The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind PDF

Table of Contents Praise Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Preface PART 1 - THE SCANDAL CHAPTER 1 - The Contemporary Scandal Definitions Aspects of the Scandal Arguments CHAPTER 2 - Why the Scandal Matters Utility The Message of the...

Table of Contents Praise Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Preface PART 1 - THE SCANDAL CHAPTER 1 - The Contemporary Scandal Definitions Aspects of the Scandal Arguments CHAPTER 2 - Why the Scandal Matters Utility The Message of the Past Truth and Intellectual Heresy PART 2 - HOW THE SCANDAL HAS COME TO PASS CHAPTER 3 - The Evangelical Mind Takes Shape — Revival, Revolution, and a... Revivalism The Separation of Church and State A Christian-Cultural Synthesis Jonathan Edwards: Evangelical Intellectual CHAPTER 4 - The Evangelical Enlightenment The Enlightenment to the Rescue of Evangelicalism The Enlightenment and the Shape of Evangelical Thought The Enlightenment and the History of Evangelicalism after the Civil War The Intellectual Legacy of the Evangelical-American Cultural Synthesis CHAPTER 5 - The Intellectual Disaster of Fundamentalism The Transformation of the University Fundamentalism The Meaning of the Innovations The Lingering Effects of the Innovations Conclusions PART 3 - WHAT THE SCANDAL HAS MEANT CHAPTER 6 - Political Reflection William Jennings Bryan and Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Political Thought Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Political Reflection in Comparative Perspective Evangelical Political Reflection and Evangelicalism Stages in Evangelical Political Reflection Style and Content CHAPTER 7 - Thinking about Science The Nineteenth-Century Heritage The Impact of Fundamentalism PART 4 - HOPE? CHAPTER 8 - Is an Evangelical Intellectual Renaissance Underway? An Awakening Evangelical Mind Political Reflection The Situation in Science and Philosophy Conclusion CHAPTER 9 - Can the Scandal Be Scandalizes? Evangelicalism Evangelical Intellectuals Evangelicalism and the Intellectual Life Acknowledgements Index of Names and Subjects Index of Scripture References Mirabile mysterium declaratur hodie, innovantur naturae: Deus homo factus est, id, quod fuit, permansit, et quod non era, assumpsit, non commixtionem passus neque divisionem. (A wondrous mystery is proclaimed today; all natures are renewed: God has become human: He remained what He was, and what He was not he became, suffering neither confusion nor division.) Jacob Handl (1550-91), Mirabile mysterium  Copyright © 1994 by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 255 Jefferson Ave. S.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49503 First published jointly 1994 in the United States by Wm. Eerdmans Publishing Co. and in the U. K. by Inter-Varsity Press 38 De Montfort Street, Leicester LE1 7GP, England Paperback edition 1995 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. Printed in the United States of America 00 765 5 Library of Cong ress Catalog ing -in-Publication Data Noll, Mark A., 1946- The scandal of the evangelical mind / Mark A. Noll. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8028-4180-5 1. Evangelicalism — United States. 2. Christianity — United States — Forecasting. 3. Christianity and culture. I. Title. BR1642.U5N65 1994 280’.4’0973 — dc20 94-18843 CIP British Library Catalog uing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Inter-Varsity Press ISBN 0-85111-165-3 Unless otherwise indicated, all biblical quotations in this work are taken from the HOLY BIBLE: NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by the International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Bible Publishers. Inter-Varsity Press is the book-publishing division of the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship (formerly the Inter-Varsity Fellowship), a student movement linking Christian Unions in universities and colleges throughout the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, and a member movement of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. For information about local and national activities write to UCCF, 38 de Montfort Street, Leicester LE1 7GP. To the faculty and trustees of Wheaton College  Preface This book is an epistle from a wounded lover. As one who is in love with the life of the mind but who has also been drawn to faith in Christ through the love of evangelical Protestants, I find myself in a situation where wounding is commonplace. Although the thought has occurred to me regularly over the past two decades that, at least in the United States, it is simply impossible to be, with integrity, both evangelical and intellectual, this epistle is not a letter of resignation from the evangelical movement. It intends rather to be a cri du coeur on behalf of the intellectual life by one who, for very personal reasons, still embraces the Christian faith in an evangelical form. As one might expect from an evangelical on such a subject, this is not a thoroughly intellectual volume. It is rather a historical meditation in which sermonizing and the making of hypotheses vie with more ordinary exposition. It is meant to incite more than it is meant to inform. The notes are here to show where fuller academic treatments, a few of them by myself, may be found. Several of the chapters were first given as talks or lectures, although everything has been rewritten for this volume. The book is dedicated with gratitude and respect to my colleagues at Wheaton College, where we together fight the fights and inflict, sometimes on each other, the wounds that are the subject of this book.  