The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.

When poll-takers ask a hundred typical Americans to describe themselves religiously, one-fourth of them say they are Catholic. One-fourth define themselves as "[Mainstream] Protestant," or they get classified as such when they identify their denominations. A third fourth of them represent a complex mix: African-American Protestant, Mormon, Muslim, Orthodox, Jewish, "Other," or "non." That leaves the fourth fourth, which is usually code-named "Evangelical." This one includes the born-again evangelicals, fundamentalists, pentecostals, Southern Baptists, Missouri Lutherans, Christian Reformed, and other evangelism-minded conservatives.

This fourth cohort of fellow-citizens and believers has been surprisingly active politically and evangelistically and has made headlines for a quarter-century. They "work their cohort," as a sociologist might say, demonstrating energies and efficiency unmatched by most other religionists. For all the stir they create, it is still safe to surmise that Catholics of theological bent know less about these evangelicals as an intellectual community than they do about mainstream Protestants, Jews, or their fellow Catholics. Those who would now like to become acquainted with their neighbors and potential conversation partners will find no better book to serve as a guide than The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, by Mark Noll of Wheaton College, who is also the best personal guide to the subject that I know.

Certainly Catholics and others are aware of this multimillion-member cluster of fellow Christians in America. Then why do most of them know so little about the mind, the intellect, the brainwork of such a huge congregation? Though he is their sympathetic critic, Noll has a blunt answer: "We," as Noll, an insider, calls his main readers, have not valued the mind, theology, reflection, the engagement with secular thought. To be more brusque, Noll adds: "The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind."

Evangelicalism in Noll's account has a generous heart and soul. Its hands do good works. But it has lost the kind of competence and interest in scholarship its forebears brought to their faith. And yes, there were forebears. Noll and his company claim as spiritual ancestors all sorts of figures, beginning with the New Testament lovers of the mind like Paul. More surprisingly in his gallery are shapers of early Christianity like Augustine and even medieval Catholics like Thomas Aquinas. Of course, the sixteenth-century-reformers, especially Calvin, are evangelical progenitors. In the immediate family Noll claims the great premodernist theologians of the Puritan tradition, supremely New England's Jonathan Edwards. Edwards conjoined the concerns of heart and mind better than any other American. Latter-day evangelicalism's mindlessness gets to be described as a fall from Edwards and his lineage.

If there was a fall, there had to have been a rise, a crest. Alongside Edwards, Noll praises the pietists, revivalists, and some Christian thinkers of the eighteenth century. He affirms the basics of their move to embrace a version of the Enlightenment, to celebrate reason of a certain sort. In fact, there was an Evangelical Enlightenment. It featured the Scottish Common Sense Realism cherished by some of the American founders. Noll has expounded that philosophical school elsewhere and presents a condensation of that exposition here. It must represent terra incognita to many Catholics and most others if they are not historians of philosophy. This Enlightenment lived on in the minds of Princetonians like John Witherspoon in Revolutionary War years, and among Princeton-based and other theologians for a century-and-a-half more. This school of thought impelled evangelicals to be rationalist, apologetic, scientific because fact-obsessed, and thus, they thought, able to commend themselves to the increasingly secular community. This community found its home in the emergent universities whose scholars, in the age of Darwin, had no reason to measure themselves by evangelical norms.

The Evangelical Enlightenment was not all misconceived; indeed, within limits, Noll can praise its expounders for their alertness and audacity. Its favored philosophy taught people to trust their senses; to rely on facts; to assume that one should and could deal "objectively" with the mysteries of faith. Their embrace of it was fateful. Most secular intellectuals abandoned Common Sense Realism and ever after left the Protestant apologists stranded. The evangelical intellectuals of this tradition built elaborate edifices but they stood on a metaphysically condemned site. Some of these thinkers, it is true, made efforts to adapt to mild evolutionary thought so long as it was pointedly theistic. However, the threat of evolution seen as natural selection became so violent that evangelical militants found it necessary to fight against it.

Holding their ground against enemies such as Darwinism, the biblical criticism being imported from Germany to the fashionable seminaries, and the modernist moves by progressive theologians on the left in their own denomination, the evangelicals mingled grief over their loss, resentment over the seizures of their bastions, and fear of threats to faith, with ambition, in efforts to state their case. Unfortunately, in Noll's reading, this mixture soon led to the invention of hardline and reactive evangelicalism. Thus was born the fundamentalist movement in the 1920s. Under fundamentalism most evangelicals turned at once rigid, defensive, and belligerent as they fought for control of their denominations (especially Presbyterian and Baptist), seminaries, missionary agencies, and whatever else Protestants employed as instruments of church life.

