Raccoon John Smith: Frontier Kentucky's Most Famous Preacher.

Raccoon John Smith: Frontier Kentucky's Most Famous Preacher. By John Sparks. Religion in the South. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, c. 2005. Pp. xxvi, 462. $45.00, ISBN 0-8131-2370-4.)

John Sparks, an ordained minister or elder in the United Baptist Church, has read more minutes of Baptist associations in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Kentucky than anyone past or present. His indefatigable perusal of these documents gives him exceptional insight into the views and motives of Raccoon John Smith (1784-1868). Smith was a Baptist minister from 1808 to 1830, after which he became a member of the Disciples of Christ. Sparks gives special attention to the Baptist years, and this is the distinctive merit of his work. He dialogues with Smith biographers John Williams (1870) and Everett Donaldson (1993) and with Louis Cochrane, who wrote a novel based on the life of Smith in 1963. All three interpreted Smith by projecting backward from his Disciples' years. Sparks maintains that the early Smith is better understood by projecting forward from his Baptist roots, a worthwhile claim, but Sparks does this almost to the exclusion of the direction in which Smith was moving.

Sparks is at his best when he comments on Baptist history. His account of the First Great Awakening shows no awareness of the significance of the German Pietists. He is oblivious to the work of C. C. Goen on the separatist movement among the New England Puritans. He also ignores the theological struggles among the Kentucky Presbyterians that indicate that Smith's changing views were endemic to the time and place.

It comes as something of a surprise that Sparks utilizes book titles and statements from SCren Kierkegaard as the organizing and critical beginning points for the biography. Chapter titles include "Stages on Life's Way," "Sickness Unto Death," and "A Concluding Unscientific Postscript." Sparks sets forth the reason on page 325, claiming that the dialectic of Kierkegaard will enable persons from the rationalistic Disciples and from the experiential Baptists to understand each other. Sparks believes that one of the drawbacks of the three accounts mentioned above was that the existential contexts for Smith's decisions were ignored. There is much to learn from Sparks's "existential" reconstruction of these contexts. Nevertheless, his conclusions are not always compelling since, in some cases at least, other explanations are possible because much remains unknown. One has to be impressed, however, with Sparks's in-depth understanding of Kierkegaard as well his perspective on the Heiko A. Oberman/Richard Marius disputes regarding Martin Luther.

Sparks is less informed regarding Disciples' background. He draws on secondary sources, mostly Leroy Garrett and Richard Hughes. Sparks has an exceptional command of the minutes of the Baptist associations but not of Disciples' journals. He is aware that Disciples have few association minutes in the early years and that their primary materials are to be located in the numerous journals, but he does not capitalize on these resources.

Sparks is neither a professional theologian nor historian but a preacher and a laboratory technician. Regardless, he has read widely and perhaps overcompensates by interlacing his remarks with insights and quotes drawn from all sorts of sources--William Shakespeare, William Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, Edgar Lee Masters, Noam Chomsky, Saul Bellow, Albert Camus, Herman Melville, Gilgamesh, Peter Berger, Marcus J. Borg, N. T. Wright, and William Sloane Coffin. At first I was put off by Sparks's style. It is often complicated, and sometimes turgid and oblique. It stuck me as some sort of combination of the styles of Kiekegaard and Faulkner, with segments as loquacious as Thomas Wolfe. But once I grew accustomed to the mode, despite the mandated slower reading pace, I became aware that a superior if not always disciplined mind was at work. All scholars interested in Raccoon John Smith and especially the Baptists of Kentucky are indebted to Sparks because of his immersion into the primary Baptist sources.

THOMAS H. OLBRICHT

Pepperdine University