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1 “The Presbyterian and Orthodox Idiosyncrasy of Mind” The Perkins chair institutionalized the widespread concern of south­ern Presbyterians that the waters of modernity be safely navigated. Though contemporary intellectual currents discomfited some less than others, the displacements of war and Reconstruction would render every reflective south­ erner’s world highly unstable, vividly alerting each that ideas have tangible consequences , and demonstrating the need to discern between the harmful and safe aspects of modernity. Nearly all postbellum South­ern Presbyterian ministers claimed to regard the Bible in “orthodox” fashion and to judge contemporary intellectual, cultural, and social trends by its standard. But as the Woodrow controversy would reveal, one man’s orthodoxy could be another’s heterodoxy. Not surprisingly, the staunchest conceptions of what it meant to be orthodox came from the voices and pens of the old preacher-­ apologists who had most explicitly linked south­ ern culture to biblicism. From the sectional debates in the 1850s through the late nineteenth-­ century defenses of the Lost Cause, South­ ern Presbyterians like Benjamin Morgan Palmer, John L. Girardeau, and especially Robert Lewis Dabney argued that biblical orthodoxy undergirded south­ erners’ thought and way of life and that the South, in turn, manifested and safeguarded the authority of scripture.1 Forged in the fires of sectionalism in the 1850s and honed to an even keener edge in numerous intellectual and cultural engagements through the 1880s, a sharp defense of south­ ern conservatism claiming the very word of God as its basis flashed outward from Dabney’s professorial chair at Union Theological Seminary in Hampden-­ Sidney, Virginia.2 Repulsing ­ invaders like the Confederate martyr Stonewall Jackson, whom Dabney served as chaplain and whose memory he served as hagiographer, this south­ ern-­ biblicist apologia defended the South against social, cultural, and intellectual intruders who threatened to make human reason, rather than divine revelation, the corner- Presbyterian and Orthodox Idiosyncrasy of Mind 11 stone of civilization. Though other South­ern Presbyterian theologians took a similar tack, Dabney perfected an apologia that identified biblical orthodoxy as the basis of south­ ern culture. In doing so, he engaged such diverse concerns as naturalistic science, racial amalgamation, commercialism, the extension of democracy, women’s rights, the pub­ lic school movement, philosophical empiricism, higher criticism of the Bible, and the proposed union with the North­ ern Presbyterian Church (PCUSA).3 According to Dabney and those for whom he spoke, these hazardous aspects of modernity emanated from a common source: the abandonment of the Bible as the infallible standard for all thought and conduct. Through the trials of sectionalism and war, Dabney believed, only the South had remained faithful to God. As each year brought new threats, in­ clud­ ing the seditious cry for a “New South” and a deadly flirtation with dangerous new ideas, the apologetic role of the theologian grew more crucial. As one entrusted with the cultivation of future ministers—who would in turn influence whole congregations and south­ern society—Dabney viewed his profession with solemnity . Sound theo­logi­cal training, he would remind his fellow divines in 1883, cultivated skill in detecting “error and sophism in false doctrines” and inculcated “the Presbyterian and orthodox idiosyncrasy of mind.”4 The kind of orthodoxy Dabney had in mind involved a correct conception of the Bible and its hermeneutics, which had been the common heritage of most mid-­ nineteenth-­ century Ameri­ can believers, not just South­ ern Presbyterians . Outside of Unitarian New England—the chief Ameri­ can conduit for German “higher criticism”—most mid-­ nineteenth-­ century north­ ern theologians joined south­erners in rejecting the alien notion that the Bible merely contained the word of God, along with the fallible words of men. Instead , the orthodox position held that the Bible was the word of God, and therefore wholly without errors.5 This orthodoxy required that one not only affirm the Bible’s infallibility as the word of God but also interpret it properly . At the outbreak of the Civil War, the dominant hermeneutic among Ameri­cans north and south was what Mark Noll has called “literal Reformed biblicism.”6 Owing to both Reformed theo­ logi­ cal traditions and the shared experience of Ameri­can history that favored commonsense readings of scripture ,7 most north­ern and south­ern Christians believed the meanings of biblical texts were constant across time and space. But, as Noll notes, the debate over slavery and the Ameri­ can Civil War put this nonperspectival conception of biblical truth to a stern test. It...

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