God and the Civil War

Mark J. Larson

Reviewed by: Sam Logan

God and the Civil War: Lincoln in Moral and Theological Perspective, by Mark J. Larson. Stone Tower, 2024. Paperback, 173 pages, $19.95. Reviewed by OP minister Sam Logan.

Mark Larson’s new book, God and the Civil War, is Reformed, orthodox, and superb! It is an incredible irony that, on the very threshold of the Civil War, Christianity permeated American society. Protestant church buildings were everywhere. These houses of worship were likely filled on any given Sunday in the months preceding the Civil War. It is estimated that more than two-thirds of the nation’s population would have been in attendance. Americans were a Christian people. As Abraham Lincoln put it, “Both North and South read the same Bible and pray to the same God.” There were, nevertheless, “differences of opinion” about how the Bible handles certain theological and other matters. A few of the “differences of opinion” identified by Dr. Larson are listed below.

(1) Should ordained ministers be allowed (or possibly even required) to fight in what we have come to call the “Civil War” (40)?

(2) How should biblical Christians respond to continued racial injustice in their countries and, in fact, how should “racial injustice” be defined? Specifically, is any racial discrimination always wrong (42–55)?

(3) In his sermon, “A Strong Rod Broken and Withered” delivered on the occasion of the death of John Stoddard, the preeminent American theologian Jonathan Edwards asserted: “The removal of legitimate rulers from a people by death is to be looked upon as an awful judgment of God on that people and is to be greatly lamented.” Was Edwards biblically correct?

Dr. Larson briefly but excellently discusses the political views of Jonathan Edwards Jr., James Henley Thornwell, Robert Lewis Dabney and, in his sixth and seventh chapters, provides an extensive interpretation of “The Hand of God in the Life of Lincoln” and an excellent examination and interpretation of “The Work That God Had Done.”

I hope and pray that this book will be assigned and widely read in both secondary and college-level American history classes.