Peter Steinfels, in the NYT (2-12-05):

Today is the birthday of a man thought by many to be the nation's greatest president. It is also the birthday of a man whom many believe to be if not the nation's greatest theologian, at least to come close. That is no coincidence, because they are the same man.

Abraham Lincoln seems an unlikely candidate for the Theological Hall of Fame. He belonged to no church. He had read little theology. The exact nature of his religious beliefs remains a matter for debate.

Lincoln's standing as a theological thinker rests, above all, on his Second Inaugural Address. Although its closing lines about binding up the nation's wounds ''with malice toward none, with charity for all'' are so familiar and so susceptible to a sentimental reading that the extraordinary force of the whole speech can be missed, a sizable and thoughtful literature has grown up around this address.

Mark Noll, an outstanding historian of American religion, has done something further. In '' America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln'' (Oxford University Press, 2002) he compares Lincoln with the acknowledged theological minds of that era.

''None of America's respected religious leaders,'' Professor Noll wrote, ''mustered the theological power so economically expressed in Lincoln's Second Inaugural. None probed so profoundly the ways of God or the response of humans to the divine constitution of the world. None penetrated as deeply into the nature of providence. And none described the fate of humanity before God with the humility or the sagacity of the president.''

Consider that famous peroration. Who would be for malice or against charity? But as Professor Noll points out, the operative words here are ''toward none'' and ''for all.'' That included the still undefeated enemy as well as Union soldiers and innocent victims. This, at a time when Henry Ward Beecher (''the Billy Graham of his era,'' Professor Noll calls him) was preaching a vision of Southern leaders -- ''these guiltiest and most remorseless traitors,'' the evildoers who had ''drenched a continent in needless blood''-- cast down by God into ''endless retribution.''

''Almost alone among his contemporaries,'' Professor Noll explained, ''Lincoln did not presumptuously assume that the moral high ground belonged to only his side. By questioning the righteousness of the North and by failing to denounce the South in absolute terms, he joined a very small minority in the spring and summer of 1865. If Lincoln's magnanimity and his moral evenhandedness were generally religious, his view of providence was distinctly theological. More than any other feature of this address, Lincoln's conception of God's rule over the world set him apart from the recognized theologians of his day.''...