Someone has quipped that an evangelical can be defined as someone who says to a liberal, “I’ll call you a Christian if you’ll call me a scholar.” Though Wheaton College historian Mark Noll knows all the one- liners about evangelicals, this one does not make his book. Evangelicals’ anti-intellectualism is no laughing matter. “The scandal of the evangelical mind,” he laments, “is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” Since the movement’s birth in the transatlantic revivals of the early eighteenth century, it has brought millions to deep and lasting Christian faith. Even today, polls tell us, a solid majority of the folk who regularly attend and participate in the life of local churches are evangelical in belief and behavior. But in the process, Noll argues, they have paid a terrible price, for they have “abandoned the universities, the arts, and other realms of ‘high’ culture.”

By “mind” Noll does not mean theology or biblical studies per se, where, all things considered, evangelicals have done quite well. His target, rather, is evangelicals’ failure seriously to confront the “whole spectrum of modern learning, including economics and political science, literary criticism and imaginative writing, historical inquiry and philosophical studies, linguistics and the history of science, social theory and the arts.”

The problem, in short, is evangelicals’ appalling parochialism, their unwillingness to break out of the vast but all-too-comfortable ghetto of evangelical churches and colleges and publishing networks and engage an intellectual world long ago captured by Marx and Darwin and Freud.

Noll’s work is a jeremiad, profound in implication but simple in form. The tragedy of evangelicals’ poor scholarship, he argues, is that it grew from negligence, and the roots of that negligence go way back. In his view evangelical thought is best understood as a tissue of unexamined assumptions arising from early nineteenth century American values. Those values included revivalism, separation of church and state, political republicanism, social democracy, economic free enterprise, philosophical realism, and patriotic nationalism. Evangelical thinking suffered additional damage from the “disaster of fundamentalism.” In its holiness/pentecostal form, fundamentalism encouraged morbid inwardness; in its dispensationalist form, it fostered wooden literalism and an unhealthy preoccupation with predicting the future.



Hard words, to be sure, but they are the words of a “wounded lover,” as Noll calls himself, the words of an evangelical insider calling other insiders to humility in the face of a great heritage squandered. Though the book is concisely and elegantly written, it reflects awesome erudition. The footnotes stand out as a treasure in themselves, not stacked up like index cards in a shoebox but judiciously brought forth as needed. Still more importantly, Noll shows, very much as H. Richard Niebuhr did in The Kingdom of God in America , how to be passionately committed to a cause without sacrificing fairness (laying one’s own assumptions out on the table) or publicness (remembering that all bits of evidence and lines of argument must be open to the scrutiny of insiders and outsiders alike).




However we answer these questions, the largest one remains: Do resources for renewal lie within the evangelical tradition? Yes, Noll believes, but they can be salvaged only with strenuous effort. Noll thus urges evangelicals to historicize themselves, to see how their favored modes of reaction are conditioned by time and place. He calls them to develop a sense of irony, to see, in words historian Peter Brown used in a different context, that the first and final enemy of the Christian intellectual is the “patina of the obvious.” It was said of Jonathan Edwards that he “smelt of the lamp”; Noll reminds Edwards’ latter day heirs that there is no substitute for long grueling hours in the library, the study, the laboratory. And in an age obsessed with narrative, when everyone seems to think that his own story is as valid as anyone else’s, Noll effectively says No, there really is a normative conversation out there, a conversation defined by the reality-shaping institutions of our society, and it is high time for evangelicals to enter into it.

Thus this sermon, like all true jeremiads, ends on a note of hope. Noll urges these reforms upon evangelicals, not because they will afford them more power and prestige, but solely for the glory of God. “The search for a Christian mind is not, in the end,” he tells us, “a search for mind but a search for God.” Evangelicals purport to speak biblical truth, but in fact sold their soul to American culture long ago. The lips are Esau’s but the voice is Jacob’s. So for Noll evangelicals must become bilingual. They must continue to address the world with the life- giving words of faith that they know so well. At the same time, they must learn to translate those words into the language of the public academic sphere.

The great and pleasant irony of this book is that as long as the evangelical subculture is able to turn out a mind as learned and as Christian as Mark Noll’s, its future promises to be a lot brighter than he supposes.


Keith Pavlischek

Largely because Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind is a crie de coeur, and indeed “an epistle from a wounded lover,” I suspect it is more likely to get a hearing among evangelicals than David Wells’ more combative No Place for Truth: Or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology and his more recent God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams . But I think we would do well to read these evangelical authors together, for their diagnosis of the sorry state of evangelical scholarship-or, more accurately, their analysis of why American evangelicals have such a hard time nurturing the habits of mind required to produce quality scholarship-complement each other.

