the New Pantagruel

Theology of Scandal

by D. G. Hart

OR EVANGELICALS (however defined) Mark Noll is a remarkable comfort. He may be capable of taunts like the one that opened his 1994 landmark book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, “the scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is no evangelical mind.” But no matter how dyspeptic his assessments can be, his own intellect proves that evangelical minds do exist (whether his is the exception that proves his rule is another matter).

In a recent piece for First Things (“The Evangelical Mind Today,” Oct. 2004) Noll used the tenth anniversary of The Scandal’s publication to reflect on where he erred, how he might have written the book differently, and what the prospects for evangelical intellectual life are. On the whole, his ten-year retrospective was positive, an indication that Noll does not suffer from H. L. Mencken’s self-described malady “as he got older he got worse.” The reasons for Noll’s hopefulness are two-fold. The first is evangelical theology itself, which provides the resources, he believes, for careful thinking about God and the world He has created. The second involves the increasing improvement of evangelical intellectual life, evidence of which Noll gathers from various institutional and publishing developments. He remains no less discerning of the impediments to evangelical intellection: “an immediatism that insists on action, decision, and even perfection right now, a populism that confuses winning supporters with mastering actually existing situations, an anti-traditionalism that privileges one’s own current judgments on biblical, theological, and ethical issues (however hastily formed) over insight from the past (however hard won and carefully stated), and a nearly gnostic dualism that rushes to spiritualize all manner of bodily, terrestrial, physical, and material realities (despite the origin and providential maintenance of these realities in God).” That being said, Noll believes “it is still possible to identify substantial signs of progress.”

One sign is evangelicals’ increasing reliance on Roman Catholic patterns and habits of reflection. “Whenever evangelicals in recent years have been moved to admonish themselves and other evangelicals for weaknesses in ecclesiology, tradition, the intellectual life, sacraments, theology of culture, aesthetics, philosophical theology, or historical consciousness,” Noll asserts, “the result has almost always been selective appreciation for elements of the Catholic tradition.” This is by no means a surprising judgment from a man who himself signed and defends “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” (ECT). Nor would it shock readers of the Nicotine Theological Journal to see in these pages criticism of evangelical softness on Rome. (Let the record show that Noll’s reasons for hope extend beyond the Roman Catholic factor.) The main reasons for dwelling on his attitude toward Roman Catholicism will become apparent, but Noll’s friendliness to Roman Catholicism is curious on several levels and these factors lead to doubts regarding the possibilities of evangelical intellectual life.

The first is that of arguably the world’s leading scholar on evangelicalism and one of its greatest defenders (minus the enthusiasm and cheerleading), on the one hand, understanding evangelicalism so well and, on the other, advocating on the basis of evangelical convictions something that no evangelical would have ever countenanced. To his great credit, Mark Noll has done more than any other historian to figure out exactly what makes born-again Protestantism tick. For forty years or so after the advent of Billy Graham, scholars reckoned evangelicalism a conservative version of Protestantism that cohered around a small set of doctrinal convictions, from biblical inerrancy to the literal return of Christ (an account that still dominates the social sciences, especially opinion polls). Noll eventually figured out, by drawing on the work of other scholars, many of whom he had personally cultivated through associations with the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals, that evangelicalism was less about intellect and more about affect.

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