The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind II

Noll makes a number of significant contributions in the book, primarily related to his area of strength, historical analysis. There were many times as I was reading the book that I wanted to say “Amen!” Many of the flaws he notes in fundamentalism are defects which I have noticed and suffered with for many years, both in my own thinking as well as in the thinking of those around me. The depth of the bibliographic notes were incredible in my eyes, as Noll has read and digested more works about American Christian history than I even knew existed (although I am admittedly a specialist in Old Testament studies and not church history, so this fact is not too surprising!).

The perceptive comments Noll makes about my heritage are excellent. The problems that have arisen with fundamentalism are well articulated. He observes that evangelicals have exaggerated the divine quality of Scripture and minimized the fact that it was written by humans (135), a trait which has had oftentimes disastrous consequences in the churches I have attended. Noll condemns reading the Bible as a code (142) or treating Bible verses as a puzzle that just needs to be put together (127), habits which follow from this same exaggeration of the divine aspect of Scripture. Prooftexting is a related problem which Noll notes occurs within the dispensational tradition (134).

Another problem with the dispensational tradition is that it ignores other traditions (127), although this is certainly not limited to dispensationalists.  The fact that Chafer felt himself more qualified as a theologian because he did not have any prior theological training is a travesty and set an unpleasant tone for later followers (128). The thought that one can be totally unbiased and uninfluenced by one’s culture is very misguided.

Noll also shows the significance of the problems associated with an overly scientific view of theology and the Bible which has been characteristic of fundamentalism. For example, apologetics became an exercise in proving the facts of Christianity to be true (90-93), revival became a human-driven method (96), and an incredibly arrogant reading of the Scripture which valued ignorance of prior interpretations (98). Even though fundamentalism reacted against the anti-supernaturalism of modernism, they continued to use the same methods of modernism. One wonders how things would be different today if they had changed their methods.

One example which Noll does not dwell on but which I have dealt with firsthand is the evangelical attitude towards the modern nation of Israel. Noll notes that evangelicals did not do much serious thought on Middle EastIsrael in small details in prophecy rather than their conduct in the modern world. Since my family and I spent a year living in Jerusalem, I have had extensive opportunities to discuss this issue with a wide variety of people. The usual approach of dispensationalists to modern Israel was unfortunately a fine specimen of Noll’s main point: if evangelicals have a mind, it appears to be on a vacation. While there were those who were more balanced, there were also those with stars in their eyes and who thought that Israel could do nothing wrong and who believed it was the job of the church to not simply support Jewish ministries, but also the Israeli government financially. Few of the evangelicals I conversed with, even in Israel, thought deeply about the Arab-Israeli problem as it stands today, and simply wanted to give all of the land to Israel. Unfortunately, the issue is polarizing, since the evangelicals who desired to help the Arabs tended to be highly anti-Israeli. Evangelicals need to think more about the Arab-Israel conflict as it is today and avoid being so unbalanced that the other side is ignored. politics at the time of the First Gulf War, but instead ate up books about how this fulfilled prophecy (140, 167). Dispensationalists Zionists have placed too much emphasis upon what can be learned about

Finally, Noll is careful to state the benefits that came from the groups he criticizes. Most importantly, these fundamentalists group passed along the essence of the gospel in a time when many did not (132). The creationists “have performed an excellent service by denying that vast cosmological claims about the self-sustaining, closed character of the universe can ever arise from scientific research itself” (186). Even while he argues that these groups have wreaked havoc for the evangelical mind, he still recognizes their good points.  

However, the book does have its flaws.  Noll notes how evangelicals have unconsciously picked up the assumptions of modernism and how these assumptions have proved to be detrimental. However, Noll himself seems to have picked up assumptions which he has not analyzed carefully, or at least not presented clearly in this book. These assumptions are not those of modernism, but of postmodernism. Just as modernism has good aspects and bad aspects, so postmodernism has its positive and negative parts, so Noll is not to be condemned for being influenced by postmodernism. But since the book is largely about presuppositions, then he should have presented the origins of some of his own ideas more clearly.  

One example of this is a passing comment about intellectualism. “If intellectual life involves a certain amount of self-awareness about alternative interpretation or a certain amount of tentativeness in exploring the connection between evidence and conclusions, it was hard to find any encouragement for the intellectual life in the self-assured dogmatism of fundamentalism” (126). Noll does not argue for his definition of intellectualism (this aspect of the definition does not occur in his definition section at the beginning of the book), but simply assumes it to be true. I agree to a certain extent with Noll and I am regularly frustrated with evangelical teachers who are overly confident. We should learn from postmodernism to be more cautious in the areas in which we do not have sufficiently clear data. But contrary to the prevailing ideas of postmodernism, there are some areas where we are not permitted to waffle and we should be dogmatic. This is the pattern of many authors of Scripture and one that we should follow today.