How bad do Noll and Wells think things are? After dismissing evidence for a resurgence in Christian scholarship as “accidents of personal history,” Noll observes that even when the evangelical heritage is not actually a deterrent to “God-honoring thought,” one finds little encouragement for the life of the mind in evangelical Protestantism. The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is no evangelical mind. Wells, a professor of Systematic Theology at Gordon-Conwell, a major evangelical seminary, is no less pessimistic. He reports that in recent years he has watched “with growing disbelief as the evangelical church has cheerfully plunged into astounding theological illiteracy,” a phenomenon his recent books have tried to explain.


Noll admits that fundamentalism preserved essential aspects of orthodox Christianity, but argues that the lingering effects of certain “theological innovations” central to the fundamentalist movement, particularly dispensationalism, Pentecostalism, and holiness spirituality, continue to wreak havoc on the evangelical community. His chapter on the “The Intellectual Disaster of Fundamentalism” can be summed up by his quotation from Nathan Hatch:

Let me suggest somewhat whimsically that the heritage of fundamentalism was to Christian learning for evangelicals like Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution [was] for the Chinese. Both divorced a generation from mainline academia, thus making reintegration [into larger worlds of learning] a difficult, if not bewildering task.

Toward the end of this chapter Noll anticipates a plausible objection to his story: “Surely we are flogging a dead horse by being so preoccupied with beliefs and practices from the early twentieth century that must now exert only a residual effect on the evangelical community.” While Noll admits, for instance, that “the specific theological propositions of dispensationalism probably do not have quite the importance across the evangelical spectrum that they once did,” he insists that “fundamentalist intellectual habits . . . have been more resilient than fundamentalism itself.” It is not so much the specific tenets of dispensational, holiness, and Pentecostal theologies that are at issue for a more general consideration of the intellect, but rather “the patterns of thinking encouraged by these theologies.”

In sum, Noll thinks fundamentalism was such a complete intellectual disaster that contemporary evangelicals’ contribution to the life of the mind will remain scandalous until they go beyond it. What sporadic intellectual activity evangelicals do display points to their only intellectual hope:





For contemporary Evangelicals, “to believe that God can work dramatically within the narrow fissure of internal experience” is sufficient.

They have lost interest . . . in what the doctrines of creation, common grace, and providence once meant for Christian believers, and even in those doctrines that articulate Christ’s death, such as justification, redemption, propitiation, and reconciliation.

I don’t know whether Noll would take issue with all this, but Wells’ criticism is distinct from Noll’s because he understands this evangelical “turn inward” toward the self to be of more recent origin, distinguishable from fundamentalism in important respects.

This turn toward the self is also a strategic retreat from the world, says Wells, no less than that of the fundamentalists of the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s. At least then fundamentalists knew that they were “cognitive aliens within the culture” and thus “used doctrine to define their own cultural boundaries. Doctrine served to seal in believers and seal out unbelievers. As a result, their commitment to the formal and material principles of Protestantism was unyielding.” But in one crucial respect contemporary evangelicals are even worse off than the fundamentalists. The new turn inward to the “self”


”Evangelicals, no less than liberals before them whom they have berated,” declares Wells, “have now abandoned doctrine in favor of ‘life,’” a “life” defined by inward “experience” emptied of cognitive content.



Who’s right? I suspect they both are. A large part of evangelical Protestantism continues to be burdened by the legacy of fundamentalism. And a large part has been given over to the worst aspects of a uniquely modern brand of subjectivistic pietism that makes cognitive engagement irrelevant and a recovery of a vibrant Protestant orthodoxy next to impossible. This should not be surprising given that “evangelical Protestantism” is such a wide and diverse phenomenon in the first place. But if this is indeed the case, then the scandal of the evangelical mind is greater than either Wells or Noll suggests individually. And that’s pretty scandalous.


J. Daryl Charles

In the early to mid 1970s, during the aftermath of the “Jesus Movement,” a popular evangelical apologist was fond of provoking his audience: “If Jesus is the answer, what is the question?” Over two decades later, though the cultural climate has changed, that provocation remains every bit as relevant. Indeed, what questions should evangelicals be asking?

A similar concern surfaced in a recent lunch discussion among friends. Someone probed further. “Where are all the evangelical thinkers?” Disturbed at the paucity of names that came to mind, the group was left to concede that, more often than not, influential Catholic thinkers-whether philosophers, ethicists, or social critics-had played a greater role in stimulating each person’s intellectual development.

Protestant evangelicals would do well to ponder those unsettling questions. What is the nature of the question we should be asking in light of the Church’s cultural mandate? And where are the evangelical thinkers of our day? It is such questions that constitute the burden of Mark Noll’s book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind .


