Dr. James Byrd and Dr. Dru Johnson Discuss 'The Bible and the American Civil War'

| Photo courtesy of The King’s College

On Friday, Sept 24, King’s hosted Dr. James P. Byrd of Vanderbilt University to speak on his book A Holy Baptism of Fire and Blood: The Bible and the American Civil War. A response was provided by Dr. Dru Johnson, Associate Professor of Biblical and Theological Studies at King’s and Director of the Center for Hebraic Thought.

 Byrd began the discussion with a quote from Abraham Lincoln regarding the Union and Confederacy: “‘Both sides read the same Bible and prayed to the same God, and each invoke[d] His aid against the other.’”

 “I set out to figure out just how the Bible influenced the Civil War and was influenced by the Civil War,” said Dr. Byrd.

 In appealing to Biblical literature, Americans in both the North and South gathered the courage to fight, sacrifice and kill because they were confident that “God was guiding this war to a certain end,” according to Byrd.

 “God is in every war, in every campaign, in every battle, in every great political and social change and directs every movement to the accomplishment of His own grand purposes. If war results in the subjugation of a people or in the annihilation of an institution in society, we must accept such a result as Heaven’s decree,” Byrd quoted, citing a Southern Methodist during the Civil War era.

 Christians in both the North and the South also appealed to the Bible to settle their disputes regarding slavery.

 “The most prominent theme throughout the Civil War was, of course, slavery, and there was a strong sense on both sides that the Bible had something definitive to say about slavery,” Byrd said. However, the Union and Confederacy disagreed about what that definitive something was.

 How could it be that, though each side read the same Bible, they had such contradictory interpretations of its message?

 Johnson referred to Byrd’s opening quote and began his commentary with, “Both sides read the same Bible.’ But did they? Or is it more accurate to say they both held the same Biblical text in their hands?”

 He asked the audience to consider the hands not as those of Northern or Southern origin, but to instead consider “the two sets of hands that held the Biblical text: the Black hands and the white hands.”

 “Scripture was largely written by the oppressed and to the oppressed,” Johnson said. As a result, “embodied traditions that have experienced persecution and marginalization might see better and truer into the Biblical reasoning about governance, slavery, justice and other topics.”

 Perhaps the white hands and the Black hands held the same text, but “in the American slave’s world, exploitation issued from masters who read the same Bible but read it poorly.”

 Johnson urged students to continue questioning their own Biblical interpretations, ending his response by asking, “Were the Union and the Confederacy reading the same Bible? Maybe this is the wrong question. I might replace it with this question: which intellectual tradition practiced better interpretation?”