21st century?

SPEAKER_03 12:11

The reason that I think it has become such a compelling part of the American canon is because uh I think people think that it says something about the spiritual uh identity of America. Now, that's a little ironic because uh these people were not Americans in the sense that we think of it today. They're not thinking they're starting a new country, but they are thinking they're starting a new community. That the phrase used is New England, New England. Uh they view themselves as in some ways renewing English Protestantism, that by withdrawing from a country that they believe has become uh too corrupted, that they will in some way renew the church, that they will be that city upon a hill that will in some way affect old England through its example. So they're not necessarily thinking that they are in any way non-English in the way that we would think of it today, they're not thinking of themselves as Americans, but they are believing that they are in a spiritual renewal project, and that this spiritual renewal project has cosmic significance. And so when G.K. Chesterton said in the early 20th century that America is a country with the soul of a church, this sermon in some way speaks to that. If that's true, it means that there's a spiritual identity to America, and and what is that spiritual identity? And one is I think that that uh Americans have often thought of themselves as in as a city on a hill, as a special sort of community with with values, with practices that say something to the rest of the world, and uh that I think has uh impressed people about this sermon. But it's also in its original context a real warning. I I I think it speaks to both the the best of American exceptionalism, also some dangers of American exceptionalism. I think there are some theological dangers with seeing a direct parallel between the United States and ancient biblical Israel, and and when read uh in the wrong context, this sermon can be used to support that. But it's also I think a a warning that I think tells us something about uh American Christians' uh way of relating to the United States, that throughout the rest of American history many groups of Christians have thought that if uh the country somehow failed because of a spiritual deficiency, because of a moral lapse, that that would be a tragedy. But yet it's it's also something that could happen. That if the country receives exceptional blessings from God, which is the way some people have read this sermon, it also, according to this sermon, has an exceptional calling. And there's this warning that the way that we interact with each other, the way that that we behave in community, has some profound effects that are greater than just that one community.

SPEAKER_04 15:11

Uh I think we should uh read this sermon um because it's there. There's always going to be something in a sermon, especially, that one can find some sort of application either to their own personal life or to the life of their society, whether that be their family, whether that be their neighborhood or their town or their state or their nation. Um I echo everything that Dan just uh just just said so well in terms of uh encouragements and warnings. And that certainly is the whole point of this sermon: encouragements and warnings. And um because human nature doesn't change. Uh, we always um should welcome any kind of encouragement and warning we receive, whether that be from people who are among the living or people who are among the dead. There's a reason that we're still reading this 400 years later. And it's not just because it's a historical artifact, there's something deeper to it. Um, they did see themselves doing something cosmic. And the fact that we're still reading this sermon 400 years later is evidence that they were right.

SPEAKER_02 16:27

I love that. And some of these themes, John, we'll come back to at the end of this conversation. So, John's new book, God and Country, is all about how can we love our neighbor better? And by our neighbor, John includes historical figures. How do we listen to historical voices and love people of the past and try to understand them better, even if they seem really weird and foreign to us, and especially perhaps when they seem really weird and foreign. So we'll get back to that at the end of this conversation. But right now, we're going to say goodbye to the year of our Lord 1630 and jump to our second sermon, Jonathan Edwards' famous sermon, Sinners at the Hands of an Angry God, which by the way gets a lot of modern readers angry. So tell us about it. Why does it upset some people so? What exactly did he say? And is it quite as awful as it sounds from the title?