To illustrate, many of the Coalition faculty earn their doctorates at elite universities where little regard for faith, intellectual breadth, and Christian worldview is to be found. Consequently, one of the hallmarks of Coalition faculty members, upon “returning” to the Christian college environment to teach, is not the aspiration to cultivate intellectual excellence for the glory of God so much as a deathly fear of being labelled “fundamentalist.” This, however, is not the antidote for the sort of “anti-intellectualism” that Prof. Noll deftly critiques.

What is often lacking in the scandal called the “evangelical mind” (something of an oxymoron to some) is the development of biblical worldview thinking, i.e., thinking and learning holistically. It will not suffice merely to “integrate faith and learning,” as the catalogue of virtually every Christian liberal arts college states. Such “integration” in and of itself demonstrates the false dichotomy that already exists in evangelical thinking, not only among academics but among most lay people as well. If all things-things epistemological and metaphysical, things material and physical-indeed cohere in Christ, then “integration,” a well-intended evangelical response to the fragmentation of knowledge that characterizes the modern university, should give way to the notion of epistemological unity or uniformity. In contrast to “integration,” which carries the connotation of mixing, blending, or kneading, “uniformity” would give evidence that evangelicals have begun to perceive the reality of theology as “the queen of the sciences,” as John Henry Newman noted 140 years ago. Newman, it should be remembered, was chiding Protestant educational institutions for their wholesale abandonment of theological foundations and consequent disciplinary fragmentation.

In addition to remedying evangelical fragmentation, such unified thinking would also force evangelicals to draw the inseparable link between orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Scandal invites us, and rightly so, to “think more Christianly,” but what does this entail? While it encourages serious evangelical reflection on matters philosophical, scientific, and political, as Prof. Noll points out, it also bridges the common gap between belief and behavior, doctrine and ethics-an omission in the book that deserves some comment. It matters little that evangelicals develop the “life of the mind” when the ethical life leaves much to be desired. Evidence of this “ethical” scandal, even among evangelical academics, is omnipresent.

For example, a renowned professor of Christian ethics at an elite midwestern university is caught in sexual impropriety involving students. Although his denomination censures him, he goes on teaching Christian ethics without missing a stride. A noted evangelical thinker and critic of American evangelical subculture separates from his wife, falling prey to the very tendency he has so eloquently decried over the years. A highly respected evangelical teacher divorces his wife of over three decades on the grounds of incompatibility, and his “ministry” continues unabated. An evangelical professor of sociology, worked up to a near froth over what he views as intractable evangelical “homophobia,” remains blissfully unable to comprehend the Church’s historical teaching on human sexuality. A robust intellect, unharnessed by an equally robust Christian ethos, can only produce a different (though equally odious) strain of the “evangelical scandal.”

The utter necessity and extraordinary merits of Prof. Noll’s book notwithstanding, Scandal contains, from a Protestant evangelical standpoint, one conspicuous omission. The one evangelical thinker over the last thirty years who, perhaps ahead of his time, described the evangelical “disaster” in forthright and unequivocal terms goes essentially unnoticed by the author. One sentence and one brief footnote on p. 223 are deemed sufficient to sum up the cumulative influence of Francis Schaeffer, who founded L’Abri Fellowship in 1955, emphasized the importance of “substantial Christianity,” and, along the way, managed to write over thirty books on Christian worldview, the church, and culture. Despite occasional criticisms of methodological unsophistication, the very minimum that deserves to be said is that this was an evangelical thinker who at least asked the right question: How shall we then live? “The evangelist and popular apologist Francis Schaeffer,” notes Prof. Noll in passing, “also urged . . . more careful attention to the theological meaning of general cultural developments.” One wishes that Prof. Noll, an historian, had resisted the rather breathtaking use of understatement at this point. After all, it was Schaeffer who kept probing the scandal of the “evangelical mind” by raising the question that largely fell on deaf ears: “If Jesus is the answer, then what is the question?”


Robert Wuthnow




2. There is no Christian university. Maybe not. Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, the Southern Baptist Convention’s recent efforts to rein in its system of colleges and universities, or rapidly expanding graduate programs and professional schools at Wheaton College, Calvin, Gordon, and elsewhere do not fit Noll’s criteria of a great university. But what if evangelicals had a university comparable, say, to Notre Dame or Brandeis? They would probably feel better, but I doubt that history would look more favorably on them. The very logic of the modern university is to bring diverse intellectual perspectives together. We have no University of Feminism, yet feminism is part of every university. Biology, Marxism, Judaism, and Christianity are all approached better at the graduate level within an integrated setting than in isolated, marginalized settings.










Articles by Grant Wacker, Keith Pavlischek, J. Daryl Charles, Robert Wuthnow