The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind Revisited
Tuesday, June 8, 2010 at 10:00AM | by Otter One of the most moving and important books of the 1990’s for me was Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.
Mark Noll: Fear His Brain, For It Is Enormous And Will Eat You. Smart smart smart. And a gentle, nurturing teacher. I can’t say enough how much admiration I have for him.
Mark Noll, at the time a very good historian at Wheaton College (and one of my former teachers), wrote eloquently there of the struggle to maintain intellectual integrity and the best standards of scholarship as well as evangelical commitments.
Noll’s target in that book was a giant, easy to hit but hard to kill: the anti-intellectualism of evangelical Christianity. He was quietly and gently furious at the contradiction between the beliefs that God was the god of truth and that becoming saved for the next world released one from the duty and pleasure of knowing truth in this world.
He was (and is) qualified to understand evangelicalism’s strange bigotry against intellectualism at every level: an evangelical with a Wheaton pedigree as both a student and a teacher, and a scholar with first-rate credentials and reputation, he probably understands the complicated nature of American evangelicalism as well as or better than anybody on the planet.
His call for Christians to engage in the life of the mind impacted me deeply.
His book remains one that evangelical Christians should read before they get to college, and before they home school their kids or commit them to some insular school that parrots back their convictions in order to “protect” their children. (By the way, that’s an attitude that I’ve seen backfire majestically in my classes: the protected child is a defenseless one, and Lee Strobel won’t bail them out when the fewmets hit the windmill.)
But I think that The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind needs an update or revision for its life after the Internet.
The scandal is now that there’s not much of an American mind, I think. The Internet revolution is not yet finished, but from where I sit, it represents the substitution of information for mind on an enormous scale, and in particular the collapse of the intellectually engaged imagination.
And evangelicalism, reacting against popular culture in almost every way it can think of when it’s not simperingly imitating that culture (think Christian contemporary music), has become a potentially more interesting thing than ever.
The Merry Chesterton
Saint Lewis
During the 1980’s and 1990’s, in no small part thanks to Noll and the worthies at Wheaton, evangelicalism was thoughtfully absorbing and adapting a good deal of the great British Catholic and Anglican apologists, especially Chesterton and C.S. Lewis. Neither of them I think were especially persuasive at the level of reason or logic but whose commitments to excellence and to never putting forward an argument they themselves had seen the weakness in made them very difficult to discount.
For me, the interesting thing about these men and their friends and fellow-travelers was how similar they could be to American evangelicals in theology but how dissimilar in spirit. In my community growing up it was incredibly difficult to find somebody who understood Shakespeare, for instance, or his worth. You might find a bright guy who read Lewis’s apologetics but I don’t recall finding one apart from my mother who understood what the hell he was talking about in his literary criticism.
Chesterton and Lewis recognized, rightly, that theology dealt with poetic materials, and that evangelicalism was an extraordinarily powerful form of poetry. It gave a language to a very real subjective experience that had no other name.
The American evangelicalism by contrast tended (and often still tends) to see theology as a scientific discourse in which one is arguing for an independent truth about God and the soul. It’s tiresome, but more importantly, it’s boring as hell. What happens when somebody wins that argument? You sit around with nothing to say like the winner in a marital argument, seething and being right.
I think the two works of Lewis which have had most impact on me have been The Allegory of Love, a highly technical analysis of certain themes in medieval literature, and A Grief Observed in which he simply describes the feelings of a grieving man. They represent evidence of a clear eye and a profoundly penetrating insight. His famous “trilemma” in Mere Christianity, the proposition that Jesus was either mad, lying, or the son of God, left me even as a teenager feeling that Lewis didn’t know what he was talking about, and the older I’ve gotten the more sure I am that that’s a bogus argument. But I’m fairly sure Lewis didn’t see it that way, perhaps because of blind spots in his world-view or something: and there’s little chance he would have advanced the argument had he understood its weaknesses.
And Chesterton’s trenchant social criticism and his command of English were far more persuasive to me than his apologetics in Orthodoxy, which don’t stand much rational scrutiny but which invigorate the spirit wonderfully when wrapped in his powerful appeal to the imagination.
Anyway, it seems to me that the farther away from the church and evangelicalism I get, the more I like them.
In a culture increasingly obsessed with information and communication, I think that evangelicalism has absorbed and retains some sense of communion with what is best in humanity and nature.
In no small part, this is due to giving up some things they are better off without: a dogmatic dedication to a conservative political agenda, for instance. Anti-Catholic prejudice for another (for I’m really writing about Catholicism and its positive influences on American evangelicalism).
I hope I’m wrong about all this for one important reason: I think that evangelicalism is benefiting from a collapse of American critical thinking skills, and even more from a collapse in American imagination.
Evangelicalism is, I believe, rightly doomed by its otherworldliness and its incapacity to make or imagine new things in its haste to protect the old, old story of salvation as it imagines that story to be.
But if it ever had the courage not just to imitate Lewis and Chesterton in their arguments but in their courage and in their faith and confidence in their own minds, it could become downright fascinating.
I don’t really look for that. But I grew up evangelical, and I know where the tripwires are hidden. Sometimes, I’ve wondered where Mark Noll got his confidence that it could ever be otherwise.
Reader Comments (5)
I think I'll just listen to Mark Knoll instead of reading Mark Noll if that's okay with you.
Shirley:
I think this is one of those cases where it's not "either / or." Plug in the iPod and crack open the e-book.
Oh, very well.
you said, " Anyway, it seems to me that the farther away from the church and evangelicalism I get, the more I like it"
I'm unclear as to what you mean by which "it" you mean when you say you like "it' more?
Also could you explain the weaknesses of Lewis's "trilemma"?
From Jennifer:
That should have been "them." I'll edit the post. Thanks for the heads-up on my grammar breakdown...
I like the church and evangelicalism much more from a distance. I think I can just see their strengths more clearly.
Briefly, they're historical problems and in particular problems in the history of thinking and mind.
What precisely do you think Jesus meant by claiming to be the Son of God? What is the content of that expression?
If you reach immediately for the Virgin Birth, that'd be one answer, one that hurls itself totally back on faith.
But the term "son of god" had a currency in the ancient world that was capable of being claimed without incoherence by a man like Jesus without him being either a liar or a lunatic or the biological son of God.
Specifically, it was a term that could be used for a king who was "divinized," given divine status. It therefore had theological and political dimensions to it that did not cancel each other out.
Roman or Greek heroes could be the Son of Zeus or the Son of Poseidon, and Augustus (with whom Jesus is very consciously contrasted in the gospels) was himself called divi filius("Son of the divinized [Julius Caesar]"), in Greek huios theou ("Son of [a]]god"), an expression that lacks an expected definite article that would turn it into "a son of THE God." It's an expression that Paul and Mark use of Jesus (but Matthew, Luke, and John change to "son of THE God." Consider for instance Mark's Roman centurion at the cross: "Surely this man [i.e., not Caesar, or in addition to Caesar] was a son of a god," or "a son of God," in which the phrase consciously mimics the epithet for Caesar.
This was (as all mythological language is) a way of structuring the imagination. And it had some pretty steep political implications, obviously.
When Elvis called himself The King, he was neither a liar nor a lunatic nor a King in the exact sense that most tiresome moderns would use the word.
And it's in a more or less modernist sense that Lewis uses the phrase "Son of God." I mean that Lewis aims at defining "Son of God" according to a narrow metaphysic that's got to do with things like the ontology of Jesus that Jesus almost certainly did not have in mind (because they don't really come up in the conversation until a few hundred years after Jesus).