SPEAKER_03 17:22

Uh I will say that uh most American college students today reading this in a survey class reader do not resonate with it. Even people who are very devout Christians find it troubling. So it's ironic that this is probably the most famous American sermon ever preached. Especially if we confine the word sermon to sermons preached in a church, which this was. I don't think it's entirely representative of Jonathan Edwards in the sense that if I had to pick one sermon from Jonathan Edwards to represent Jonathan Edwards as an individual, I would not choose this sermon. But I chose this sermon for this conversation because if we're talking about American sermons, you can't omit the most famous sermon. We have to talk about it. And so as I was rereading it today, trying to think about okay, what do we get out of this sermon? One of the questions that I was asking myself is why did this become the most famous sermon? And I think there are probably uh several answers that could be given to that question. One of those is it was remarkably effective. So people remembered it because their the response was profound. Jonathan Edwards preached this in the midst of a a great revival that we often call part of the first great awakening in colonial New England, uh about 1741. And he preached it in a t at a at a church that he was not the minister of, but he preached it by invitation in a town that was not experiencing this revival. And so in the other some of the other towns, there were mass uh conversions in the 18th century evangelical sense. So when we talk about an 18th century conversion in a revival, these are often people who are lifelong uh churchgoers, maybe even church members. They're not, it's not the village atheist coming forward at a uh a service. It's rather someone who has been sitting in the pew but but experiences the Spirit of God in a new way and believes that's the moment when their heart is divinely changed, when they are truly saved. And so he was coming into a church where it seemed like, from his perspective, uh people are religious, but only in a cold formal sense. There's no heart change. And he wanted to see that heart change. And so he wanted to see it based on people's encounter with God. So the sermon is primarily about the holiness of God and the the justice of God's wrath against sin. And I think if you were to ask Jonathan Edwards about this, if he were told your sermon is making people angry, he would think, well, that's exactly what he would expect. That this is a dividing line between those who are experiencing the beginning of regeneration and a heart change, and those who are still in their hearts angry with God, even if they might think of themselves as Christians.

SPEAKER_04 20:37

Yeah, I I I um I agree with everything you said, Dan. Um one thing I would add is um Jonathan Edwards is uh at heart uh um a theologian and a pastor, a the a pastor theologian. And um having set that context up as you did so well, uh these are not necessarily his people. They are not his, these are not his flock, his congregation. But at the same time, he knows, he knows the sorts of people that he's dealing with. He he understands um their temper, he understands their habits, he understands their patterns of life, he understands their presuppositions because he had he had worked with them, his his family came from uh a ministerial tradition, whereas his famous grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, um, the author of the Halfway Covenant. So he he has been he has been immersed in New England church life all of his life, and um he has ministered among these people all of his life. So when he says things like this, um I I find um uh it it strikes me when he says in his beginning of his application section, uh he's he's preached on uh Deuteronomy 32 35 they their foot shall uh slide and do. Time. And he says, the use of this awful subject, and there he he is acknowledging that it is an awful subject. He is acknowledging it is disturbing. It's supposed to be disturbing. The use of this awful subject may be for awakening unconverted persons in this congregation. He knows that there are unconverted persons in the congregation. He may even know them by name. He goes through some very descriptive words about hell. And then he says, You probably are not sensible of this. You find you are kept out of hell, but do not see the hand of God in it. But look at other things as the good state of your bodily constitution, your care of your own life, the means you use for your own preservation. These are the words of a pastor, someone who walks with a congregation, attends to their spiritual needs, and opens the Bible to attend to those spiritual needs. We know that Jonathan Edwards was deeply concerned about, on the one hand, excessive enthusiasm, unreliable signs of spirituality, presumptuous sins, and ambivalence to the things of God. We know that he was very concerned about those things. He wrote about them all the time, preached about them all the time. And, you know, anybody who's ever preached a sermon before to um either their own congregation or to a congregation that is uh of which he is culturally familiar, um anybody can relate to the fact that you just you just have to have something to say to these people to wake them up. And um, I don't know what is going on in his mind when he's writing this sermon and when he's preparing his his um his his thoughts on around this text, but when you you can read between the lines a little bit and see that um he's sort of um he's sort of reached the end of his rope on um dealing with ambivalence and presumptuous sins among people in New England. Uh anyway, I I I think that all this to say that uh sinners in the hands of an angry God is again, it's a window in time. It's a window in time for a preacher uh expositing the Bible to a particular group of people at a particular time. 1741 was when this sermon was preached, uh, sometime in the spring or summer, um, May, between May and July, somewhere in there. I can't remember which month it was. But um, it's a window in time. It's an it's a diagnosis of a person. Um, and and he is he is attempting to treat a spiritual sickness as he sees it. And um, it's not necessarily something that's gonna apply to everybody who picks it up and reads it in 2026. Um, but um it it it still will be applicable uh to us all in some way, because again, as I said earlier, uh I I don't believe the human nature has uh changed any since 1741.

SPEAKER_02 25:33

But it is a good reminder also of reading the room, if you will. So the fact that it was it spoke so powerfully to people at the time, and yet it doesn't speak quite the same way, perhaps to everybody today, is a reminder of um that historical context, the significance of this. Definitely. And just to talk about sin is so uncomfortable. Go ahead, Dan.

