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Third, in political deployment of Scripture the Bible is quoted or paraphrased to make a direct assertion about how public life should be ordered. The difference from merely rhetorical or evocative use is the speaker's implicit claim that Scripture is not just supplying a conceptual universe from which to extract morally freighted phrases, but that it positively sanctions the speaker's vision for how public life should be ordered. Thus, King, toward the end of his great speech, quoted Isaiah 40:4 in order to enlist a divine sanction for his vision of a society free of racial discrimination: "I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places shall be made plain, the crooked places shall be made straight and the glory of the Lord will be revealed and all flesh shall see it together."
In his Second Inaugural, Lincoln did something similar when he combined resignation before the workings of providence with an indictment of the ones who had asked God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces. For that combination of opinions a quotation from Matthew 18:7 was Lincoln's clincher: "The prayers of both [sides] could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. 'Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!'"
Political use of Scripture is at once more dangerous and more effective than the rhetorical or evocative. It is more dangerous because it risks the sanctified polarization that has so often attended the identification of a particular political position with the specific will of God. It can also be dangerous for religion. In the telling words of Leon Wieseltier, "the surest way to steal the meaning, and therefore the power, from religion is to deliver it to politics, to enslave it to public life."
Yet political use of Scripture can also be remarkably effective. When a specific political position is successfully identified with the purposes of God, that position can be advanced with tremendous moral energy. With these two speeches, strategic quoting from the Bible played a significant part in reassuring many Americans that Lincoln's opposition to slavery and King's opposition to racial discrimination really did embody a divine imperative.
Finally, after rhetorical, evocative, and political usages, there is the theological deployment of Scripture, where the Bible is quoted or paraphrased to make an assertion about God and the meaning of his acts or providential control of the world. In American public life, this use of the Bible is by far the most rare. Lincoln's Second Inaugural may represent its only instance. What he said pertained not primarily to the fate of the nation, and not even to a defense of his own political actions, but to the sovereign character and mysterious purposes of God. For that statement, a quotation from Psalm 19:9 provided the last word:
If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
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