The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind - revisited after 15 years

Christopher Gilbert October 03, 2009

In 1994, Historian Mark Noll published a book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, that was a cry from the gut. A scholar, and an evangelical, he was despairing at the contemporary intellectual vacuum that had overtaken his treasured Christian tradition. At Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts on Friday October 2, a number of visiting scholars and local students, many of them evangelicals, met with professor Noll, to consider what might have changed in fifteen years.

Noll’s book dared to name an Emperor with no clothes, a form of Christianity claimed by as many as 200 million Americans, that had become anti-intellectual, populist, ideological, politically polarizing, and socially sectarian, contributing almost nothing to US culture in the 20th century. His criticism resonated with Christian intellectuals, both in the US and around the world. Yesterday, Noll, to his chagrin explained that such a large response was evidence that his despair then, like the prophet Elijah’s, was overstated. But the problem itself wasn’t, and isn’t exaggerated.

Evidence presented at the conference suggests that there is in fact a thriving Christian intelligensia throughout the US, and many of these, as professors, speak of great support from secular sympathizers within the halls of mainstream academia. I’ve noted before that even avowedly liberal media like the New York Times especially through its columnists, David Brooks, Jewish, and Nicolas Kristof, a declared liberal, and the reporting of Michael Luo, explain that intelligent Christian evangelical leadership makes a difference, notably in crisis places, New Orleans, Darfur, and many African and Asian nations beyond the efforts of governments, and other aid agencies.

My wife and I have for many years observed what we call the sleeping giant of Christian higher education where scholars have quietly devoted themselves to equip their own minds and prepare students in real world studies of the sciences and humanities, classical and modern because their evangelical churches gave them nothing else to do. It has occurred under the radar of both the wider culture and the subculture of evangelicalism. An extraordinary number of these scholars have gained doctorates at the most rigorous Universities in the world and as Noll noted yesterday, have become serious contributors to global scholarship in their specialized worlds.

The issue for us, and it rose at yesterday's conference, is how to communicate a flourishing knowledge that proceeds from a truly thoughtful biblical understanding of the world, to the broad and amorphous evangelical community of the US. It’s a community that Pew research demonstrates has 100 million people who believe the world is less than 10,000 years old. But Christian artists are taking it further – as writers, journalists, documentary film makers, painters, we consider how this knowledge might be shared with the community as a whole, a community we discover to be, ironically, even more receptive than the evangelical subculture to thoughtful Christian understandings.

See Mark Noll video interview on the future of Evangelicalism

Tags: Mark Noll , Lamp Post Media , Chris Gilbert , The Scandal Of The Evange