Books & Culture
A Quiet Fire finds a new birth in a troubled nation.
Quiet Fire: The Spiritual Life of Abraham Lincoln
By Duncan Newcomer
Reviewed By Martin Davis
Published April 2025
Santos Books
296 pages
Paperback - $24.95
“Proof-texting” is a common ploy in evangelical Christianity. Pick a series of verses, take them out of their original context, and mold them to whatever one’s theology happens to be. It’s an approach to the bible that has led to centuries of flaccid, and wildly contradictory, theologies.
It’s why Protestants can’t agree on the words to use during baptism (does one follow Acts 2:38 [among other verses] or the great commission [Matthew 28:19]?) Is one pre- or post-millennial? Does the bible forbid the use of instruments in the church - some denominations say yes. Are women on an equal footing with men, or submissive inferiors?
A version of this flawed textual approach holds true with the writings of notable political leaders. Liberals and Conservatives and MAGAs, for example, regularly use Martin Luther King Jr.’s “not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character” — with significantly different understandings of that text.
Proof-texting, be it in a religious or a secular context, is a mark of lazy historical thinking.
Living with a great thinker’s words means not just reading what’s on the page and stopping at what one thinks the plain-language interpretation suggests, but wrestling to understand what was originally meant, and why anyone should care today.
Duncan Newcomer has lived with the words of Abraham Lincoln — specifically, how Lincoln’s words unveil his spirituality — nearly his entire life. And his new book, Quiet Fire, is a model for what serious wrestling with historical language requires, and how to bring meaning to those words into our era.
A simple reading of Quiet Fire may lead one to see the book as merely ground in mysticism.
Consider how Newcomer himself opens his book.
There was a full moon on the hot nights of the battle at Gettysburg, the nights of July first, second and third, 1863. Eighty years later, on July third, I was born. On the night of my fiftieth birthday, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, I watched a full orange moon rise over the long dark reflecting pool. The moon slowly changed to silver, and I felt the white moon on Lincoln looming behind me.”
Newcomer is no mere mystic, however, and his living with Lincoln’s words owes as much to Newcomer’s background as a poet, a psychotherapist, and a minister as any starry convergence.
Lincoln’s spiritual life is, for Newcomer, one that is characterized by the paradoxes that have puzzled contemporaries and scholars since Lincoln’s days as a lawyer in Springfield, Illinois.
“The list of opposites in [Lincoln’s] character is almost endless,” Newcomer writes, “a rollicking melancholic, as comic as he was tragic. He was a leader who seemed to drift.”
Lincoln’s spiritual life was as full of paradox, save for this one difference — Newcomer contends that Lincoln himself resolved those contradictions. And in that resolution there are important lessons for us today.
Newcomer’s analysis rests on six terms that he uses to make sense of Lincoln’s spiritual paradoxes: Language, Yonder, Negative Capability, Warrior, King, and Grail King.
From these he creates a challenging read that asks the reader to wrestle, as Lincoln did throughout his own life, with how spiritual power and secular power interact.
Today, spiritual and secular power are grossly out of sync in favor of the spiritual. At other times in America’s history, the asynchronous relationship has worked in the opposite direction.
“Lincoln’s lesson to us is clear,” Newcomer writes. “Unlike most nation states that have anything to do with religion he came close to religion but did not let religion take over. Never was America to him the Kingdom of God in America. The American experience was perhaps humanity’s last best hope as he saw history. We were engaged in a pivotal enterprise but it was both for what he always called God’s ‘almost chosen people’ [as well as] it was also for the [worldly] as he saw the world. The line he drew was important and the difference crucial and unique in world history.”
Newcomer’s book is a much-needed analysis of Lincoln’s spirituality and what it means for people today. Don’t expect a simple read, however. Quiet Fire is deeply challenging, and it requires a great deal from the reader.
Proof-texters will need to lay aside their bibles and learn what it means to wrestle with the bible at a deeper level; nonreligious readers will need to set aside their self-assuredness about the absence of the divine in the world and open their minds to the ideal that there is a spiritual dimension to life.
Working together, with Newcomer as a guide, the spiritual and the nonspiritual in our nation can begin to reconcile the paradoxical words of Lincoln, and discover anew a spirituality that can unite, not divide, the country.
Paragraph II
Hede
Support the Advance with an Annual Subscription or Make a One-time Donation
The Advance has developed a reputation for fearless journalism. Our team delivers well-researched local stories, detailed analysis of the events that are shaping our region, and a forum for robust, informed discussion about current issues.
We need your help to do this work, and there are two ways you can support this work.
Sign up for annual, renewable subscription.
Make a one-time donation of any amount.
Local Obituaries
To view local obituaries or to send a note to family and loved ones, please visit the link that follows.
This article is published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND. It can be distributed for noncommercial purposes and must include the following: “Published with permission by FXBG Advance.”