SPEAKER_03 25:56

You know, there there's a reason that this has endured, I think. So even if people do find it uh very disconcerting, but even if I think Jonathan Edwards has been uh strongly uh uh misinterpreted uh as a result of people just reading him through the lens of this one sermon. Uh nevertheless, I think this does tell us something about America. So I I think it's important for us to read these as Christians, and I think John has really tried to bring that out. What can what can we uh learn as Christians? And much of what we can learn as Christians from these sermons may even be transnational. That is, someone in the UK or Canada or elsewhere uh you know may well be able to get something very useful out of these sermons because they're engaged uh with the Bible, but because you're also recording this podcast for this America 250 series, I can't help but think about what do these sermons tell us about America and especially in their enduring power. And so we talked about that with the with the first sermon, and I'll just say a word about this. This is of course a very uh personally oriented sermon, and it says nothing directly about America. That is, you won't find lines like uh America if there's a reference here to New England, it's only it's not as a uh ideal community as we would see in the the model of Christian charity. It's it's just a geographic description. So what does this tell us about America? And I I think the answer is that the United States is in some ways an evangelical nation in a way that other nations are not. So both the UK and Canada have evangelicals in the country, but I would not describe them as evangelical nations. But I I think in the United States evangelical Protestantism has had a cultural influence that exceeds the influence of evangelical Protestantism probably anywhere else in the world. And part of that influence relies on this doctrine of the necessity of personal conversion, that that was central to the first great awakening, and that has been central to American evangelicalism ever since. That there's a general sense among Americans, even those people who don't go to church, that religion should be about changing your life, your life, otherwise you are a hypocrite. Okay, and that's just that's kind of a universal in the United States. I'm not sure it's a universal everywhere in the world, uh, but it it is a universal in the United States, and this sermon speaks to that. This sermon speaks about that conversion. There's also a sense that I think that the church should be convicting, that sermons should be convicting in a in a way, again, that I don't think is universal throughout the world, but it is the way that Americans understand church and Christianity. And sometimes I think that also has played out in American politics, that so much of our American political debates are about renewal, are about change, that we approach our political debates sometimes with the the passion of uh of an evangelical conviction, of this idea that there needs to be a a national renewal. And of course that goes beyond this direct sermon, but uh but I think it's related. And so in preparation for this conversation, I looked up uh percentages of people in a particular country who believe in the existence of hell. Uh in Britain, it's 26% right now. Uh in Canada, it's a minority of people. But uh in the United States, it's 62%, which is not everybody in the United States, but it's still a pretty healthy majority. And obviously we don't have those public opinion polls from say uh 1860 or 1890, but I think it's fair to say that if that's true in the 2020s, it's probably safe to say that in every year of American history, majority of Americans have believed in the existence of hell. And that in some way influences how we think about life, and and this sermon speaks to it.

SPEAKER_04 30:26

I think it's a great point because um uh uh uh one thing I tell my students about about thinking about the past and thinking about history is while we we we take change very seriously, there are there are continuities in the past that make that make lives and events and ideas in the past recognizable to us in the present that serve as benchmarks. And one of those is the is the constant um reality of death. Death just looms over all of us in every generation, and so many things, so many events occur, and so many ideas are directly relevant to death and the reality of death, an impending death. If not the death of a person, the death of a nation or the death of an idea, the end of a way of life. Um, and so efforts are made to preserve, you know, efforts are made to fend off or to um, you know, chase away the shadow of death somehow, um, to reckon with it in some way. That's that's one of the reasons why sinners in the hands of an angry God is still so relevant to us today, because we all, even if we don't believe in hell, we still know that the end is coming. Um and the older that we get, we recognize that uh, you know, we we do the math and um we we recognize maybe we've lived more than Dan, maybe you and I have lived more than half of our lives. Not you, you haven't. You still you still have a long way to go. But me and Dan, you know, we're we're definitely over the hill. Um so the the uh ever presence of uh of of death looming is um I I I don't know. I think that um it'd be interesting to to do a a a lengthy study on the effect of death on on the way we we interpret the past and that the presence of death, continuous presence of death, the uh common experience of death um as a as a marker for historical thinking.

