Virginia religionists also saw the entire Bible as a unity, as a Christian book. Israel’s history prefigured or foreshadowed the Christian future, and expressed, to paraphrase Lampe, the significance of the present in terms of the past (Lampe, p. 20).

Between the American Revolution and the Civil War, according to Mark A. Noll, the United States was the most "biblical nation" in the world. For the educated as well as the illiterate, the Bible "was the story of all stories. . . . the controlling myth for American use." The scriptures were "most useful on public occasions" when treated as "a storehouse of types" in the "belief that the United States was an antitype which fulfilled biblical types" ("The Image of the United States as a Biblical Nation," p. 43). Ministers had an intense fascination with the fulfillment of biblical prophecy to substantiate nationalism and patriotism:

This predisposition to read Scripture typically and to regard the United States as a new Israel naturally led ministers to stress the grand narratives of the Old Testament. Well into the national period, the public Bible of the United States was for all intents the Old Testament. During the Revolution just about the only ministers who preached consistently from the New Testament were pacifists and loyalists, trying—in vain—to overcome the power of Old Testament narratives about setting captive Israel free with straight-forward New Testament injunctions to honor the king and love one’s neighbors (Noll, pp. 44-45).

Though widespread, this "union of biblical typology and American nationalism" was not followed by all (Noll, p. 46). In the early nineteenth century, a class of educated blacks, such as David Walker, rose in the North who used biblical typology for ideological purposes, namely, abolitionism. Some, such as Martin Delany, used this biblical mode of interpretation to promote the notion of an African nationality.

Affected by Enlightenment thinkers, such as John Locke and other natural theologians, many American clergyman modified the traditional methods of biblical exegesis. Congregationalist minister Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), former president of the College of New Jersey and a "student of prophecy" and "God’s eschatological designs" for America, moved away from the standard use of Bible typology as was used by Cotton Mather and other Congregationalists. He was "enthralled with the sense of God’s majestic presence, not with man’s submission to infinite authority" (Bowden, p. 142). 

Edwards' dispute with the Northampton church over "church purity" and its attempt to establish a public morality led him to "reconsider the application of biblical typology. He did not abandon the idea that Israel and its history were types to be fulfilled in later years," according to Mark A. Noll. "But he did insist that these were types of spiritual realities having little or nothing to do with later nations as such" ("The Image of the United States as a Biblical Nation," p. 46).

Much of the nation, however, did not follow Edwards or make use of his method as he had intended. Many of the colonists viewed the Revolution and American Independence in biblical terms as a fulfillment of prophecy. The dissenting settlers who made up the body of the revolutionary spirit, less lettered than Edwards, were still heavily influenced by the bible tradition. For them, the American Revolution "represented the complete break from Old Israel" and the "creation of a New Israel" in which the promises of the past would bring forth a harvest that would benefit the world, according to Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.

"One of the obvious points here is that biblical typology, particularly Exodus, is an important part of the cultural and political beginnings (ideology, if you will) of the United States, so much so that most political events are captured and understood within the terms of the narrative. We are the new Israelites. That is, unless you are black" (Exodus, p. 42). The American Enlightenment was not as thorough-going as that which occurred in Europe, which moved away from religious explanations to explain "natural events."

Samuel Hopkins of Newport, a follower of Edwards’ method, used scripture, during the Revolutionary period, for an attack on slavery. He was aware that there was nothing explicit in the Bible that condemned slavery. Hopkins concluded, however, that slavery was "condemned by the whole of divine revelation." He cited book, chapter, and verse in which implicit condemnation could be found. "For Hopkins to read the Bible as had been taught by Edwards was to find a very different public book than that which many of his contemporaries opened to illuminate the Revolutionary era" (Noll, p. 47-48).

Besides the Edwardseans, there was yet another group of Americans who used "biblical typology," not as a "fulfillment in the legendary events of United States history," according to Noll. Though seldom heard, Christian slaves had their own perspective of God working in the world. "If whites saw future political realities in Scriptural narrative, and Edwardseans discerned spiritual ones, [Christian] slaves saw a combination of social and spiritual truths" ("The Image of the United States as a Biblical Nation," pp. 48-49). One needs only examine the Spirituals, an extant source of Christian slaves’ religious consciousness, to observe their use of biblical typology to other purposes than nationalism or self-glorification.

