Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
105 of 111 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Articulated my frustrations with evangelical Christianity, November 14, 2000
Mark Noll has written a most scathing review of the evangelical mind. His opening sentenace says it all: "The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is no evangelical mind". True, harsh words, but Noll was able to put into words so much of what bothers me about evangelical Christianity. From creationism to dispensationalism I have been frustrated by the lack of deep thinking within Christian circles and often I find myself branded as a cynic for asking too many questions. The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind does not quite drift into the territory of criticizing BEING an evangelical, only that somewhere along the way, we have let ourselves be co-opted by thinking patterns that stifle good thought processes. Noll deftly traces some of the history and development of the evangelical mind thorough the past few hundred years. I would say that this book changed my life. It helped me to realize much of what bothers me about evangelicalism. It ALMOST made me want to give it up. And some may say that this is the danger of the book. However, I think that Noll does not want us to go that far; he honestly described the problems and begins to offer a solution to the way that we have forgotten how to love God with our minds. I commend this to all who want to think honestly about their faith and not be afraid to be shaken.
|
|
|
82 of 89 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Insightful, caring, yet provocative, December 31, 2000
Mark Noll is a chaired professor of "christian thought," at Wheaton College - one of the great Evangelical liberal arts colleges, as well as being one of the leading church historians of our time. Noll is also one of the leading public intellectuals within the Evangelical movement. (By public intellectual, I mean an academic whose is grounded in rigorous scholarship but who also writes - at a high level - for the general public. Stephen Carter of Yale is another good example of a Christian public intellectual.)Evangelicals are all too often typecast as hillbillies who neither read nor think. Like most stereotypes, there is a grain of truth to the characterization - where there is smoke there is usually fire. In the "Scandal of the Evangelical Mind," Noll issues a wake-up call for a renewed commitment to the life of the mind on the part of Evangelicals. Noll begins by persuasively demonstrating the existence of an intellectual deficit among Evangelicals. In contrast to the Catholic-leaning journals like First Things or the New Oxford review, there is no real Evangelical journal of public thought. There are few scholarly journals focusing on Evangelical perspectives. Evangelical colleges emphasize teaching at the expense of scholarly research, despite decades of proof that the good teaching and good scholarship goes hand in hand. Noll then traces the historical roots of this scandal, showing that there was a time when Evangelicals dominated top institutions of learning. What caused the decline? In what must surely be the most controversial portion of the book, Noll lays the blame on an anti-intellectual strain of populist fundamentalism. As someone who grew up with many working class fundamentalist relatives, I am more sympathetic towards that world view than is Noll. Indeed, Noll candidly admits that his thesis rests in part on his theological disputes with fundamentalism. Yet, as an adult convert to Catholicism currently going through RCIA, I have no doubt that the life of the mind is more highly regarded in Catholicism than in the fundamentalist protestantism of my youth. Unfortunately, the fundamentalists' appropriate rejection of modernity and secular humanism simply painted with too broad a brush. Noll concludes with a slightly self-serving call to action. I say "slightly self-serving" because Noll's call to action includes the idea that Evangelical colleges ought to pay more attention to scholarship. As a top-notch scholar at a leading Evangelical college, Noll probably would benefit from such a shift in emphasis. yet, as Aadam Smith pointed out centuries ago, there is no more powerful engine for the public good than enlightened self-interest. Noll's call to action deserves to be heeded. All Christians, including all evangelicals, are called to serve God not only with our heats but also with our minds.
|
|
|
35 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"The scandal of the evangelical mind is...", July 12, 2004
"that there is not much of an evangelical mind." That is the first sentence of this book by Mark Noll who is an evangelical himself, professor at Wheaton College, alma mater of Billy and Ruth Bell Graham.So what's the problem, Mark Noll asks? Doesn't Christ command us to love Him with all our mind, and how have evangelicals in this country failed in this respect? That's the aim of Noll in this book to show the historical reasons for that failure but also to show that there is hope and signs that some evangelicals are back on the right track. I think his main point is that research is key to developing the mind, that Christians should venture to explore all "topics under the sun" as Solomon says, and that we can do so in a way that glorifies God without compromising basic Christian beliefs. This author was recommended to me and others from the evangelical church I attend. I loved this book; it's one of the more substantive Jesus books that are out there. It's well-researched and thought provoking. Evangelicalism is new to me, although maybe I was one before I knew what the word meant! In the first chapter, evangelicalism is described as having "the key ingredients of: conversionism/new birth, biblicism/the bible as ultimate religious authority, activism/sharing your faith, crucicentrism/significance of Christ's saving work on the cross." Fundamentalism is not necessarily evangelicalism. Here are some excerpts I loved: "In each of these instances (pro-life/abortion, creationism/creation science/evolution debates), the point at issue for a historian of the intellectual life is not whether the new ideas were right or wrong. The point is that a combination of self-confident biblicism and populist political mobilization greatly restricted, if it did not altogether shut down, promising lines of scientific debate. In such controversies, heat almost entirely replaced the light that might otherwise have been generated to correct, expand, refine, redirect, or otherwise build upon the commendable intelligence of the proposals." I totally love his last chapter, here are his last two sentences: "The effort to think like a Christian is rather an effort to take seriously the sovereignty of God over the world He created, the lordship of Christ over the world he died to redeem, and the power of the Holy Spirit over the world He sustains each and every moment. From this perspective the search for a mind that truly thinks like a Christian takes on ultimate significance, because the search for a Christian mind is not, in the end, a search for a mind but a search for God."
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
by George M. Marsden
by George M. Marsden
by Mark A. Noll
by George M. Marsden
by Mark A. Noll
See all Editorial Reviews
