Thread by @PhilipDerrida

🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸
It’s another living, slow drip #PresbyAmericana #ChristianAmericana thread🧵

This time it’s The Christian Soldier: A Sermon Commemorative of the Death of Abram C. Carrington (1863) by Robert Lewis Dabney (1820 – 1898)

1/75 (+/-)

Some brief background info:

Robert Lewis Dabney (1820-1898)—a major figure in 19th century Southern Presbyterianism—was born on March 5, 1820 in Louisa County, Virginia, as the sixth child of Charles and Elizabeth Dabney.

His father Charles (a planter, church elder, and county court member) died when Robert was thirteen and this sense of responsibility to his family and their estate slowed Dabney's path to the ministry.

However, in 1846 he completed his studies at Union Seminary and was issued a preacher’s license by the West Hanover Presbytery.

The following year Dabney was called to pastor Tinkling Spring Church in Augusta, Virginia, where he designed the new church building in the Greek Revival Style. (Dabney was also a talented architect.)

In 1853, after recently being awarded a degree of Doctor of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary, Dabney accepted a professor position teaching Ecclesiastical History and Polity at Union Seminary. In 1859, he began teaching Systematic Theology.

At the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, Dabney enlisted to serve as a chaplain with the Eighteenth Virginia Volunteers where he was known for preaching to the troops while standing on a wooden box.

However, not long after the First Battle of Manassas/Bull Run, Dabney was struck by a fever and forced to return home to recover.

The following year, General Jackson offered Dabney the position of Adjutant-General (chief of staff). Dabney reluctantly took the position and served for four months until illness struck again. This time forcing him to leave the army entirely.

After the death of General Jackson, his widow asked Dabney to write a biography of her husband. Dabney took up the task and wrote his two-volume Life and Campaigns of Lieut.-Gen. Thomas J. Jackson (Stonewall Jackson).

After the war Dabney resumed teaching at Union Seminary and producing some of his major theological works.

The following thread will be providing excerpts from a 1862 funeral sermon entitled "The Christian Soldier: A Sermon Commemorative of the Death of Abram C. Carrington."

The sermon text for the funeral was 2 Samuel 10:12: "Be of good courage and let us play the man for our people, and for the cities of our God: and the Lord do that which seemeth him good."

Feel free to read along: static1.squarespace.com/static/590be12…

"The duties of patriotism are not prominently urged in sacred Scripture. This we account for, not by supposing, with a certain sickly school of moralists, that this sentiment is selfish, narrow or inconsistent with the broadest philanthropy."

RL Dabney, Christian Soldier🇺🇸

"The duties of patriotism are not prominently urged in sacred Scripture. This we account for... by the facts, that the obligations of the citizen are not directly religious, and that they are so natural as to require little inculcation."

RL Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"The Hebrew Scriptures do indeed say enough, as in the text [2 Sam 10:12], to justify an intense love of native land and its institutions."

Robert Lewis Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"Civil government is God's ordinance, and if it be just, one of his greatest temporal blessings."

Robert Lewis Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"The diversity of tongues, characters, races and interests among mankind forbids their union in one universal commonwealth. The aggregation of men into separate nations is therefore necessary."

Robert Lewis Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"The authority of the governments instituted over them [nations], to maintain internal order and external defence against aggression, is of divine appointment."

Robert Lewis Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"Hence, to sustain our government with heart and hand is not only made by God our privilege, but our duty."

Robert Lewis Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"Our best way to advance the well-being of the race is to advance that of the portion of our race associated with us in the same society."

Robert Lewis Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"He who extends his philanthropy so broadly as to refuse a special attachment to the interests of his own people, will probably make it so thin as to be of no account to any people."

Robert Lewis Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"I therefore believe that there is nothing opposed to an enlightened Christianity in a warm patriotism for our particular country."

Robert Lewis Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"This [patriotic] feeling is made up of several elements: a legitimate regard for our own welfare and worldly estate, interest in that of our families, and a wider benevolence towards our fellow citizens."

Robert Lewis Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"[Patriotic feelings go] together with an honest pride in the glories of our history, and in the justice of our institutions, with the attachments of local affection to the very scenery and soil of our native land."

Robert Lewis Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"Unprovoked war is the most monstrous secular crime that can be committed; it is at once the greatest of evils, and includes the worst forms of robbery and murder."

Robert Lewis Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"Wherever war is prompted by mere pique or lust of aggrandisement, or ambition for fame and power, it deserves all that can be said of its mischiefs and criminality by the most zealous advocates of peace."

Robert Lewis Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863) 🇺🇸

"And nothing can rescue a people waging war from this guilt except the fact that their appeal to arms is necessary for the defence of just and vital rights."

Robert Lewis Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"The Scriptures... give no countenance to the weak fanaticism which commands governments to practice a passive non-resistance in such a world as this."

Robert Lewis Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"Nations are usually unjust and unscrupulous. The very fact that they are politically sovereign implies that there is no umpire between them, except divine providence." A passive attitude would usually only provoke, instead of disarming, attack."

RL Dabney, Christian Soldier 🇺🇸

"The very fact that all war is so terrific a scourge, and that aggressive war is such an enormous crime, only makes it more clear that the injured party are entitled to their redress, and are justified in inflicting on the injurers."

RL Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"It is perfectly clear that sacred Scripture legalizes such defensive war. Abram, Moses, Joshua, Samuel, David, Josiah, the Maccabees, were such warriors; and they were God's chosen saints."

Robert Lewis Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"Under the New Testament, when Christ's forerunner was preaching the baptism of repentance, he did not enjoin on soldiers the surrender of their profession as sinful, but only the restricting of themselves to its lawful duties."