PART 1 THE SCANDAL  CHAPTER 1 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.1 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.2 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. Definitions But now it is necessary to define more carefully the critical terms of the book, including “America,” “the (life of the) mind,” “evangelical,” and “anti-intellectual.” “America” Throughout the book, “America” will mostly mean the United States, even though the inclusion of Canada in the study of Christian developments in North America is an immensely rewarding effort. Occasional efforts will be made to include Canada in the pages that follow.3 But the structures and habits of evangelical thinking in Canada are just different enough from those in the United States to prohibit extensive treatment, even though that treatment would reveal helpful ways in which Canadian evangelicals have escaped some of the intellectual perils found in the United States and perhaps some ways in which Canadian evangelicals have had more difficulty than their counterparts in the United States at sustaining the life of the mind.4 “The Life of the Mind” By “the mind” or “the life of the mind,” I am not thinking primarily of theology as such. As I will suggest below, I do feel that contemporary evangelical theologians labor under several unusual difficulties that greatly reduce the importance their work should have in the evangelical community. But the effort to articulate a theology that is faithful both to the evangelical tradition and to modern standards of academic discourse is not in itself the primary problem for the evangelical mind. In fact, with the contemporary work of evangelical theologians from several different subtraditions — including William Abraham, Donald Bloesch, Gabriel Fackre, Richard Mouw, Thomas Oden, J. I. Packer, Clark Pinnock, Ronald Sider, David Wells, and William Willimon — North American evangelicals enjoy a rich theological harvest. Much the same could be said about advanced work in biblical scholarship, although, as a general rule, evangelical Bible scholars do not extend their insights into wider areas of thought as regularly or as fruitfully as do the best evangelical theologians.5 By an evangelical “life of the mind” I mean more the effort to think like a Christian — to think within a specifically Christian framework — across the whole spectrum of modern learning, including economics and political science, literary criticism and imaginative writing, historical inquiry and philosophical studies, linguistics and the history of science, social theory and the arts. Academic disciplines provide modern categories for the life of the mind, but the point is not simply whether evangelicals can learn how to succeed in the modern academy. The much more important matter is what it means to think like a Christian about the nature and workings of the physical world, the character of human social structures like government and the economy, the meaning of the past, the nature of artistic creation, and the circumstances attending our perception of the world outside ourselves. Failure to exercise the mind for Christ in these areas has become acute in the twentieth century. That failure is the scandal of the evangelical mind. “Evangelical” But what is an “evangelical,” and how might recent efforts to ascertain the scope of the North American evangelical constituency add to the urgency of this book? “Evangelicalism” is not, and never has been, an “-ism” like other Christian isms — for example, Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Presbyterianism, Anglicanism, or even Pentecostalism (where, despite many internal differences, the practice of sign gifts like tongues speaking provides a well-defined boundary). Rather, “evangelicalism” has always been made up of shifting movements, temporary alliances, and the lengthened shadows of individuals. All discussions of evangelicalism, therefore, are always both descriptions of the way things really are as well as efforts within our own minds to provide some order for a multifaceted, complex set of impulses and organizations. The basic evangelical impulses, however, have been quite clear from the mid-eighteenth century, when leaders like George Whitefield, John Wesley, Jonathan Edwards, and Nicholas von Zinzendorf worked to revive churches in northern Europe and North America and so brought “evangelicalism” into existence. In one of the most useful general definitions of the phenomenon, the British historian David Bebbington has identified the key ingredients of evangelicalism as conversionism (an emphasis on the “new birth” as a life-changing religious experience), biblicism (a reliance on the Bible as ultimate religious authority), activism (a concern for sharing the faith), and crucicentrism (a focus on Christ’s redeeming work on the cross).6 But these evangelical impulses have never by themselves yielded cohesive, institutionally compact, easily definable, well-coordinated, or clearly demarcated groups of Christians. Rather, the history of these evangelical impulses has always been marked by shifts in which groups, leaders, institutions, goals, concerns, opponents, and aspirations become more or less visible and more or less influential over time. Institutions that may emphasize evangelical distinctives at one point in time may not do so at another. Yet there have always been denominations, local congregations, and voluntary bodies that served as institutional manifestations of these impulses.7 One thing seems clear from several surveys by social scientists that are now being carried out with a sophistication unknown as recently as five years ago. For both the United States and Canada, evangelicals now constitute the largest and most active component of religious life in North America. For the United States, a recent national survey showed that over 30 percent of 4,001 respondents were attached to evangelical denominations, that is, to denominations that stress the need for a supernatural new birth, profess faith in the Bible as a revelation from God, encourage spreading the gospel through missions and personal evangelism, and emphasize the saving character of Jesus’ death and resurrection.8 Adherents to largely white, evangelical Protestant denominations by themselves make up a proportion of the population roughly the same size as the Roman Catholic constituency, but quite a bit larger than the total number of adherents to mainline Protestant denominations. The same survey showed, moreover, that a much higher proportion of adherents to evangelical denominations practice their faith actively than do either Catholics or mainline Protestants. Based on queries concerning personal religious commitment, church attendance, prayer, belief in life after death, and other matters of faith and practice, the survey shows over 61 percent of the “white evangelicals” and over 63 percent of the “black Protestants” rank in the highest categories of religious activity, percentages far higher than for mainline Protestants, Roman Catholics, the Orthodox, Jews, or nontraditional