The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

by Mark Noll

Publisher:

Eerdmans

, 1994

Overview

In The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, Mark Noll asks why the largest group of religious Americans—who enjoy increasing wealth, status, and political influence—have contributed so little to rigorous intellectual scholarship in North America. In nourishing believers in the simple truths of the gospel, why have evangelicals failed at sustaining a serious intellectual life and abandoned the universities, the arts, and other realms of “high” culture?

Noll is probing and forthright in his analysis of the origin and progression of this situation. Noll also sets a vision for the future, searching for resources, within evangelicalism itself, to turn this situation around.

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Key Features

• Discusses the modern developments in evangelical intellectualism
• Analyzes the lack of pervasive “intellectual muscle” central to evangelicalism
• Proposes the importance of cultivating the mind

Contents

• The Scandal
  • The Contemporary Scandal
  • Why the Scandal Matters
• How the Scandal Has Come to Pass
  • The Evangelical Mind Takes Shape—Revival, Revolution, and a Cultural Synthesis
  • The Evangelical Enlightenment
  • The Intellectual Disaster of Fundamentalism
• What the Scandal Has Meant
  • Political Reflection
  • Thinking about Science
• Hope?
  • Is an Evangelical Intellectual Renaissance Underway?
  • Can the Scandal Be Scandalized?

Top Highlights

“By an evangelical ‘life of the mind’ I mean more the effort to think like a Christian—to think within a specifically Christian framework—across 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.” (Page 7)

“The much more important matter is what it means to think like a Christian about the nature and workings of the physical world, the character of human social structures like government and the economy, the meaning of the past, the nature of artistic creation, and the circumstances attending our perception of the world outside ourselves. Failure to exercise the mind for Christ in these areas has become acute in the twentieth century. That failure is the scandal of the evangelical mind.” (Page 7)

“Fundamentalism, dispensational premillennialism, the Higher Life movement, and Pentecostalism were all evangelical strategies of survival in response to the religious crises of the late nineteenth century. In different ways each preserved something essential of the Christian faith. But together they were a disaster for the life of the mind.” (Page 24)

“‘On the one hand there is the enormous growth of the Church, and on the other its almost complete lack of influence.’^{10” (Page 10)}

“Who will teach us how to reason about these matters? Who will be our guides pointing us to truth and light? If evangelicals do not take seriously the larger world of the intellect, we say, in effect, that we want our minds to be shaped by the conventions of our modern universities and the assumptions of Madison Avenue, instead of by God and the servants of God. But if we take this action by inaction, we are saying that we want our lives to be shaped by cultural forces—including intellectual forces—that contradict the heart of our religion.” (Page 34)

Product Details

• Title: The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind
• Author: Mark Noll
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Print Publication Date: 1994
• Logos Release Date: 2014
• Pages: 284
• Era: era:Contemporary
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Logos Research Edition
• Subjects: Evangelicalism › United States; Christianity › United States--Forecasting; Christianity and culture
• ISBNs: 9780802841803, 0802841805, 9780802882042, 0802882048
• Resource ID: LLS:SCNDLVNGLCLMND
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2022-09-30T02:53:30Z

About Mark Noll

Mark A. Noll (PhD, Vanderbilt University) is Francis McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Noll’s main academic interests concern the interaction of Christianity and culture in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglo-American societies. He has published articles and reviews on a wide variety of subjects involving Christianity in modern history. Some of his many books include The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, Is the Reformation Over?, The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield and the Wesleys, and The Old Religion in a New World.