John Sparks. Raccoon John Smith: Frontier
Racoon John Smith is the story of a region, the profound influences that shaped its formation, and intermittently, the biography of Elder John Smith. From the late eighteenth century through the Civil War, John Sparks traces the life of this Appalachian preacher, delving into theology, church formation, societal developments, politics, and many other topics along the way. In many regards, straying so far from the path is necessary since the available information about the preacher is sparse; in fact, Sparks sums up the historiography of Smith’s life in two pages. Ultimately, then, this book is less about Smith than it is a sermon—and a rather prolonged one at that—arguing first that “life choices [are] . . . visceral responses to soul-shattering tragedies of the type many Christians prefer to dismiss in fretful complacency and uneasy confusion until such events come home to them”; and second, that “regardless of what theologians or denominational apologists of any breed might claim, our search for truth and our perceptions of any figure of the past are only improved and made fuller by the competent use of historical and textual criticism” (xxiii). No wonder the book is so thick!
The core of this book is the shaping and reshaping of the
Baptist and Disciples of Christ denominations in
Amazingly, Sparks realizes this, appealing to his readers
who “will thank me to keep any further speculations to a minimum” to “Bear with
me a few more minutes, though” (71). It
isn’t just a few more minutes! The
entire book is laden with digressions, into Kierkegaard and into so many other
distractions. The digressions are mostly
interesting, although at times the reader just wonders why the author needed to
add more to the text. The opening page
of chapter three, for example, explores the biology and folklore surrounding
the redbud tree, all done for the sake of suggesting that John Smith’s father may have prayed in a grove of them. During an interesting exploration of the
Baptists’ North District Association,
The real problem with this book, ironically, is that despite
the author’s chastisement to others about improving and filling out our
perception of the past, it really only works when one employs the most recent
historical and textual criticism. The historical
sources are mostly outdated. It is as if
the boom in
Incidentally, a consequence of this neglect is to make minor
historical misstatements. For example,
although historians have mostly disabused us of the idea that the Era of Good
Feelings was without ideological conflict,
The theology is stronger, interweaving older denominational histories with more recent scholarship on the Campbellites, Kentucky Baptists, and cutting-edge theological discussions by Marcus Borg and N.T. Wright, and Peter Berger. Still, at times, theological pronouncements seem rather narrow: for example, “New Birth in Christ . . . makes one perceive the sacred as firsthand experience rather than mere secondhand belief; were it not so, the biblical inerrantist mindset of the Great Awakening and the Great Revival could never have evolved” (53). Certainly, the statement may be true, but the connection between the “sacred as firsthand experience” and biblical inerrancy is never explained. And for readers like this one who have experienced the sacred firsthand but do not believe in biblical inerrancy, the logic is just not there.
All of this makes Raccoon
John Smith interesting but far longer, rambling, and esoteric than it
needed to be. People who appreciate
Craig Thompson Friend