Another example is the following quote about studying and science. “In their enthusiasm for reading the world in light of Scripture, evangelicals forget the proposition that the Western world’s early modern scientists had so successfully taken to heart as a product of their own deep Christian convictions – to understand something, one must look at that something” (199). This conviction is based heavily upon ideas of Aristotle which replaced Platonic ideas beginning especially with the work of Aquinas. But the irony is that on the bottom of the same page Noll quotes Toulmin who notes that Christians should not be tied too tightly to a specific model of science, since the view of Aristotle or Newton might not have “the last word” (199-200). While the details of Aristotle’s beliefs have been rejected by science, the very basis of science is deeply indebted to the work of Aristotle, an influence that Noll does not point out.

On the other side of the previous example is Noll’s attitude toward science, an area where he appears to be overly modernistic. Noll’s view on science seems to be a little confused. Postmodernism destroys the myth of the unbiased observer of modernism, as it recognizes that people have always have motives and presuppositions. Although I only have an undergraduate degree in science (chemistry) and two years working in industry, this truth became very clear to me in my work in science. Scientists are not blank slates, but always have assumptions of some kind. Noll clearly recognizes this with a comment such as the following about dispensationalists and science: “This overwhelming trust in the capacities of an objective, disinterested, unbiased, and neutral science perhaps was excusable in the early nineteenth century, but by the early twentieth century it was indefensible” (127).

But on the other hand, Noll gives too much credit to evolutionary scientists to work in an unbiased fashion. Noll states that we would be “foolish” to not follow what the consensus of modern scientists says about the age of the world (207). He even recognizes that at some point in the future scientific opinion may change, but that it is still necessary for us to follow the consensus of scientists today (207). He backs up this conviction with an appeal to Psalm 19, which commands us to listen to nature (207), but he ignores the difference between gathering data and interpreting data (two vastly different procedures, as a quick reading in any branch of scientific literature will show). While Noll criticizes the creationists for having presuppositions and doing science, he does not permit that other scientists also have presuppositions which influence their work (although he does give lip service to this thought [186]).

While it is certainly true that some of the creationist arguments have been very bad science, the occasional bad science does not necessarily invalidate the position as a whole. Answers in Genesis, one of the creationist groups, has put out a DVD and an excellent article which explain bad arguments used in the past to defend creationism but which should not be used today, an exercise that seems to be exactly the type of self-examination that Noll is looking for (202). Although Noll states that the creationists only do reacting science instead of original research (198), it appears to me that several contemporary creationist groups have changed from their past tendencies of reactionary science to following what Noll desires to see: original work actually looking at nature instead of just reacting.

The tentativeness which Noll desires to see in theology should also be applied to science. Noll points out that there are various interpretations about Genesis 1-2, quoting a view of Waltke which varies dramatically from the creationist view of the passage (197-198). The implication of this is that creationists need to look at the natural world and base their ideas about creation upon the “book” of nature rather than the “book” of Scripture, since the interpretation of Scripture is unclear. But the problem is that interpreting the other “book,” the book of nature, is just as difficult, if not more difficult, to interpret than the book of Scripture. Noll should recognize the difficulties inherent in interpreting both books.

Another flaw of the book is Noll’s choice of targets, although since I come from a dispensational and creationist background I am not the most unbiased of observers. I agree with many of his observations about fundamentalism, but I think that he has allowed his theology (specifically, his opposition to their theology) to shape his critique. As I was reading through the section in which he praised various groups for their efforts, I wondered why Noll was positive about these groups but negative about others. For example, he commends the theonomists for their work on politics (224-225). While I am not well read in the theonomist literature, it seems to me that they approach politics with the same methodology as those who receive the wrath of Noll: they dogmatically present their views based on their own view of the Bible. I would assume that Noll could explain the difference, but it is not apparent to me in the text.

There are a final critiques of the book. Noll does not point out that the culture as a whole has not been using its mind recently as it has in the past, so part of the problem of the evangelical mind is that it is simply following the culture. Most postmoderns do not think through a highly consistent worldview of postmodernism, for example. Another critique is more of a speculation, but I wonder if the situation really is as bad as Noll thinks it is. For example, in my secular undergraduate studies, my classics and Greek professor was an evangelical who attended the same church as I. He was highly respected in his field and was an expert in medicine in classical time.  But he engaged his beliefs in a variety of ways in his scholarship as he wrote about topics relating to faith in the early church and how that related to medicine. That is just one example, but I wonder how many others are like him who are doing what Noll wants, but who do not receive extensive attention. But once again, this is just speculation.

There are a few typos in the book, although they are not distracting and few in number. Examples include “word or[f] caution” (46) and “the lat[e] eighteenth century” (48).

Overall, the book is a helpful work to examine the state of the evangelical mind and how evangelicals have come to their current status. Noll is very perceptive on the inner workings and paradigms of thought for fundamentalists, and I think that open-minded and self-critical fundamentalists can learn from the book even though Noll does seem to not see his own presuppositions on occasion.

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