religions. Thus, not only is a very large proportion of the American population definably evangelical, but that proportion of the population is the nation’s most actively involved set of believers. For Canada, a recent in-depth survey showed that individuals holding evangelical beliefs made up a larger proportion of the Canadian population than most pundits had thought. In an interesting variation on most surveys in the United States, this Canadian study enumerated Catholics and Protestants together. It found that 13 percent of the national population was active, committed, self- identified evangelicals (one-fourth of that number Catholics), while another 11 percent of the population (one-half of that number Catholics) held evangelical beliefs about the Bible, the person and work of Christ, the necessity for personal salvation, and the like but were only occasional participants in formal church life.9 The most intriguing result of such surveys for this book is that, on any given Sunday in the United States and Canada, a majority of those who attend church hold evangelical beliefs and follow norms of evangelical practice, yet in neither country do these great numbers of practicing evangelicals appear to play significant roles in either nation’s intellectual life. What a British Roman Catholic said at midcentury after looking back over more than one hundred years of rapid Catholic growth in Britain may be said equally about evangelicals in North America: “On the one hand there is the enormous growth of the Church, and on the other its almost complete lack of influence.”10 “Anti-Intellectual” Is it simply that evangelicals are “anti-intellectual”? Maybe so, but the term itself is a problem. The temptation has been great in historical analyses of evangelical, pentecostal, fundamentalist, or pietistic movements simply to label adherents “anti-intellectual” and then move on to other considerations. Some classic books have come close to adopting this procedure. Ronald Knox’s scintillating study Enthusiasm, for example, contrasted traditional Roman Catholic thinking (where grace perfects nature) with the approach of “enthusiasm” (where grace destroys nature and replaces it). Of the “Enthusiast” (a category that for him included most evangelicals), Knox concluded as follows: “That God speaks to us through the intellect is a notion which he may accept on paper, but fears, in practice, to apply.”11 Closer to the American situation, Richard Hofstadter ’s Pulitzerprize-winning book Anti- Intellectualism in American Life identified “the evangelical spirit” as one of the prime sources of American anti-intellectualism. For Hofstadter, there was a common reasoning process by which evangelicals had chosen to evacuate the mind: One begins with the hardly contestable proposition that religious faith is not, in the main, propagated by logic or learning. One moves on from this to the idea that it is best propagated (in the judgment of Christ and on historical evidence) by men who have been unlearned and ignorant. It seems to follow from this that the kind of wisdom and truth possessed by such men is superior to what learned and cultivated minds have. In fact, learning and cultivation appear to be handicaps in the propagation of faith. And since the propagation of faith is the most important task before man, those who are as “ignorant as babes” have, in the most fundamental virtue, greater strength than men who have addicted themselves to logic and learning. Accordingly, though one shrinks from a bald statement of the conclusion, humble ignorance is far better as a human quality than a cultivated mind. At bottom, this proposition, despite all the difficulties that attend it, has been eminently congenial both to American evangelicalism and to American democracy.12 The anti-intellectual attitude described by Knox and Hofstadter has not been absent from the history of American evangelicals, but its description may be too simple. True, evangelicals have often contrasted the intuitions of the Spirit with the mechanics of worldly learning. There may exist, however, a genuinely Christian justification for this contrast that need not lead as directly to intellectually disastrous consequences as Hofstadter and Knox suggest. In any event, the question for American evangelicals is not just the presence of an anti-intellectual bias but the sometimes vigorous prosecution of the wrong sort of intellectual life. That is, various modes of intellectual activity may fit better or worse with the shape of Christianity itself. As I will try to show in the chapters that follow, the scandal of evangelical thinking in America has just as often resulted from a way of pursuing knowledge that does not accord with Christianity as it has been an “anti-intellectual” desire to play the fool for Christ. Aspects of the Scandal The scandal of the evangelical mind has at least three dimensions — cultural, institutional, and theological — each of which deserves brief mention here before receiving more extensive treatment in the chapters that follow. Cultural To put it most simply, the evangelical ethos is activistic, populist, pragmatic, and utilitarian. It allows little space for broader or deeper intellectual effort because it is dominated by the urgencies of the moment. In addition, habits of mind that in previous generations may have stood evangelicals in good stead have in the twentieth century run amock. As the Canadian scholar N. K. Clifford once aptly summarized the matter: “The Evangelical Protestant mind has never relished complexity. Indeed its crusading genius, whether in religion or politics, has always tended toward an over-simplification of issues and the substitution of inspiration and zeal for critical analysis and serious reflection. The limitations of such a mind-set were less apparent in the relative simplicity of a rural frontier society.”13 Recently two very good, but also very disquieting, books have illustrated the weaknesses of evangelical intellectual life. Both are from historians who teach at the University of Wisconsin. Ronald Numbers’s book The Creationists (Knopf, 1992) explains how a popular belief known as “creationism” — a theory that the earth is ten thousand or less years old — has spread like wildfire in our century from its humble beginnings in the writings of Ellen White, the founder of Seventh-day Adventism, to its current status as