On the Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

David Aikman

Fourteen Years On

In 1994 the William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company rolled a hand-grenade of a book into the genteel world of the Christian reading public: The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. If the book’s title was challenging enough, its opening sentence and the identity of its author were even more so. The scandal of the evangelical mind, said author Mark Noll, was “that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” Noll at the time was a distinguished and prolific historian who happened to have taught for several years at the flagship undergraduate college of American evangelicalism, Wheaton College, outside Chicago. Christianity Today promptly named Scandal its “book of the year” and said that it had “arguably shaped the evangelical world (or at least its institutions) more than another other book published in the last decade.”

Noll became a celebrity on the evangelical speaking circuit and was eventually hired away from Wheaton by the flagship Roman Catholic college, the University of Notre Dame. He has remained, however, a committed evangelical—as he puts it, “a wounded lover”—and in 2005 in a Time Magazine photo-essay was named one of the “25 most influential evangelicals in the U.S.” In 2006 he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President George W. Bush for his contributions to American scholarship.

It was thus with some relish that a distinguished group of scholars and intellectuals associated with the American evangelical community were invited by the Trinity Forum on November 6, 2008, to hear Dr. Noll look back on his original thesis at a dinner at Evermay, the elegant Georgetown estate that hosts the Trinity Forum’s headquarters. On hand were several of the Trinity Forum’s 27 Senior Fellows, many of whom have established reputations in the sciences and humanities, and Dr. Noll was introduced to the audience by Cherie Harder, President of the Trinity Forum. Harder said in her introduction of Noll that she thought there had been “signs of hope” since Scandal first appeared. She then raised the question for which most people wanted to hear an answer from Noll: “Is the scandal still as severe, and are we as mindless as ever?”

Noll started his talk with his own definition of what constituted a healthy Christian intellect. “The goal in view is clear,” he said. “The goal is to have a thoughtful approach to life issues, a thoughtful approach that is heavy on analysis, light on ideology, and light on simplification . . . The goal is certainly to have broad engagement with the world that includes knowledge about science, balanced approach to politics and active support of the arts.” Noll conceded that the evangelical community had several positive points. Among them were “compassion and concern for individuals’ immediate needs” and success in reaching out with the Christian message to all levels of American society.

The challenge for evangelical Christians, Noll said, stemmed largely from the nature of American society itself, with its obsession with consumption, “image, ideology, and a lust for the sensational.” One of the problems for evangelicals, he contended, was that they had virtually abandoned scholarly research. He claimed there were “no first-level research institutions operating for evangelical purposes right now” and that evangelicals had made many important errors. Among them, he said, were “political schizophrenia” derived from many earlier decades of “apolitical inactivism,” “a perfervid ideology and hyperpartisanship,” “a Gnostic spirituality, that treats the Christian faith as extracting people from the world,” and what he called “the disaster of creation science.”

Despite this discouraging overview, Noll said that there were signs of hope that things were changing. There were, he said, “growing numbers of Christian believers in a wide range of secular universities,” and significant work being done at Christian colleges—he mentioned Asbury, Biola, Oachita, Patrick Henry College, and Pepperdine, among others. The problem continued to be, Noll claimed, that the first-level scholarship of all of the evangelical academic institutions put together might not equal the research output of any one of the best secular campuses taken on its own. The one stand-out area of academic life where there was a visible and growing Christian presence, Noll said, was in philosophy departments of major universities. He thought good work was being done by some evangelical publishers, and he complimented the Trinity Forum for its own contributions. Still, he claimed, Christian research scholars were still not yet setting the agendas of academic life within American society as a whole.

Asked to provide a counterpoint to Noll’s remarks, his former Wheaton colleague and the current president of Wake Forest University, Dr. Nathan Hatch, agreed with most of Noll’s points. He added the interesting point that one of the weaknesses of the evangelical world was that it did not “necessarily value tradition.” Belief in “the Bible alone,” “sola scriptura,” Hatch claimed, had been taken to “fairly extreme points of view.” In a vivid comment, Hatch said that there were “whole denominations based on the idea that you read the scripture as if mortal man had never seen it before, a kind of Jeffersonian notion that the past is not neutral, the past is bad, and we need to discard it.” Hatch added to Noll’s complaint about the paucity of research being done by Christian colleges. There were “one hundred of so Christian colleges,” he said, “none of which can support a research faculty.”

Almost parenthetically, Hatch seemed distressed that no research institutions had been born of the huge effort—and success—of Billy Graham’s long decades of successful evangelism. “Billy Graham is the one intellectual who, had he put his mind to it,” Hatch said, “could have raised half a billion dollars” for research. Hatch did concede that Graham, throughout his life, insisted that his calling was to evangelism and not theology or academic life. He may not have known that Graham was approached by a multi-millionaire in the 1960s with the specific offer to fund an evangelical university to rival Harvard, but turned the idea down flat. He insisted at the time that it would have compromised his true calling as an evangelist.[*]

Hatch added the gloss that, for many American evangelicals, “piety and intellectual activity” were “inversely related,” and that evangelicals had often seen themselves as standing against the rational tradition. The danger that this view might lead to, Hatch warned, would be “conceding the heart of the culture to secularism.”

Overall, Noll in his talk reiterated the points made in the original Scandal, but thought there were definite signs of hope for positive change. Hatch made the same point. Perhaps it was a compliment to the cogency of speech of both speakers that the questions posed to them by the audience didn’t really advance the discourse. Noll’s Scandal, in effect, remains something, which the evangelical world in North America still has to live down.  

Dr. Aikman, a Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum, was for many years senior correspondent for Time.

Features, Education, Faiths and Worldviews, Public Square, David Aikman, Wed 26 Nov 2008