SPEAKER_02 32:36

And of course, people like Jonathan Edwards and earlier generations of Americans were thinking about it much more and more closely than we do, because um thanks be to God that all of our children are living, for instance. But to lose children in infancy was very common, of course, and people just didn't live as long as we did. So, yeah, sometimes we forget in our modern privilege.

SPEAKER_04 33:03

Yeah, but yeah, it's very true. And and it is one of the things that um I'm sorry, go ahead.

SPEAKER_01 33:09

No, go ahead.

SPEAKER_04 33:10

Well, something that Dan had um said in the in his um comments a second ago um about America being an evangelical um culture, and certainly that is very true. Uh, but evangelicalism was new in the 1730s and 40s. And imagine what it would be like to hear this sermon for the first time, and how different it would be uh when you contrast it with their normal experience of hearing a sermon in New England, in stayed old New England in 1741. Um because this is so personal. It's addressed to the individual, it's not addressed to your family, it's not addressed in abstract terms. Um you know, it's it's not uh uh it's certainly not a just a boring ordinary homily that you'd be used to hearing from the pulpit week after week after week. It is addressed to you. God, God is angry with you. I mean, you know, the most famous, uh, the most famous lines from this sermon, probably that everybody knows. The God that holds you over the pit of hell, such as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you. I mean, wow. Um you say what you want about this depiction of God. What about the uh the depiction of the person who's hearing it? Um and and as y'all both have pointed out, they believed it. They believed that, yeah, God abhors me because of my sin. They had white knuckles as they were grasping the pews in front of them. They were wailing. I mean, it was, they were terrified because of its personal nature. And it's it just breaks the mold of um of a centuries-long tradition of a homily just being, you know, boilerplate, ordinary, academic, uh, abstract, impersonal.

SPEAKER_02 35:09

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SPEAKER_00 35:47

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SPEAKER_02 36:43

Well, we're gonna jump now a little over a century and talk about a sermon that was very aware of death, but not a natural kind of death. When Abraham Lincoln delivered his second inaugural, he was a president at the time of a civil war. So talk to us about the sermon by an American president mourning a country that was fracturing in front of him.

SPEAKER_03 37:14

In some ways, I know some people will question the definition of this, uh the the use of the term sermon to describe this because it's an inaugural address, which of course is not given in a church, not given by an ordained minister, but in this case given by a man who was a a deep personal student of the Bible, uh though not a church member for most of his life, and someone whose own theology was somewhat uh complicated. I think it's a masterful uh address though, uh in terms of its uh discussion of theological themes. It does more theologically, not only than any other presidential speech in American history, I would argue, but that does more theologically than a significant number of sermons. It was given near the end of the Civil War. And the typical sermon that was given in a church on the Civil War, and we have a number of surviving examples of that, tended to see the Civil War in moral terms and to argue that God was on the side of whichever side the pastor preaching the sermon was on. So in the north, it was God is judging the South for its sins of rebellion and slavery. In the in the south, it was God is in favor of our cause, the the northerners are are apostates, they have they have uh interpreted the Bible heretically and they are crushing our liberties. Both sides, of course, would exhort their congregants to personal holiness, to prayer, to say you need to be more fervent uh in your your devotion to the Lord. Uh, whatever setbacks that side had experienced in battle were interpreted as God warning you, God God disciplining his people. But in the end, there was a fairly simple theology of God and country, God is on the side of the country. And you might expect that of all people who would embrace that theology, the commander-in-chief of the Union forces, the one man who, by some measures, could be blamed for the civil war, in the sense that Lincoln decided when the southern states started to secede that it was worth fighting to bring them back. Uh he, you would think, would embrace that triumphalism, and especially at this moment, when the civil war is almost over, and it's very clear the South is going to lose. Instead, he does not. He engages in a theological reflection on the war that sees this as part of God's cosmic purposes and part of God's judgment, but not against any one section. It's a judgment for a national sin, and both sides, therefore, need to accept both a judgment and in some ways the awful grace of God, and then embrace the other with charity toward all and malice toward none.