a gospel truth embraced by tens of millions of Bible-believing evangelicals and fundamentalists around the world. Paul Boyer ’s When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Harvard University Press, 1992) documents the remarkable popularity among American Bible-believing Christians — again mostly evangelicals and fundamentalists — of radical apocalyptic speculation. Boyer concludes that Christian fascination with the end of the world has existed for a very long time, but also that recent evangelical fixation on such matters — where contemporary events are labeled with great self-confidence as the fulfillment of biblical prophecies heralding the End of Time — has been particularly intense. For those who doubt the continuing domination of this way of thinking among evangelicals, it is worth remembering the Gulf War of 1991. Within weeks of the outbreak of this conflict, evangelical publishers provided a spate of books featuring efforts to read this latest Middle East crisis as a direct fulfillment of biblical prophecy heralding the end of the world.14 The books came to various conclusions, but they all shared the disconcerting conviction that the best way of providing moral judgment about what was happening in the Middle East was not to study carefully what was going on in the Middle East. Rather, they featured a kind of Bible study that drew attention away from careful analysis of the complexities of Middle Eastern culture or the tangled twentieth-century history of the region toward speculation about some of the most esoteric and widely debated passages of the Bible. Moreover, that speculation was carried on with only slight attention to the central themes of the Bible (like the divine standard of justice applied in all human situations), which are crystal clear and about which there is wide agreement among evangelicals and other theologically conservative Christians. How did the evangelical public respond to these books? It responded by immediately vaulting several of these titles to the top of religious best-seller lists.15 Both Numbers and Boyer are first-rate scholars who write with sympathy for their subjects. Neither is an antireligious zealot. But their books tell a sad tale: Numbers describes how a fatally flawed interpretive scheme of the sort that no responsible Christian teacher in the history of the church ever endorsed before this century came to dominate the minds of American evangelicals on scientific questions; Boyer discusses how an equally unsound hermeneutic has been used with wanton abandon to dominate twentieth-century evangelical thinking about world affairs. These are exhaustively researched books by truly professional historians who have few bones to pick with basic Christian teachings. They share in common the picture of an evangelical world almost completely adrift in using the mind for careful thought about the world. As the authors describe them, evangelicals — bereft of self-criticism, intellectual subtlety, or an awareness of complexity — are blown about by every wind of apocalyptic speculation and enslaved to the cruder spirits of populist science. In reality, Numbers and Boyer show even more — they show millions of evangelicals thinking they are honoring the Scriptures, yet interpreting the Scriptures on questions of science and world affairs in ways that fundamentally contradict the deeper, broader, and historically well- established meanings of the Bible itself. The culture Numbers and Boyer describe is one in which careful thinking about the world has never loomed large. To be sure, it is also a culture where intense, detailed, and precise efforts have been made to understand the Bible. But it is not a culture where the same effort has been expended to understand the world or, even more important, the processes by which wisdom from Scripture should be brought into relation with knowledge about the world. The problem is intellectual, but it grows out of the historical development of America’s distinctly evangelical culture. Most of this book is an effort to describe the formation of that culture. Institutional Institutional dimensions to the scandal of the evangelical mind are most obvious for colleges and seminaries, but they are also a feature of other intellectual efforts. Evangelicals, for example, have always been astute at using the periodical press for propagation, networking, edification, self- promotion, and debate. Throughout the nineteenth century and into the early years of the twentieth, noteworthy intellectual endeavor maintained a solid, if always minority, place in the evangelical press.16 Throughout this century, however, the intellectual component in the evangelical press has shriveled nearly to the vanishing point. A contrast with other religious traditions is in order. Over the last twenty years, a number of new journals have been formed, either out of specific religious communities or with specific religious intentions, in order to address selected features of modern culture with deadly (though sometimes also comic) seriousness. Examples of these journals include the Lutheran Forum, the Catholic-related New Oxford Review and The Crisis, the theological journal Pro Ecclesia, and the journal of political affairs First Things. By contrast, over the same period, evangelical periodicals that once gave at least some of their pages to intellectual considerations of nature, modern culture, and the arts — like the Reformed Journal, HIS, and Eternity — have gone out of business. Christianity Today, which, for a decade or so after its founding in 1956, aspired to intellectual leadership, has been transformed into a journal of news and middle-brow religious commentary in order simply to stay in business. The result is that, at the current time, there is not a single evangelical periodical in the United States or Canada that exists for the purpose of seriously considering the worlds of nature, society, politics, or the arts in the way that the Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, or the Washington Post’s National Weekly Edition do for the general public.17 Difficulties for Christian thinking in the world of evangelical higher education may be even more profound than those found in the evangelical press. These difficulties, however, are complex, for the myriad Bible schools, liberal arts colleges, and theological seminaries that make up