Fundamentalism was not by definition anti-intellectual, but, in Noll's reading, it became mindless. Inevitably, evangelicalism experienced an internal schism even as it took part in creating a split within Protestantism as a whole. Name-calling and the formation of parties led to a house divided. By 1941 and 1942 fundamentalists and evangelicals, who were usually lumped together by nonfundamentalists, including Catholics, formed separate organizations and went separate ways. Billy Graham and his kind became the popular leaders of the evangelicals. But while he was friendly with intellectuals, his kind of revivalism did not inspire sufficient intellectual endeavor. For all the competence and good will of Graham and his kind, evangelicalism in either of its moderate or right-wing expressions was left with too little mind.

Those who stand at some distance from evangelical quarrels may wonder why Noll, and now I, are being commended--this review is a commendment!--to work their way through the labyrinth of Common Sense thought, arcane Protestant movements, and fundamentalist formulas. What interest other than antiquarianism is addressed and who but historians of thought, especially of inferior thought, might care? Noll, talking to his "us" and not the rest of us, spends little time answering that question. But whoever knows something of the power of evangelicalism and fundamentalism in today's religious and national economy will come to understand it better than before. On these pages Noll describes the formal framework out of which developed conservative Protestant views of the sort now represented in debates over abortion, human sexuality, earthly politics, and other issues that concern us all.

Noll, a scholar of moderate temper, chooses immoderate language to make his points. The word "scandal" appears seven times on the Contents page; it means "offensive." Noll sees evangelical mindlessness as offensive to God, the church catholic, the intellectual community, and the thoughtful evangelical minority. He names fundamentalism an "intellectual disaster" in another chapter heading. Noll offers illustrations for these charges, also at chapter length. He uses examples from politics, evangelical defenses of the United States as a fortress and a kind of lost kingdom of God to be recovered, and from science (as in "creationism versus evolution").

For all the attacks Noll makes, this is a positive book. In evangelical terms, it is a call for mindless sinners to repent, to recover the mind for God and their movement. They are to delight in the world which God will take action to end, and from which Christ saves sinners, but also the cosmos which God created good and in which God is incarnate in Christ. Noll is a more incarnational thinker than most evangelical leaders have been. He uses his view of God's love of the earth and involvement in its travail and as it moves toward its destiny to inspire fellow evangelicals. They are to contemplate the wonders of creation, science, human invention, politics, the academy, letters, arts, and more.

An evangelical renaissance of sorts is underway, nowhere more visibly than in the community of religious historians to which Noll belongs and which he as much as anyone may very well lead. He does not brag about the achievements of these historians. However, one can deduce something about their strong situation and achievement in this area from his footnote references. Let me as a bystander, a sometime participant-observer, say it: women and men in evangelicalism are, by a dozen or a score, in the front ranks of achievement in the writing of history. But such recovery among other disciplines is more spotty. In literature, one sees evangelical scholarship devoted to apologist litterateurs like C.S. Lewis. Popular evangelical taste in letters, however, runs to popapocalypticism in the appalling novels of Frank Peretti, for whom Noll manifestly has little sympathy. Evangelicals as Christian exemplars, Noll notes, are still at the far margins in scientific inquiry and formulation. They have, however, regained ground and become respectable voices in philosophy, thanks to leadership of people like Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff.

"By 'the mind' or 'the life of the mind,'" writes Noll, "I am not thinking primarily of theology as such." But if evangelicalism is to be taken with real seriousness, it must be ready to be appraised by others who will examine its systematic theological claims. While there is much enterprise, Noll sees its results to be unappreciated by evangelicals. It seldom is taken with sufficient seriousness by sometimes prejudiced but often judicious assessors in the rest of Christianity. He observes that evangelical theologians got and get enlargements of their company thanks to crossovers from the mainstream, and from some immigrant infusions like the Lutherans and Hollanders (more of the latter than the former). The larger community also listens to some transatlantic voices, and on occasion heeds the still underrepresented evangelical pioneers in major research universities. But Noll's cast of theological characters--William Abraham, Donald Bloesch, Gabriel Fackre, Richard Mouw, Thomas Oden, J.I. Packer, Clark Pinnock, Ronald Sider, David Wells, and William Willimon--or their predecessors like Carl Henry, Edward John Carnell, and the like, are not always reckoned with as much as they or Noll might wish. He is clearly not satisfied overall with the achievement of those whose names he clusters.

What is one to say of all this? First, when Noll speaks of the mindlessness and theological weakness of evangelicalism, the fair-minded ecumenical Christian will ask: mindless compared to what? This is not a third-of-a-century in which many Catholics, mainstream Protestants, or Jews in systematic theology are churchhold names. Few have manifest impact in their secular surrounds, either. These years there is good enterprise in some areas, such as in theology when it is related to medical ethics. But, for all the numbers of scholars within the discipline and for all the enterprise, there remain great gulfs between unreckoned-with theologians and the clergy or laity on one hand and, on the other, between these unrecognized theologians and the larger academic community.