SPEAKER_04 40:26

I think it's um interesting how it represents development and evolution in Lincoln's thought, which he is characterized by in so many, so many of his ideas. Um for example, it's sort certainly well known that he um while while abhorring slavery, uh he was much more pragmatic in the way that he thought about slavery um and disunion in the 1850s and early part of his administration. But then came came around to uh to become uh a truly, truly an emancipator, uh, in the sense that not only uh did he want to see the liberation of the of the of the slaves, but he also wanted to see former slaves receive civil rights and primary among those the right to vote, which his uh his last public address uh in which he advocated for that probably was what sealed uh the decision that John Wilkes Booth made to kill him. Uh but I think this represents another another development in his in the way that he thought. He um, you know, in 1862 he wrote uh he wrote a little a little essay that he titled Meditations on the Divine Will. I don't know if it's his title, but that's what historians have called it. And then he wrote it and he put it away, and it was found after his death by John Hay. And um you can see that he definitely um is continuing those meditations in his second inaugural about providence, about God being on somebody's side, and whose side are we gonna be on? How do we know who's right? What if what if we're the ones in the wrong and the the South is the one the ones in the right? You know, how do we decide? How can we know? Um, and he's still a little bit um uncertain about the ways of Providence, which is also a break from almost everybody else at that time. I mean, uh in American culture, everybody thought sort of thought of Providence as a, you know, you you you you can read the the hand of God in everything that's happening. Maybe that's um maybe that's kind of a mixture of an agrarian society with uh first Great Awakening, personal sort of theology and a devotional reading of scripture. But um I think I don't know if Americans are uniquely that way, but they certainly were that way, had a very high view of providence. And and Lincoln's just not so sure that we can read God's providence so uh so clearly. Um I also I also find it really intriguing how uh Lincoln casts the beginning of the war. You know, he he's uh he says all sought to avoid it. Um his first inaugural address while was being delivered from this place and devoted altogether to saving the union without war. The insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war, to seeking to dissolve the union, divided the effects by negotiating. Both parties deprecated war. One of them would make war rather than let it perish, and war came. What I find interesting about those lines is Lincoln's use of passive voice, um, especially when he says, and war came. Um did does he use uh does he use passive voice? Because he's comfortable with the audience filling in the blanks, reading in, reading between the lines, judging for themselves about the causes of the war. Does he not want distraction um to be about uh while why did this war come? Was he um well what were his motivations? He was a good enough writer to know what he was doing. I don't think that he used passive voice like many of us do. We we use it, we don't even know we're doing it. I think he knew he was doing it. It it it might be a reflection of of some of his uncertainties about the providence of God, and he wants to leave uh open um some um some possibilities he had not yet considered. I I don't know what the answer is, but um he uses passive voice, and I don't think it's um I don't think it's by accident, I think it's intentional.

SPEAKER_02 44:50

There's this hiding of agency, as you noted, which I wonder how uncomfortable that was for listeners.

SPEAKER_03 45:02

I guess it it allowed him at the end to talk about binding up the nation's wounds, because if you don't uh blame a separate side for the war, uh then you can bring both sides to the table with reconciliation, which seemed to be uh one of his main uh uh objectives there. I mean it it seems like he's uh doing at least a couple things in this address. One is he's trying to show that uh we can't be as certain about the uh the judgment of God, and in a sense, maybe the judgment of God is falling on all of us, uh rather than one particular group. And the other is which is his ultimate conclusion, because of that because both sides have evil sin that they're bringing to the table, both sides therefore are in a position to reconcile, to receive the forgiveness of the other uh to work on binding up the nation's wounds, which seem to be what he really wanted to focus on. That the question is now that the war is coming to an end, what next? And I I think it's fascinating to me that he does this in a way that that brings God into the picture front and center in ways that I think I think take a remarkable amount of uh theological perspicuity and theological restraint that was just not common at that point and has not been that common since then. It's very easy for a president to invoke God in a formulaic way to justify part of the president's program or the American enterprise anyway. It's much more difficult to invoke God in in ways that raise questions about our righteousness. And I think this this is one of those extremely rare presidential addresses. In fact, really not just one of, it's the rare residential address that does that.

SPEAKER_02 47:15

Well, so some of those wounds that Lincoln was trying to bind were still around a little over, well, about a century later, when we get to Malcolm Luther King Jr.'s mountaintop sermon. And that is our fourth and concluding sermon uh today. And it's striking as we're talking to realize a bit of a thread connecting the four, um, a nation wrestling with identity and connection to God. So talk to us about this sermon. What is happening in MLK Jr.'s ministry at that point, um, the civil rights movement, and why this particular sermon?