Robert Lewis Dabney, Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"It would be strange indeed if the ruler who is armed by God with the power of capital punishment against the domestic murderer could not justly inflict the same doom on the foreign criminal who invades our soil, unprovoked."

Robert Lewis Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"The security of life and property which the magistrate is intended to provide... would be illusory... if it could only be used against individual criminals, while the more... widespread crimes of organized multitudes must go unpunished."

RL Dabney, The Christian Soldier(1863)🇺🇸

"Aggressive war is wholesale murder; and when the government sends out its army to repel and chastise the invader, it does but inflict summary execution on the murderer caught in the act."

Robert Lewis Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"I have briefly stated this truth in order to ground firmly your belief in the righteousness of the calling of the Christian soldier."

Robert Lewis Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"God has authorized him [the Christian soldier]. The objects for which he contends are excellent, noble, yea of supreme temporal value, 'for our people and for the cities of our God.'"

Robert Lewis Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"Our homes and the shelter of our families, the rights bequeathed to us by our ancestors, the whole earthly welfare of us & all our fellow-citizens, everything which is included as valuable in the words, my country, is committed to his protection."

RL Dabney, Christian Soldier🇺🇸

"The godly soldier is called to defend also the far dearer interests of the church of God, involved in so many ways with those of the country in which it is planted."

Robert Lewis Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"He [the Christian soldier] protects all these precious objects by the exercise of the noblest attributes of manhood, courage, self-devotion, faith in God."

Robert Lewis Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"The glory of the soldier's prowess has always inflamed the admiration and dazzled the fancy of mankind above all other greatness."

Robert Lewis Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"Let not the pseudo-philanthropist say that this universal, this resistless impulse of the popular heart [towards warriors] is merely an irrational remnant of the more bloody and ruthless ideas of Paganism."

Robert Lewis Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"Let not the pseudo-philanthropist say that this universal, this resistless impulse of the popular heart [towards warriors] is... unworthy of the benevolence and knowledge of a Christian age."

Robert Lewis Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"If this admiration of the military virtues is bestowed on the hireling, the mere soldier of fortune or the scourge of nations, who, like 'Macedonia's madman or the Swede,' fights from the lust of fame and power; it is a monstrous perversion."

RL Dabney, Christian Soldier 🇺🇸

"But the great instincts of the human heart and reason never go totally astray. These perverted instances would not occur unless there were a true military glory, to blind men as to the black deformity of its counterfeit."

Robert Lewis Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"This universal applause of the martial virtues is the instinctive testimony of man's heart to the fact, that they require the exercise of the noblest sentiments of the human soul."

Robert Lewis Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"He who cultivates the arts of peace does, indeed, make a worthy contribution to the well-being of his fellow-men; but he who defends them with his life makes the contribution of supreme value."

Robert Lewis Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"He [the soldier] maintains that peace and security which are the necessary conditions for enjoying all other acquisitions."

Robert Lewis Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"But for his [the soldier's] protection it would be of no avail to the citizens that the two blades of grass grew for every one that grew before, when all were trampled down by the ruthless invader."

Robert Lewis Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"Nor is it true that the exploits of the soldier are merely those of the brute muscle and sinew, and of animal courage. War, and especially modern war, is not an unreasoning art; but it is a profession requiring."

Robert Lewis Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"But the true glory of the Christian soldier is in this: that he is called to the noblest exertions of the emotions and the will."

Robert Lewis Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"For the heart is nobler, wiser, greater than the head. The speculations of the head are cold and devoid of moral trait. It is the impulses of the heart which characterize man as a moral being. To love is better than to analyze."

Robert Lewis Dabney, Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

“I assert this Christian courage is but another name for self-sacrifice. It does but postpone self to duty, and to the good of others.”

Robert Lewis Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"The temper of the Christian soldier is also one of high faith and profound submission to God."

Robert Lewis Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸
64/75

"Death, and especially what men call a premature death, must ever be regarded by us as a natural evil."

Robert Lewis Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"The very instincts of man's animal nature abhor it [death], and his earthly affections shudder at the severance which it effects between them and their dear objects."

Robert Lewis Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"Death is always a solitary struggle; however we may be surrounded by friends, when the shadow of the great agony falls upon us it shuts us out like a dark veil from their aid, and we must meet the last enemy alone."

Robert Lewis Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"We contend, not only for the lawful interests of home and country, but for the more precious and sacred cause of God and of souls. I am not one of those who hold that these sentiments are the birth only of pagan ferocity, or unholy pride."

RL Dabney, Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"The principles of personal honor and the love of glory have been perverted among us into a code of wickedness and bloody retaliation, for which we now doubtless suffer the chastisement of an offended God."

Robert Lewis Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"From this abuse [of honor and glory] the professors of a spurious and debased puritanism have taken occasion to decry all such sentiments until they seem to be vanished from among them."

Robert Lewis Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"There is a true glory and a true honor, that which cometh from God and not from man: the glory of duty done, of obstacles overcome, of fears resisted, and of generous sacrifices made to a worthy cause."

Robert Lewis Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"He deserves most of this honor who from pure motives braves the direst evils and pays the costliest sacrifice for the noblest object."

Robert Lewis Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"What fear can be darker than that of death? What more precious than life? What object more worthy than the cause of our country and our God?"

Robert Lewis Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

"In attuning our souls so as to make them thrill at the applause of our fellows, our Creator doubtless assigned to this affection some legitimate scope."

Robert Lewis Dabney, The Christian Soldier (1863)🇺🇸

If you enjoyed this thread and would like to see more like it, check out this thread of threads

https://twitter.com/PhilipDerrida/status/1610097545736224769