Ronald C. White Jr. writes in the Presbyterian Outlook about the often overlooked evolution of Abraham Lincoln’s faith:
Lincoln eventually develops into a fatalist, a kissing cousin to the Deism of Thomas Jefferson. The writer of the Declaration of Independence espoused a creator God who set the world in motion, but not a redeemer God who acted in history. And there the Lincoln religious story usually stops. Lincoln’s politics are characterized by his ability to change his mind over time, but his religious views have been frozen in time by biographers and historians, if they choose to choose to comment on them at all.
[…]Lincoln’s personal presidential pilgrimage of faith became public in his remarkable Second Inaugural Address delivered on March 4, 1865. In 701 words, Lincoln mentions God 14 times, quotes the Bible four times, and invokes prayer three times. This address is not fatalism. Rather it is a “Scriptural understanding of the providence of God,” which Lincoln had been hearing now for four years from Pastor [Phineas Densmore] Gurley at New York Avenue.
Read the full article here.
[via: the Dallas Morning News Religion blog]