evangelical higher education present a landscape of great diversity. These institutions were created for specifically religious purposes; many are successful, some remarkably so, in promoting those goals. Virtually without exception, however, they were not designed to promote thorough Christian reflection on the nature of the world, society, and the arts. It is little wonder they miss so badly that for which they do not aim. Diffused educational energies. Part of the problem is the diffused structure of evangelical culture, which promotes a rich breadth, but also an appalling thinness, in educational institutions.18 Evangelicals spend enormous sums on higher education, but the diffusion of resources among hundreds of colleges and seminaries means that almost none can begin to afford a research faculty, theological or otherwise. The problem is compounded by the syndrome of the reinvented wheel. Popular authority figures like Bill Bright, Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson all assume that no previously existing educational enterprise is capable of meeting the demands of the hour. Despite the absence of formal educational credentials, each man presumes to establish a Christian university. Small wonder that evangelical thinking so often appears naïve, inept, or tendentious. Colleges have a different goal from the research universities. Most important, they function under entirely different reward structures. At evangelical colleges, professors teach broadly to undergraduates and try to do so in ways that are generally Christian. The entire point of such institutions is to provide general guidance, general orientation, and general introduction. They are not designed to do the work that sets intellectual agendas, but to synthesize the work of intellectual leaders elsewhere. Associations such as the Christian College Coalition and the Christian College Consortium do some tasks very well, but they are not very helpful in bridging the gap between general learning and first-order scholarship because they represent the interests of only the collegiate side. Their goals are not scholarship per se but the support of their constituent institutions, strong and weak. To be sure, a few evangelical colleges — among others, Calvin, Messiah, Redeemer, Samford, Steubenville, and Wheaton — have made some progress in the postwar years at promoting scholarship alongside the more general goals of broad learning and basic Christian orientation. But the distance remaining before such places become first-rate reservoirs of thought is still very great. A recent essay by the Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow, himself sympathetic to evangelical convictions, highlights some of the problems of the evangelical colleges. Wuthnow pointed out that the deep structures of modern intellectual life are shaped largely by the works of non- or anti- Christians. Nineteenth-century theorists like Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Freud established the intellectual conventions of the modern university. Their legacy, for good and for ill, provides the framework in which Christians do their advanced studies.19 The same is true for the principal theorists of the twentieth century — Milton Friedman, Ferdinand Saussure, Ferdinand Braudel, E. P. Thompson, Thomas Kuhn, Jacques Derrida — none of whom is concerned about the Christian implications of his work; yet they have set the agenda for what goes on throughout the academy. Inadequate resources. More than just the framework of modern intellectual life keeps evangelical colleges from promoting first-order learning. The widely varying distribution of academic resources also is crucial. A handful of national research universities act as gatekeepers, intellectual and otherwise, for most of the learned professions. If evangelicals are to be academically certified, they must pass through those gates. But then, if they would mount convincing efforts to reassess the academic landscape from a specifically Christian perspective, they must do so with resources that cannot begin to compare with those enjoyed by the major research universities. As Wuthnow puts it, “Those who would wish to see a distinctively evangelical scholarly orientation advanced are at a tremendous competitive disadvantage. To pit even the strong intellectual aspirations of a Wheaton College or a Calvin College, or the massive fund-raising network of a Liberty University, against the multibillion dollar endowments of a Princeton or a Harvard reveals the vast extent of this deficit in resources.”20 Small institutions with modest budgets can still exert a life-changing influence on their students. But by their nature they are not designed for the kinds of patient, creative study that alters the way we think about the world and ourselves. Seminaries versus colleges. Another part of the institutional problem in evangelical higher education concerns the division of labor between seminaries and colleges. Evangelical seminaries, of which there are at least a dozen with substantial resources and large student bodies and several score of more modest size, are the institutional descendents of the theological schools founded in the first third of the nineteenth century. Andover (1808), Princeton (1812), and Yale (1822) led the way in training ministers for the rapidly expanding national population. 21 But by the Civil War almost all major denominational families in the United States had founded seminaries for the training of ministers. Before the Civil War these institutions provided the most advanced training of any schools in the United States. After the Civil War the rise of the modern university pushed the seminaries toward the intellectual backwater. By 1900, advanced study at universities had developed far beyond that done at seminaries. The seminaries — then and now — have done their job well. They have served as effective training grounds for Christian workers and were one of the reasons why Canadian and American missionary efforts possessed the personnel to accomplish their great tasks. The autonomous seminary, separate from college or university and often under the direct control of a denomination, was a singularly American creation. It has exerted a profound influence on the shape of Christianity in North America. Its existence, however, has also created problems for more general intellectual