FOR 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.
This comes through loud and clear in Noll’s latest book, The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield and the Wesleys, the first of a five-volume series on born-again Protestantism in the English-speaking world (evidence that evangelical scholarly ambitions may be catching up to the movement’s evangelistic ones). There he identifies a 1740 remark by George Whitefield as key to the evangelical sensibility: “It was best to preach the new birth, and the power of godliness, and not to insist so much on the form: for people would never be brought to one mind as to that; nor did Jesus Christ ever intend it.” This emphasis on the new birth and holy living, combined with disregard for the institutional church, is the essence of evangelicalism. As Noll puts it, “The concentration on conversion and holy living that marked Whitefield’s activity, as well as his flexibility with respect to church forms and inherited religious traditions, have always been important characteristics of evangelical movements.” One could add that these have emerged as so important that Noll believes they are sufficient to launch a multi-volume, multi-author project.
Yet, the tension between this evangelical essence and Roman Catholic formalism is virtually palpable. Sure, in the post-Vatican II environment many of the certainties that defined Rome are no longer as certain. Still, Roman Catholicism thrives on church forms and inherited religious traditions precisely because, contra Whitefield, the Roman Catholic church confesses that Christ very much did intend for his followers to display unity on these matters. What is more, Rome’s insistence on conformity was a large factor in generating opposition from all Protestants, both churchly ones like Anglicans, Lutherans and Calvinists, and parachurchly ones like Whitefield, Wesley and Edwards. It is indeed a curious matter for Noll to highlight this aspect of evangelicalism and at the same time to use it as justification for warmer relations between evangelicalism and Roman Catholicism. For most of evangelical history, Catholicism was the antithesis of the new birth and holy living. So what happened to make these two Christian expressions friendly? Evangelicals certainly are as experiential as ever. Maybe it is Roman Catholicism which displays less discipline (read: uniformity) than forty years ago. Still, for the logically impaired: A (anti-formalism) = non-A (formalism). What gives?
On another level, Noll’s hopefulness is odd because the recent trend is not for evangelicals to borrow selectively from Roman Catholic forms and practices but to embrace them altogether. For the sake of the integrity of a religious tradition, the idea of converting to Rome is far preferable to a multi-cultural dabbling in whatever suits the religious consumer’s needs. Still, the reality for many young evangelicals, attending college and seeking for a way to be as serious in their learning as in their devotion to Christ, Rome offers a better option than a cafeteria-styled religious identity. In fact, precisely because evangelicalism has emerged as the conservative version of Protestantism, and by drowning out the older Protestant voices or selling the Lutheran, Anglican, and Reformed communions on the pitch that they themselves are really evangelical, young serious-minded Protestants increasingly look to the magisterium of Rome as providing the intellectual and spiritual order for which their minds and souls ache. A hodge-podge of evangelical affect and Roman Catholic practice (including the activity of thinking) does not cut it for these students because it is seemingly as flimsy as the evangelical project of picking and choosing from the various Protestant expressions to arrive at a generically conservative Christianity. It could be that conversion to Roman Catholicism is better than being an evangelical (I’m still sorting this one out). But my prediction is that flirting with Roman Catholicism will lure away young talent from evangelical circles, causing a brain drain as it were, which will erode further the prospects for an evangelical mind.
The most curious aspect of Noll’s assessment of evangelicalism’s intellectual prospects is his appeal to the incarnation. It is not that Noll misunderstands Christology but that he addresses the problem of evangelical life with the wrong member of the Trinity. Right God, wrong person. Here is how Christ apparently remedies the situation; Noll writes:
If evangelicals are the ones who insist most aggressively that they believe in sola scriptura, and if evangelicals are the ones who assert most vigorously the transforming work of Jesus Christ, then it is reasonable to hope that what the Scriptures teach about the origin of creation in Christ, the sustaining of all things in Christ, and the dignity of all creation in Christ—about, in other words, the subjects of learning–will be a spur for evangelicals to a deeper and richer intellectual life: “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:15-17).
There is nothing inherently wrong with this formulation until Noll arrives at the end of his essay and mentions the oxymoronic character of mixing evangelical enthusiasm with scholarly seriousness:
… think how natural it sounds to talk of Pentecostal Signs and Wonders, intense holiness spirituality, vigorous seeker-sensitive evangelism… . It seems equally self-evident that we can speak of such things as an estimable tradition of Lutheran sacred music, art history pursued from a Kuyperian Reformed perspective, profound social theory from Catholics… . But try to shift and mix the categories and hear how unexpected some of the combinations sound: Kuyperian Reformed Signs and Wonders? Vigorous Catholic evangelism? An Anglo-Catholic devotion to Scripture? Intense Lutheran spirituality?
The mix of things evangelical with human endeavors requiring sustained seriousness only sounds odd if the assumption behind this melange is that born-again Protestantism has the Spirit, that charismatic gifts, holiness spirituality and seeker-sensitive evangelism are in fact signs of the Holy Spirit’s work. This assumption has in fact been at the core of evangelical self-understanding and receiving a pass from Christian observers for almost three centuries.
But what if Lutheran piety (or Reformed piety, for that matter) is not an oxymoron? What if the older Christian traditions have the Spirit also? What if, furthermore, those traditions have not only the Spirit but the Word to go with it? In other words, could it be that evangelicalism has separated Christ, the Word incarnate, from the Spirit whom he sent to lead his church into all truth? If so, then if evangelicals don’t have the doctrine (or the brains behind such teaching), then maybe they also don’t have the Spirit either.
This is not to suggest that evangelicals are unregenerate. Instead, the point is that the categories Noll uses to assess evangelicalism are off. Of course, he is only a church historian and Noll may want to climb behind the wall of academic neutrality, claiming all the way that he tries to avoid rendering a verdict. But sometimes in places like First Things he comes out from behind the wall and indicates what he thinks about evangelicalism. Since he has no better ability to discern the Spirit than a crusty Presbyterian, perhaps the best way to judge evangelicalism is by the categories given by our Lord who taught that the work of the Trinity was designed to be unified and coherent. In which case, rather than looking for signs of affect among the born-again, maybe the search should be for evidence of intellect. Ironically, that would draw confessional Protestants and Roman Catholics closer in terms of real togetherness than the pious good wishes of trying to combine the zeal of evangelicals with the forms of Rome. It might also close the book on the evangelical mind.
Copyright 2004-2005 :: The New Pantagruel 2.3.