There will be no attempt here to analyze the Spirituals for their topological content. But a mere perusal of a few titles of the more than six hundred songs should sustain the point: "Go Down Moses"; "Joshua Fit The Battle of Jericho"; "Didn’t Old Pharaoh Get Lost?"; "Give Me That Old Time Religion"; "Stand Still Jordan"; "Singing With a Sword in My Hand"; "Steal Away to Jesus"; and "Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel." Spiritual and physical liberation centered their religious concerns.

In the religious songs, the sentiments and often the entire lines are taken bodily from the Bible. However, there is no doubt that some of these religious songs have a meaning apart from the Biblical text. It is evident that the opening lines of "Go Down Moses" . . . have a significance beyond the bondage of Israel in Egypt (The Book of American Negro Poetry, p. 18)

America’s Christian slaves lived in a world radically different from that of Jonathan Edwards’ "spiritual realities." These Christian slaves, like the Jewish sects of the Roman Empire, were an oppressed people sustained by their relationship to God.

In 1864, a Union soldier was dismayed by the appeal that the biblical Moses had for liberated Christian slaves. "There is no part of the Bible with which they are so familiar as the story of the deliverance of the children of Israel. Moses is their ideal of all that is high, and noble, and perfect, in man. I think they have been accustomed to regard Christ not so much in the light of a spiritual deliverer, as that of a second Moses who could eventually lead them out of their prison-house of bondage" ("The Image of the United States as a Biblical Nation," p. 50).

That Jesus was a "second Moses" had long been a commonplace in Christian typology. According to W. K. Grossouw, "Chapters 5 to 7 of Matthew’s Gospel represent the Lord as the new and greater Moses, who with authority proclaims His teaching on the mountain" (Spirituality of the New Testament, p. 38). Despite widespread illiteracy, these Christian slaves may have been more attuned than their power-wielding masters to the underlining messages found in Jesus’ parables of "the kingdom of heaven."

This type of thinking, despite the Union soldier’s amazement, was orthodox biblical typology, the same typological thinking found in the Book of Matthew, the "most violently anti-Pharisaic" of the gospels (The Gospels: Their Origins and their Growth, p. 137). Like those of the first century, the religion of Christian slaves were both other-worldly and this-worldly. Like other Christians, they too desired one of the "father’s mansions" in this world and the next. These black Christian "readers" combined "biblical types and scriptural injunctions" against slavery’s demonic power. Some of their favorite verses were Malachi 2:10 ("Hath not one God created us?") to counter ethnic rivalry; Acts 10:34 ("God is no respecter of persons") to counter racial thinking; and Acts 17:26 ("Of one blood hath God made all nations") to counter white nationalism.

For Christian slaves, "God’s chosen people" were those "who suffered unjustly among all peoples," not one "nation among nations" ("The Image of the United States as a Biblical Nation," pp. 50-51). Though an African people, America’s Christian slaves, the folk masses, responded wonderfully to the universal message of salvation taught in the gospel of the "kingdom of heaven." Not infrequently, Christian slaves led their masters to Christ.

In the black popular imagination, Nathaniel Turner, with the fervor of Old Testament prophets, corrected the religious arrogance and vanity of Christian slaveholders. But Turner was not singular in his actions. Christian slaves of Virginia and throughout the South reoriented the typological mode of interpretation to the perspective of the enslaved Christian, whose self-interest it was to "escape from American institutions," as Christian Jews and Gentiles sought to escape the horrors of Roman imperialism and slavery.

"Escape" for the Christian slave of the South was expressed in the biblical terms of the "Exodus" ("The Image of the United States as a Biblical Nation," p. 49). Grounded and schooled in this Christian slave perspective, in his youth, Turner did indeed choose "escape" when his "promise" of freedom was ignored. But that was not his destiny. He moved toward accommodation ("Give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s") and then, in the end, confrontation ("And unto God that which is God’s). For Nathaniel Turner, faith and obedience were the foundation of Christian manhood.