life. If seminaries specialized in theology and encouraged systematic reflection on Christian interaction with the world, what religious role remained for the colleges? Should colleges become miniature seminaries in focusing their curriculum on biblical and theological subjects? Was theological reflection, and consideration of how revelation affects other areas of thought, to be left to the seminaries? To this day, professors at evangelical seminaries enjoy the most thorough technical training of all professional academics identified with evangelical institutions, and their work is read far more widely in evangelical circles than work from professors in the evangelical colleges. The problem for Christian thinking does not rise from the academic quality of seminary faculties, which has been steadily rising since the Second World War. The problem concerns rather the connections between theology and other forms of learning. The American pattern of seminary formation led to a situation where experts in Scripture and theology worked in different institutions from those trained in the wider range of academic subjects. Nothing exists for evangelicals in the United States like the universities of Britain and the Continent, where the most serious work in Bible and theology goes on next to serious work in the other academic disciplines.22 In the United States, the fourfold institutional division between Bible schools, Christian liberal arts colleges, evangelical seminaries, and secular research universities has preserved important values. Independent Bible schools, colleges, and seminaries, for example, are institutionally insulated from at least some of the secularizing pressures that prevail in the modern research university. But a price has been paid for such religious security. The price is a loss of first-level cross-fertilization between theological reflection and reflection in the arts and sciences. Evangelical seminaries have often enjoyed brilliant biblical scholars, but these scholars are isolated from comparably brilliant Christians in the evangelical colleges (whose mandate is broad and general) and in the research universities (whose mandate is narrow and deep). All teachers in the evangelical institutions suffer under a further problem created by the absence of non-Christian scholars, or Christian scholars who are not evangelical Protestants. Despite good intentions, it is almost always easier to misconstrue the arguments of others if they are not present. The existence of separate institutional structures preserves autonomy and may be safe socially. What is lost, however, is an ideal of Christian intellectual life in which theologians, biblical scholars, and scholars from other disciplines work in constant connection with each other. In such an ideal, scholars in Scripture would provide the others with fruits of their labor in biblical study and theology. The others would offer biblical scholars interpretations of modern learning and creative ventures in applying the results of their labors to Christian teaching. Both together would reflect on the foundational commitments and philosophical presuppositions that shape inquiry in every field of thought. And, at least in theory, such work could be done with the specific aim of promoting first- order reflection about the whole world under the lordship of the one true God. Hints of this ideal have been realized in evangelical life, but only as scholars from various institutions have pooled their work and reached out across institutional barriers to others (evangelicals of their own sort, other sorts of evangelicals, other sorts of Christians, and non- Christians). More generally, however, the divided structures of evangelical learning have nurtured a divided evangelical mentality. Attempts to think — both profoundly and as Christians — about history, nature, the arts, and society have been frustrated by the very success of an institutional arrangement that maintains several mutually distinct forms of academ endeavor. A shortage of scholars. Institutional dimensions of the intellectual scandal do not exhaust the difficulties for evangelical higher education. A further problem is created by the generations-long failure of the evangelical community to nurture the life of the mind. That failure has created what William Hull, provost of Samford University, has called “the tragic imbalance which now exists according to which the dominant religion in America is almost destitute of intellectual firepower.” As Hull describes it, the desire to carry “the Christian dimension to the heart of the learning process” must advance realistically. College administrators and intellectuals in the churches must face the sober realities that Hull encountered when he sought to define such a goal at his own university: Long experience in academic personnel recruitment convinces me that a sufficiently large pool of qualified candidates to staff [an] entire University faculty with Christian scholars... is just not out there.... Suffice it to say that the church has failed to define its intellectual responsibilities in compelling terms, to call out from among its own those gifted to discharge this neglected stewardship, and to provide such budding scholars with support for the kind of advanced training that will equip them to do credible work on so exacting a frontier. The very few who decide to make the integration of Christianity and scholarship a lifelong calling usually do so at their own initiative, with precious little encouragement either from the church or from the academy. Ironically, the handful who do express an early interest in the vocation of Christian scholar are usually shunted into seminary for graduate theological study, producing a surplus of those qualified to teach religion but a paucity of those trained to teach the other ninety-five percent of the academic disciplines as they relate to the Christian faith.... We must not deceive ourselves into supposing that there is a large guild of seasoned Christian scholars somewhere on which we can draw in staffing our University faculty.23 Graduate school. The problem of recruiting faculty who are able to do their work both with rigor as scholars and with savvy as Christians relates directly to yet another difficulty for institutions of evangelical higher learning. The graduate programs that qualify individuals to teach