SPEAKER_03 48:00

This was Martin Luther King's last sermon, although I don't think he knew for certain it would be his last, but uh if you had to choose a sermon that would have been his last, there's there are some lines here that that seem uh uh uh just eerily prescient. And uh it was uh given when he was 39 years old. He was uh an internationally known leader, he had already received the Nobel Peace Prize, he had already given his I Have a Dream speech, he had already uh established himself as uh the most recognized name in the civil rights movement. Uh but uh it was given in 1968, and in the time period in his life from the end of 1965 to early 1968, had largely been difficult for him. Uh the civil rights movement was fracturing. Martin Luther King had less standing, uh political standing than he had had uh for quite some time, uh, for various reasons. The part of that was because of his opposition to the Vietnam War, alienating himself from President Lyndon Johnson. Part of it was because uh a significant minority of younger civil rights activists were more uh attracted to the black power movement, more radical solutions in that gave up on the integrationist stream and were willing to embrace some level of violence that Martin Luther King opposed. And so with the coalition fragmenting, King had to ask the question, well, what what next? And he believed that the future was an interracial campaign against poverty, that the the problems of race could not be separated from the problems of economics, he believed. And so he came to Memphis, uh to Memphis, Tennessee to aid in in a garbage workers' strike and that was going to be part of that that interracial uh economic coalition to protect human dignity, to protect workers' rights. So that's that's the larger context. He uses this uh speech, which really uh had the form of a sermon, and of course, he was an ordained Baptist minister. He spoke as uh uh Baptist preacher, drawing on both the black church tradition and on uh ideas from from the white liberal Protestantism of the mid-20th century that he had been educated in. And so the sermon is shot through with biblical references. He talks extensively about uh the parable of the Good Samaritan, which is one of his favorite scriptural passages. He talks about the importance of the ethic of nonviolence, but he also talks about promise. Uh, he's uses the famous phrase, I I may not get there with you, but we as a people will get to the promised land. And that in many ways expresses his willingness to die for the cause, which he talks about quite directly and graphically. And he's saying, This is not about me, this is this is not about my personal uh achievement, this is about collective struggle against injustice. And just as God delivered the people from Egypt into the promised land, there he's drawing, of course, on the the Exodus theology that's so central to the black church, just as that happened, he knew certainty we as people, he's talking to other African-Americans, would get to the promised land of justice and unity.

SPEAKER_04 51:33

Yeah, this uh absolutely. Thanks for that that contextual background. Um, I I think it's interesting also that um king king is is definitely um deeply conversational in not just the Bible, but also the Western tradition writ large. Um right right at the very beginning, he he references uh ancient Greece and Greek philosophers and Greek uh and and um Greek thought and as well um Rome and the Renaissance and the and the Reformation. Um he uh most famously is able to do this uh through his uh in his letter from a Birmingham jail. But um his uh his hold, his grasp of of Western civilization and Western thought is it augments, I think, his um um his his uh ethical urgings that are that are rooted in the Bible. Um combined with um with his storytelling, and not storytelling of abstract things, but storytelling from his own life. So towards the end of the of the sermon, um he talks about how um that he would have uh he would have died, according to the New York Times, he would have died had he sneezed uh after uh uh after Selma and receiving a letter from a ninth grade girl um um at White Plains High School. She said, While it should not matter, I would like to mention that I'm a white girl. I read in the paper of paper of your misfortune and your suffering, and I read that if you had sneezed, you would have died. And I'm simply writing you to say that I'm so happy you didn't sneeze. And then he ruminates on that uh towards the end. And he says, I'm so happy that I didn't sneeze. And then he gets us to that final paragraph um where he he says um reflect, you know, sort of in that prescient moment, reflecting on um the task ahead. Um but the task is not daunting to him. The task is uh uh, even though he may not see the completion of the task, the culmination of the work, um, he he is happy, he is content. And um what a way to close, uh what a way to close the sermon. And and again, like Dan just said, if if if you if you were going to pick the last sermon, it would certainly be this one. Uh I I remember when I when I was in high school, I grew up in Atlanta, and um when I was in high school, I guess I was maybe in 10th grade or 11th grade, we took a field trip to uh uh to see Martin Luther's Martin Luther King's grave. And um this the marble sarcophagus uh sitting there with uh the inscription free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, I'm free at last. I still still remember as a 16 or 17-year-old being being really struck by by those words um carved on his on his tomb. And um this is something I think that you see in a lot of sermons, uh a prescient quality to it. Um I I don't know that that Martin Luther King had uh uh any any sort of um um premonition of his uh of his of his of the end of his life, but um I I do think that from a pastoral perspective and from a leadership perspective, the leadership of a of a great cause, you do have a sense of your mortality. You do have a sense of how the cause is bigger than yourself. It's far bigger than you. And no matter how long you live, um, it is going to outlive you. And uh so I don't know that he had a premonition of what was going to happen to him the the next morning, but um, because he he he gave this on the 3rd of April 68. Of course, he died the next morning. But um, I don't I don't know that he's thinking in those terms. I think I think that he's thinking that these are um this cause is much bigger than myself, and it will outlive me no matter how long I live.