Like Abraham or Joshua, Turner engaged the forces of evil with righteous indignation and violence. Though usually associated with Old Testament prophecy, Turner focused his testament primarily on the gospel message of the prophet Jesus of Nazareth. Turner did not read the gospel as a pacifist manifesto nor Jesus as a non-violent ideologue. Like Francis Asbury, Turner believed the gospel was "armed with terror to the disobedient, impenitent, and to apostates from it. . . . all the perfection of Deity is arranged on the side of vengeance and vindictive wrath" (The Journal and Letters of Francis Asbury, p, 553).

In his "1831 Confessions,"  Turner highlighted the Gospel of Matthew, which is "emphatically apocalyptic-eschatological" (The Gospels: Their Origins and their Growth, p. 147). Establishing a continuity between the old and the new, Matthew’s gospel cements the two testaments. This emphasis was a sign for the reader that Turner too viewed the Bible as a unity, as a Christian book. The gospel message of the "kingdom" was central to Turner’s Christianity. For Turner, it was clear, Jesus was a prophet who "called his disciples to be, among other things, prophetic" (Prophecy in Israel, p. 159).

The religious world of Southampton, for Turner, thus mirrored the biblical world of the ancient Israelites and the new dispensation of Christ as seen through Methodist eyes.. Turner reenacted in his own Cross Keys context the Christian drama. To put it another way, one must read Turner’s "1831 Confessions" in light of the Gospel of Matthew. Throughout Turner’s life, there are indeed correspondences or echoes that respond to Jesus’ life and ministry. For instance, ancient Jerusalem played a pivotal role in the life of Jesus and his execution.

In Turner’s life, the Jerusalem of Southampton played a symbolical role in his Christian slave context. In Turner’s Jerusalem, the Court of Oyer and Terminer (a special court for Virginia slaves) publicly tried and convicted him, November 5, 1831, "as an insurgent." Twelve days after his "capture," under order of the Court, Turner’s jailers took him from his cell to a nearby tree, and at noon on November 11, 1831, hanged him until he was dead. Clearly, for Nathaniel Turner, this state murder was a type of crucifixion.

Sources Consulted

Bowden, Henry Warner. Dictionary of American Religious Biography. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1977.

Clark, Elmer T., J. Manning Potts, and Jacob S. Payton. The Journal and Letters of Francis Asbury, Volume II. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1958.

Glaude, Jr., Eddie S. Exodus: Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Grant, Frederick C. The Gospels: Their Origins and their Growth. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957.

Grossouw, W. K. Spirituality of the New Testament. London: B. Herder Book Company, 1961. 

Johnson, James Weldon. The Book of American Negro Poetry. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969.

Lampe, G. W. H., and K. J. Woollcombe. “The Reasonableness of Typology.” In Essays on Typology, Studies in Biblical Theology, no. 22. Napierville, Ill: A.R. Allenson, 1957, pp. 9-38.

Noll, Mark A. "The Image of the United States as a Biblical Nation, 1776-1865. In Nathan O. Hatch and Mark A. Noll, eds. The Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982, pp. 39-58.

Skinner, Andrew C. "The Influence of the Hebrew Bible on the Founders of the American Republic." In Leonard Jay Greenspoon and Bryan F. LeBeau, eds. Sacred Text, Secular Times: The Hebrew Bible in the Modern World. Omaha, Nebraska: Creighton University Press, 2000.

Stroh, Guy W. American Ethical Thought. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1979.

Tucker, Gene M. "The Role of the Prophets and the Role of the Church." In David L. Petersen, ed. Prophecy in Israel: Search for an Identity (Issues in Religion and Theology 10). Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987, pp. 159-174.

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Exodus!: Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. No other story in the Bible has fired the imaginations of African Americans quite like that of Exodus. Its tale of suffering and the journey to redemption offered hope and a sense of possibility to people facing seemingly insurmountable evil. Exodus! shows how this biblical story inspired a pragmatic tradition of racial advocacy among African Americans in the early nineteenth century—a tradition based not on race but on a moral politics of respectability. Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., begins by comparing the historical uses of Exodus by black and white Americans and the concepts of "nation" it generated. He then traces the roles that Exodus played in the National Negro Convention movement, from its first meeting in 1830 to 1843, when the convention decided—by one vote—against supporting Henry Highland Garnet's call for slave insurrection.