The
Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.
By MARK A. NOLL. Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994. ix + 274pp.
[Reviewed in The New Oxford Review (April 1995), 27-28.]
“The
scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical
mind.” So says Wheaton historian
and first-rate evangelical mind, Mark Noll, in this well-documented and
eminently readable study of the decline of American evangelical thought.
Unsparing in his indictment of current evangelicalism yet deeply engaged
with its fate, Noll’s cri de coeur is both an exasperated diagnostic
and desperate call for reform.
According to Noll, evangelical
Protestants comprise the largest single group of religious Americans.
They enjoy increasing wealth, status, political influence, and
educational achievement. They claim a history rich in precedents of intellectual
achievement--Luther, Calvin, Milton, Bunyan, Jonathan Edwards.
Yet, despite their numbers and considerable potential, they contribute
little to first-order public discourse. Despite
their many colleges, seminaries, and publishing houses, they neither sponsor a
single research university, nor support a single periodical devoted to in-depth
interaction with modern culture.
How is this possible? Noll explains how many of the features responsible for the
earlier success of evangelicalism in America are the very features responsible
for its current weakness. He shows
how evangelicalism successfully aligned itself with national ideals through the
individualism and populism of its Great Awakenings, and through its embrace of
the intuitivist “common sense” outlook of the Scottish Enlightenment
(Hutcheson, Reid, Adam Smith). He
shows how evangelicals lost the universities in the secular, post-Civil War
climate, and how fundamentalists at the start of this century preserved basic
elements of the faith only at the cost of embracing a disastrous and
anti-intellectual obsession with dispensational millenarianism, speculations
about the Antichrist, and creationist alternatives to Darwinian evolution.
The ironies of evangelicalism are well
illustrated in what Noll calls the “conundrum” of Jonathan Edwards.
On the one hand, Edwards was “the greatest evangelical mind in America
in large measure because his thought was driven by the profoundest truths of
evangelical Protestantism.” On the other hand, he promoted “as the essence of
evangelical Christianity a program that led to the eclipse of the evangelical
mind in America.” Despite the
best of intentions, the revivalist program fostered a populist, charismatic
style of leadership that undercut the traditional authority of churches and
planted the seeds of anti-historical individualism and immediatism that would
help undermine the evangelical mind.
No less illuminating is Noll’s
symbolic comparison of Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891) with
William Jennings Bryan’s famous 1896 speech before the Democratic National
Convention in Chicago. Both
appealed to religion and addressed social concerns, but beyond this the
differences are telling. Leo’s
document was an encyclical; Bryan’s a speech--essentially an evangelical
exposition of political thought. Leo
assigned the Church a critical role in meeting the social crisis; Bryan appealed
to individuals. Leo’s was an
authoritative pronouncement; Bryan’s an exercise in persuasion.
Leo drew on historical authorities, like Aquinas; Bryan drew on the
emotive appeal of the mythic American past.
One finds in Bryan the an-ecclesiastical moralism, emotivism, populism
and activism that pervade the political discourse of evangelicals today.
Significantly, Noll argues that the “evangelical intellectual renaissance” touted by some in recent decades is more apparent than real. Any renewal of evangelical thought that has occurred “is mostly a matter of evangelicals’ overcoming the encumbrances of the evangelical heritage and finding themselves in a position to exploit patterns of thought offered by other Christian traditions,” he says, such as the Dutch Reformed and Catholic. Evangelicals have had to learn that much of what is distinctive about American evangelicalism is not essential to Christianity, and vice versa. “At this stage in our existence, evangelicals do not have a lot to offer in intellectual terms as such. We have frittered away a century or more, and we have much catching up to do. We need a lot of help, which may come from other Christian traditions . . . where continuous intellectual activity has been undertaken as a spiritual discipline.”
Philip Blosser
Lenoir-Rhyne College
Hickory, North Carolina
Copyright © 1995 New Oxford Review. All rights reserved.
Used with permission. December 20, 2002