in colleges and seminaries are almost uniformly uninterested in the questions of Christian perspective that are prerequisite for first-order evangelical thinking. With the exception of a few theologians who may have finished their most advanced work in evangelical seminaries, the professors at evangelical (or Catholic) institutions have done their most advanced study at places little concerned about what, at evangelical colleges and seminaries, should be the most important matters. Nowhere in the Western world is it possible to find an institution for graduate training — that is, for the training required to teach at evangelical institutions of higher learning — that exists for the primary purpose of promoting Christian scholarship defined in a Protestant, evangelical way. Thankfully, there are a few Roman Catholic and Jewish institutions where Catholic or Jewish understandings of God and the world receive careful attention, and evangelical scholars have sometimes made use of such institutions. But for most of the faculty members at most evangelical institutions of higher learning, to ask in the course of their most advanced training the deepest and highest questions about the relationship between God and the world would be irrelevant, or it would create prejudice against them. Yet, once called to evangelical institutions, part of the task of these same scholars is to guide students and publish research that asks precisely those questions. In sum, the scandal of the evangelical mind arises from the specific institutional arrangements of evangelical higher learning in North America. Even if an evangelical were convinced that deep, probing study of the world should be undertaken as a specifically Christian task, it is by no means self-evident where that task could be pursued. Theological Finally, there is a theological dimension to the scandal of the evangelical mind. For an entire Christian community to neglect, generation after generation, serious attention to the mind, nature, society, the arts — all spheres created by God and sustained for his own glory — may be, in fact, sinful. Os Guinness has recently called attention to this dimension in a memorable passage worth quoting at length: Evangelicals have been deeply sinful in being anti-intellectual ever since the 1820s and 1830s. For the longest time we didn’t pay the cultural price for that because we had the numbers, the social zeal, and the spiritual passion for the gospel. But today we are beginning to pay the cultural price. And you can see that most evangelicals simply don’t think. For example, there has been no serious evangelical public philosophy in this century.... It has always been a sin not to love the Lord our God with our minds as well as our hearts and souls.... We have excused this with a degree of pietism and pretend [ing] that this is something other than what it is — that is, sin.... Evangelicals need to repent of their refusal to think Christianly and to develop the mind of Christ.24 The scandal of the evangelical mind is a scandal from whichever direction it is viewed. It is a scandal arising from the historical experience of an entire subculture. It is a scandal to which the shape of evangelical institutions have contributed. Most of all, it is a scandal because it scorns the good gifts of a loving God. The rest of this book is an effort to show why this scandal emerged as it did in North America and how it might be possible to minimize its pernicious effects. Arguments The chapters that follow makes several arguments about why, in the late twentieth century, American evangelicals experience relative intellectual poverty. The most general of these arguments suggests that from at least the mid-eighteenth century, American evangelicalism has existed primarily as an affectional and organizational movement. The very character of the revival that made evangelical religion into a potent force in North America weakened its intellectual power. The career of Jonathan Edwards — the greatest evangelical mind in American history and one of the truly seminal thinkers in Christian history of the last few centuries — supports this argument, for despite his own remarkable efforts as an evangelical thinker, Edwards had no intellectual successors. Yet because of its location in American history, evangelicalism in the last part of the eighteenth century and the early years of the nineteenth did develop an elaborate intellectual system. That system added selected elements from the Revolutionary and democratic movements of the late eighteenth century to historic Protestant emphases. The result was a distinctly evangelical approach to the life of the mind that featured the philosophy of common sense, the moral instincts of republicanism, the science of Francis Bacon, and a disposition toward evidential reasoning in theology. This system had significant intellectual shortcomings, but these shortcomings were not noticed (and may not have been too important) so long as Americans were preoccupied with constructing a stable society. The flaws in the system became more apparent when evangelicals responded to the new social and intellectual conditions of the mid to late nineteenth century. Fundamentalism, dispensational premillennialism, the Higher Life movement, and Pentecostalism were all evangelical strategies of survival in response to the religious crises of the late nineteenth century. In different ways each preserved something essential of the Christian faith. But together they were a disaster for the life of the mind. This disaster could be explored from several different angles, but I have chosen to address it in separate chapters on evangelical political reflection and evangelical attitudes toward science, two intellectual areas that have suffered among evangelicals in the twentieth century, not so much for evangelical anti-intellectualism as for the wrong kind of intellectual attention. It has taken two full generations to begin to recover from the intellectual disaster of the late nineteenth century. In the meantime, new cultural and intellectual problems have arisen for which evangelical intellectual traditions offer only scant resources. Summarized like this, the arguments of this book paint a bleak picture. Along the way, however, a brighter light will appear, for it is a minor paradox worthy of the larger paradoxes of Christianity itself that the