Mark A. Noll

THE SCANDAL OF THE EVANGELICAL MIND

An 1993 open letter to Mark Noll regarding the Wheaton College history professor's pre-publication article, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, which appeared in the Oct '93 edition of Christianity Today. Included is Mark Noll's response.

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AN OPEN LETTER TO DR. MARK A. NOLL

A 1995 follow-up letter to the Professor Noll following the release of his book by the same name (Eerdmans/IVP/1994). This presentation includes discussion of Pauline dispensationalism and short bios on many of the original Plymouth Brethren: John Nelson Darby, William Kelly, C. H. Mackintosh, C. A. Coates, G. V. Wigram, J. B. Stoney, J. G. Bellett, H. F. Witherby, F. W. Grant, F. G. Patterson, and F. G. Burkitt.

Online Version Available Here

THE EVANGELICAL MIND TODAY

In the October 2004 edition of FIRST THINGS*, Dr. Noll reflects on changes which have occurred in the evangelical community since the publication of his earlier book. He writes:

Ten years after the publication of The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, I remain largely unrepentant about the book's historical arguments, its assessment of evangelical strengths and weaknesses, and its indictment of evangelical intellectual efforts, though I have changed my mind on a few matters. Some readers have rightly pointed out that what I described as a singularly evangelical problem is certainly related to the general intellectual difficulties of an advertisement-driven, image-preoccupied, television-saturated, frenetically hustling consumer society, and that the reason evangelicals suffer from intellectual weakness is that American culture as a whole suffers from intellectual weakness. Another helpful criticism is that the book lumps together fundamentalists, Pentecostals, and holiness advocates as culprits in the stagnation of evangelical thinking and that it ignores certain mitigating circumstances and worthy exceptions that one could cite from each of these sub-traditions. Yet on the whole, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind still seems to me correct in its descriptions and evaluations.

The remainder of the article is largely a laudation to various cooperative intellectual efforts between Catholics and Evangelicals. Why this doctor of history has failed to finger a bankrupt public educational system as the main source of America's intellectual and cultural problems is beyond me. Reformed minds like A. A. Hodge (Popular Lectures on Theological Themes), Gordon H. Clark (A Christian Philosophy of Education), & Rousas J. Rushdoony (The Messianic Character of American Education) were extremely vocal about the adverse effects government-funded education would have upon American society.

If Dr. Noll feels that academic Catholics are today's paradigm of healthy intellectualism, there may be a simple explanation. In 1946, Dr. Gordon Clark wrote:

Originally the pubic schools, while not supposed to favor one Christian denomination above another, were not intended to attack Christianity. The idea was that they should be neutral. And because the majority of Protestants believed the promises of the schoolmen that they would not attack religion, the Protestants did not found primary schools as the Romanists did. Now it is clear that the Romanists adopted the wiser course of action because the promises of the schoolmen were soon to be broken.
The public school makes no pretense of being neutral in religious matters, and when a parent here or there protests, he is promptly ridiculed and squelched. The notion of religious liberty, or even the toleration of Christianity, that is, the original claim to neutrality, is not a part of the schoolmen's mental equipment.

Readers should not be surprised to hear that Mark Noll is leaving Wheaton College and replacing George Marsden at Notre Dame University! Read this LINK.

Readers will also be interested in Christian Smith's fine book: THE SECULAR REVOLUTION, Power, Interests, and Conflict in the secularization of American Public Life, University of California Press, 2003. Smith and company's penetrating analyses further calls into question the supposed intellectual acumen of Dr. Mark Noll and his 1994 thesis. From the rear jacket:

The secularization of American public life [together with a general decline in literacy] has long been considered an inevitable and natural outcome of modernization. Christian Smith and his team of contributors reject this view, boldly arguing that the declining authority of religion beginning around 1870 was not the byproduct of modernization, but rather the intentional achievement of cultural and intellectual elites seeking to gain control of social institutions and increase their own culture authority.

Christian Smith is Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the coauthor of Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (2001, with Michael O. Emerson) and the author of Christian America? What Evangelicals Really Want (California, 2000) and American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving (1998).

*FIRST THINGS is published by The Institute on Religion and Public Life, an interreligious, nonpartisan research and education institute whose purpose is to advance a religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society. The magazine's founder and Editor-in-Chief is Richard John Neuhaus is a former Lutheran pastor who "converted" to Catholicism and became a Romans Catholic priest. By-in-large, the magazine caters to Catholic and Evangelical intellectuals who have been in dialogue over the past several decades.

MJStanford

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(Materials by Miles J. Stanford are republished here under exclusive permission from the author.)