Could there have been or could there be a pandemic "fall" or a "scandal" also in nonevangelical Christian circles? one must ask. Are energies elsewhere, as they are in evangelicalism, going into spiritual, pious, activist, relational, and therapeutic directions, all of them valid but few of them fully open to the energies of those who would "love the Lord with their minds"? Noll's book can provide a template or model for those who would deal with malaise or crisis in Catholic and in other Protestant theology or in the larger intellectual enterprise.

Second, one might henceforth make more sense of the scandal of mindlessness on the part of many secular academics, who employ stereotypes as they reject all other Christian theology as well as the evangelical versions. It could be that evangelicalism has unwittingly or instinctively been responding to a change, even a crisis, in secular thought. Over against the Evangelical Enlightened ones who stayed too long with their Common Sense Realist/Enlightenment partnership, evangelicals, without always knowing it, now might be in the vanguard of those who have spotted that there is a crisis in the Enlightenment project itself, wavering in support of the rationale off which so many in the academy still live today.

Those who are called postmodernists regularly point to this crisis in the understandings of reason, or to the widespread rejection of secular rational approaches and syntheses. As I read Noll it occurred to me that the evangelicals were among the first to realize the challenge to some thought patterns on which the West has long relied. But few have known what to do with their discoveries.

Third, maybe the best evangelical thinkers have known what to do and have tried to say it, but then got little hearing for another reason that Noll spends little time expounding: because of prejudice against evangelical thought. Several factors were at play. No doubt thanks to evangelicalism's rejection of all science that did not match their Evangelical Enlightenment standards; also, thanks to its roughshod cultural expression in opposition to evolution; and its habit of negating nonevangelical thought, even of Catholic and Protestant scholars, evangelicalism came to be stigmatized. The ostracism of evangelicalism may often have been warranted. But are evangelicals now the only challengers to secular rational hegemonies? Do not Catholics and mainstream Protestant thinkers also believe in and articulate witness to God as creator, rescuer, the incarnate one, who is active in the world? Why are evangelicals singled out for sneers or cold shoulders by the rest of the public, especially the elites? Has the academy at large taken a look at what evangelicals like Noll are beginning to offer? Noll is too even-tempered to show resentment; he is more interested in helping evangelicals find something to say and a way to say it, if a platform appears to give them a hearing.

Is there something innate about or endemic to the very intention of evangelicalism that makes the "life of the mind" enterprise even more rare and difficult there than in Catholicism and in much other Protestantism? One has to take such a question seriously. Paul Tillich once divided Christian emphases into, on the one hand, devotion to "Catholic substance" as part of a dialectic and "the Protestant principle of prophetic protest" on the other. Catholics, it was often thought, had better be good at the substantive side of the Catholic vision, and evangelicals should be the most prophetic of Protestants. But their posture handicaps them. It is hard to begin with the mixture of an oppositional stance to a fallen world, suspicion of human hubris, skepticism about the mind and will when they set out to justify themselves before God, and then to move on to the positive embrace of the world and its physical and mental substance. That may be one reason so many evangelicals gave up on the effort entirely.

Noll, however, wants to keep a dialectic, without using its terms. In H. R. Niebuhr's language, the two spheres of action can be expressed under several motifs. One of these for many evangelicals is the "Christ against culture" theme that prophets favor. Another set of evangelicals "fall" into the "Christ of culture" style when they let their guard down and idolize parts of culture, such as the symbols of American nationalism or worldly success. Evangelicalism's natural home, in any case, is with the "Christ transforming culture" theme that comes naturally to Calvinists. But Niebuhr himself also defined a dialectical position, "Christ and culture in paradox," which he associated, for example, with Luther.

"We" Lutherans have overheard Mark Noll praising the Lutheran potential for so long that we suspect him of pro-Lutheran sympathies and identifications. The dialectic that courses through this book gives reason for us to enjoy that suspicion. He is also friendly to the Catholic "life of the mind" enterprises when they combine affirmation of God's created world with prophecy against its fallen manifestations. Wouldn't it be nice if Noll would next take as searching a look at us as he does at evangelicalism?

Not necessarily, or not simply. Noll might find almost as much "scandal" here on this greener side of the fence as he does in his parched evangelical homeland. One hopes he might with equal energy here as there promote his "renaissance." Even to call for such a rousing, to diagnose reasons for its necessity, and then to describe its traces and tracks would represent first steps toward such a renaissance, in a time and place when and where, I am sure Noll would judge, it is so direly needed.