SPEAKER_02 56:00

So here we are talking about people from the past who had their own baggage and their listeners who certainly were sinners, sometimes sinners in the hands of an angry God. And the question is, what do we do with all of this as people living in the 21st century? So, John, I want you to talk to us a little bit about how to love our neighbor better, not just our present-day neighbor, but our historical neighbor, which is something that is uh has been kind of in the background of our conversation today. And this is all the topic of your recent book, God and country.

SPEAKER_04 56:39

Yes, and um, and and thank you for asking. Uh anybody who ever wants to talk about my my book is my friend, even if they want to say ugly things about it.

SPEAKER_02 56:50

You've been our friend a long time.

SPEAKER_04 56:52

That's true, and I cherish a cherished friendship with y'all. Um well, thank you for that. And and I um I have to say that uh I I read an essay about uh love and historical thinking that you both are deeply, deeply familiar with. That it was in uh um a collection of of essays that came out, I guess, in 2010, uh called Confessing History, that was uh uh edited by uh John Fiat and Eric Miller and Jay Green. And I believe it's the second essay in that in that work. It's by Beth Barton Schweiger, um, called Seeing Things. And her thesis in that essay is is the that we have, as historians, we have uh an obligation to love the dead. And in that essay, she talks about loving them in an Augustinian sense. Um what she meant by that that was to love them because they were there, simply because they were there. Uh, not to love them because you approve of their actions or because you are calling good evil and evil good, nothing like that. Nothing like it's not like you're excusing people for the bad things that they did. Um, it's not that you're idealizing them or you're glorifying them or mythologizing them or writing a hagiography has nothing to do with any of that. Um loving them because they are there, that they are worth studying, um, because their life had meaning, because they um they they their life had consequences uh for um others later, and including ourselves. And also, and I think she's really masterful in getting that getting this across in her essay, that um it it causes us also to look in the mirror. Um history writing is self-reflective too. Um and we we recognize that everybody's uh everybody's got flaws, everybody's everybody's a sinner. Um, but I know my sins better than I know anybody else's. I do think that, you know, I I joke about in some in some ways, you know, there's some people in in your life that are just so wonderful that you can't imagine how the uh the curse of the fall affects them. And Nadia, you're one of those people, I think, in my in my life too. Oh gosh. What in the world? Um, but even if you even if you're dealing with wonderful people and you can't see uh you can't really see the flaws in their lives, you know that they're there. And um, you know that you have, you know, yours better than anybody else's, which means that when you come to a historical person living in a particular historical circumstance, um knowing who you are, you you have to tread carefully because you have such a great responsibility uh to uh in the pursuit of truth, tell the truth as best you can. Uh Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13, um, love does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but it rejoices in the truth. And I think that that does have a an application in in thinking historically and writing history. Um we we don't uh we don't love the dead by idealizing them or sweeping their faults under the rug. We tell the truth about them as best we can, as much as we can. We we uh historical research and historical writing is the pursuit of truth. Um, and so if we're going to pursue truth, then um at least if you follow Paul's lead, you you have to love. But I'd love to hear y'all's thoughts on it too, because y'all are um y'all are y'all outlive me and y'all are my seniors in the historical in the historical guild. So I I want to see what y'all have to say about it too.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:52

