The Contemporary Scandal

The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind. An extraordinary range of virtues is found among the sprawling throngs of evangelical Protestants in North America, including great sacrifice in spreading the message of salvation in Jesus Christ, open-hearted generosity to the needy, heroic personal exertion on behalf of troubled individuals, and the unheralded sustenance of countless church and parachurch communities. Notwithstanding all their other virtues, however, American evangelicals are not exemplary for their thinking, and they have not been so for several generations.

Despite dynamic success at a popular level, modern American evangelicals have failed notably in sustaining serious intellectual life. They have nourished millions of believers in the simple verities of the gospel but have largely abandoned the universities, the arts, and other realms of “high” culture. Even in its more progressive and culturally upscale subgroups, evangelicalism has little intellectual muscle. Feeding the hungry, living simply, and banning the bomb are tasks at which different sorts of evangelicals willingly expend great energy, but these tasks do not by themselves assist intellectual vitality. Evangelicals sponsor dozens of theological seminaries, scores of colleges, hundreds of radio stations, and thousands of unbelievably diverse parachurch agencies — but not a single research university or a single periodical devoted to in-depth interaction with modern culture.

Evangelical inattention to intellectual life is a curiosity for several reasons. One of the self-defining convictions of modern evangelicalism has been its adherence to the Bible as the revealed Word of God. Most evangelicals also acknowledge that in the Scriptures God stands revealed plainly as the author of nature, as the sustainer of human institutions (family, work, and government), and as the source of harmony, creativity, and beauty. Yet it has been precisely these Bible-believers par excellence who have neglected sober analysis of nature, human society, and the arts.

The historical situation is similarly curious. Modern evangelicals are the spiritual descendants of leaders and movements distinguished by probing, creative, fruitful attention to the mind. Most of the original Protestant traditions (Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican) either developed a vigorous intellectual life or worked out theological principles that could (and often did) sustain penetrating, and penetratingly Christian, intellectual endeavor. Closer to the American situation, the Puritans, the leaders of the eighteenth-century evangelical awakenings like John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards, and a worthy line of North American stalwarts in the nineteenth century — like the Methodist Francis Asbury, the Presbyterian Charles Hodge, the Congregationalist Moses Stuart, and the Canadian Presbyterian George Monro Grant, to mention only a few — all held that diligent, rigorous mental activity was a way to glorify God. None of them believed that intellectual activity was the only way to glorify God, or even the highest way, but they all believed in the life of the mind, and they believed in it because they were evangelical Christians. Unlike their spiritual ancestors, modern evangelicals have not pursued comprehensive thinking under God or sought a mind shaped to its furthest reaches by Christian perspectives.

We evangelicals are, rather, in the position once described by Harry Blamires for theological conservatives in Great Britain:

In contradistinction to the secular mind, no vital Christian mind plays fruitfully, as a coherent and recognizable influence, upon our social, political, or cultural life.... Except over a very narrow field of thinking, chiefly touching questions of strictly personal conduct, we Christians in the modern world accept, for the purpose of mental activity, a frame of reference constructed by the secular mind and a set of criteria reflecting secular evaluations. There is no Christian mind; there is no shared field of discourse in which we can move at ease as thinking Christians by trodden ways and past established landmarks.... Without denying the impact of important isolated utterances, one must admit that there is no packed contemporary field of discourse in which writers are reflecting christianly on the modern world and modern man.

Blamire’s picture describes American evangelicals even better than it does traditional Christians in Britain. To be sure, something of a revival of intellectual activity has been taking place among evangelical Protestants since World War II. Yet it would be a delusion to conclude that evangelical thinking has progressed very far. Recent gains have been modest. The general impact of Christian thinking on the evangelicals of North America, much less on learned culture as a whole, is slight. Evangelicals of several types may be taking the first steps in doing what needs to be done to develop a Christian mind, or at least we have begun to talk about what would need to be done for such a mind to develop. But there is a long, long way to go.

This excerpt is from Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (pp. 3-5). It is highly recommended by our staff and can be purchased here. Carl Trueman’s in The Real Scandal of the Evangelical Mind is also worth your time. In his work, Mark Noll warned that evangelical Christians had abandoned the intellectual aspects of their faith and therefore became ill-prepared for intellectual debates and had become culturally marginalized. Fifteen years later, carl Trueman argues that the "real scandal" is that Christians (evangelicals) can't agree on what the "evangel" (i.e., gospel) even is.