Well, I I appreciated what you said in your book. I think that there is danger in simply combining the past for an agenda, whatever that agenda might be. You know, maybe it's a current uh political cause, maybe it's uh to just uh explain something that we want to to explain and uh and not necessarily grappling with people as people, as people who are made in the image of God, people who are shaped by their time. And I think that's one of the things you bring out in your book that that when we're looking at the past, even though human nature hasn't changed, culture has changed, expectations have changed. And so in any uh given culture of the past, we're going to see people who had blind spots that we don't think we have to the same degree. But also, if we're charitable, we'll recognize maybe they saw some things more perceptively than maybe our culture does, and that we can learn from them. And I I think that you did a really good job of highlighting that in your book. And that that's kind of a needed needed corrective um to the way that sometimes uh we approach the past in our culture. Yeah, one of the things I think that your book pushes against doesn't we haven't maybe you don't talk about it directly, but uh you you definitely are are dealing with this issue is that in the late 19th century a significant part of the educated population of the United States embraced a progressive view of history, uh an evolutionary view of history that views in Hegelian terms that history is moving towards something better. And we don't talk about that today in the same way, but it's it's a widespread assumption that's taken for granted. It doesn't even have to be discussed, people just absorb it. And I think in a lot of your work, you're pushing back against that and saying, No, that's not necessarily the way that we want to read the past. We want to read the past, not uh, as you said, nostalgically, where we just venerate the past for its own sake, but at the same time not with this mindset that we, of course, know better and and therefore end up judging people in the past without really listening to them and and loving them and uh understanding them on their own terms.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:28

I was thinking about that in connection with our conversation about the sermons, um, yet again, that task of understanding um God and understanding history together and talking about the two as people who are grappling with our own um beliefs and our own lives in a society that's uh not perfect. And seeing through those sermons are um just how much we share with these people from the past.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:03

I think a lot about um why why why is it that some lives are remembered and some and most aren't? Most aren't. Most people die in obscurity. Most people are forgotten when they die.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:18

Um Ecclesiastes, what is the man, the whole book is about that.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:22

That's right, yeah. So why is it that some lives we continue to talk about? Why is it that some texts we're still reading, as you said, 400 years later in the case of Winthrop's sermon? What is it that um makes us even interested in having even care to do it, besides getting a grade on it in a class or something that you're you're required to take? Um, and uh I I think that when we find something that appeals to us in a life or in a text or in an event or in an idea, it means that we've resonated with it in some way. We've related to it in some way. And that is an indicator of a shared a shared experience, um, or at least a shared intellectual or emotional experience, um, because of the fact that we're we're shared, we have a shared humanity and a shared um source of our being. Um, that is our being is found in God, and God's being. Animals don't do that. Animals don't memorialize each other, dogs don't build statues, um, horses don't write histories. We do. And um we do because we've been made in God's image. We have um an awareness of our place in time because God established the created order for us to mark time. He he put the the greater and the lesser lights in the night sky. To light the earth, but also to serve as infallible markers of time, which is amazing. Um, that he did that. That he did that. It it means that we're supposed to do this, we're supposed to read history. I usually begin my classes with the question, um, how many of you don't like history? You know, and I try to, you know, uh reassure the students that it's uh it's a safe question. Nobody's gonna nobody's gonna get an F, nobody's gonna go to hell if they don't like history. But um there's always there's always a smattering few that's uh that say they don't like it. And and I I often ask why, and they they um almost always say that they um that they uh you know struggle with memorizing dates and names and not very good at geography and things like that. Um usually it's um usually it's it's it's because they struggle with memorization of details. And um and I I I try to say to them, you know, and and and get them to think that no, I think you do like history. You like your own history. Um when you tell your own conversion story, or if you if you just tell about what you did on your summer vacation, you're you're you're talking about history and you're thinking historically, and you don't tell the story the same way to everybody you tell it to. You the story changes. It doesn't mean you're lying, it doesn't mean you're embellishing it. It means that you're fitting the story to a particular audience and with a particular perspective. And um so we think historically, not just when we are writing a paper or reading a textbook or an academic historical work. We do it, we do it without even thinking about it. And um it's uh it's intriguing. It's um it it reading history, thinking about history, is asking historical questions, is um it's who we are. We can't escape it.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:11

I love that. What an encouragement for well, any year, but especially in the year of America 250. Well, thank you both so much for taking the time for this conversation. And um, and again, John Wilsie's new book, God and Country, very well worth reading right now, along with classic American Servants. Thank you both.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:35

Thank you.