historical circumstances resulting in the decline of evangelical thinking were the very conditions that sustained the possibility of its renewal. Those possibilities are the subject of the last two chapters, which examine, first, recent efforts by evangelicals to overcome the neglect of the mind and, second, the resources from within the evangelical tradition itself that may counteract the baleful influences of the scandal. Of those resources, the most potent is yet another scandal, though one with an entirely different consequence for those who willingly embrace it. It is, in short, the scandal of the Cross, which may yet overcome the scandal of the evangelical mind. The most thoroughly Christian analysis of the intellectual situation for modern American evangelicals comes from an unexpected source. Charles Malik, a Lebanese diplomat, scholar, and Eastern Orthodox Christian, was invited in 1980 to open the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College with an address. Few of those assembled on that day were prepared for the acute wisdom of Malik’s remarks. I was there but hardly realized at the time how much a decade or more of study would move me to reinforce, with halting historical argumentation, what he put so succinctly as the manifesto of a Christian intellectual to his friends in the faith. Malik’s address was powerful because it focused on the question of ends more directly than the question of means. With great gentleness and magnanimity of soul, but also with great courage, Malik took us evangelicals straight to the woodshed. First he defined what was at stake in the modern university: “At the heart of all the problems facing Western civilization — the general nervousness and restlessness, the dearth of grace and beauty and quiet and peace of soul, the manifold blemishes and perversions of personal character; problems of the family and of social relations in general, problems of economics and politics, problems of the media, problems affecting the school itself and the church itself, problems in the international order — at the heart of the crisis in Western civilization lies the state of the mind and the spirit of the universities.” Malik went on to suggest that since the dilemmas of modern life were intellectual dilemmas of the sort that universities exist to explore, it was important for Christians to realize the magnitude of their intellectual task — “The problem is not only to win souls but to save minds. If you win the whole world and lose the mind of the world, you will soon discover you have not won the world. Indeed it may turn out that you have actually lost the world.” But then Malik turned to look at the contribution of evangelicals. He was not unappreciative of the intellectual exertions some evangelicals had been making, but his words described the nature of the intellectual challenge with uncommon force: The greatest danger besetting American Evangelical Christianity is the danger of anti- intellectualism. The mind as to its greatest and deepest reaches is not cared for enough. This cannot take place apart from profound immersion for a period of years in the history of thought and the spirit. People are in a hurry to get out of the university and start earning money or serving the church or preaching the Gospel. They have no idea of the infinite value of spending years of leisure in conversing with the greatest minds and souls of the past, and thereby ripening and sharpening and enlarging their powers of thinking. The result is that the arena of creative thinking is abdicated and vacated to the enemy. Who among the evangelicals can stand up to the great secular or naturalistic or atheistic scholars on their own terms of scholarship and research? Who among the evangelical scholars is quoted as a normative source by the greatest secular authorities on history or philosophy or psychology or sociology or politics? Does your mode of thinking have the slightest chance of becoming the dominant mode of thinking in the great universities of Europe and America which stamp your entire civilization with their own spirit and ideas? It will take a different spirit altogether to overcome this great danger of anti- intellectualism.... Even if you start now on a crash program in this and other domains, it will be a century at least before you catch up with the Harvards and Tuebingens and the Sorbonnes, and think of where these universities will be then! For the sake of greater effectiveness in witnessing to Jesus Christ Himself, as well as for their own sakes, the Evangelicals cannot afford to keep on living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence.25 This book is a historical footnote in support of Malik’s sage words. It is undertaken with the conviction that Malik was exactly right — fidelity to Jesus Christ demands from evangelicals a more responsible intellectual existence than we have practiced throughout much of our history.  CHAPTER 2 Why the Scandal Matters So what? might be a characteristically evangelical response. So what if American evangelicals commit themselves much more thoroughly to creating television networks than to creating universities? So what if evangelical activism allows scant room for the cultivation of the mind? So what if evangelical populism regularly verges on anti-intellectualism? What — from the standpoint of essential Christianity — is at stake in letting the mind go to waste? Objections to the proposition that evangelicals should repent for not cultivating the mind deserve to be taken seriously. In the first instance, the history of Christianity in North America might be read to show how useful it is for believers to neglect the life of the mind. In the United States, evangelicals have given themselves to problem solving and the accomplishments of know-how. And has not this strategy turned out well? While European churches over the last centuries have descended into lifeless formalism, and while America’s mainline churches — with their aspirations to learned culture — have shrunk dramatically over the last decades, America’s self-confessed evangelicals have become more numerous, more vocal, and more visible. While others were taking care of the thinking, we evangelicals have been activists in missions and reform. Would not the state of the church around the world today suggest that we have chosen the better way? An even more substantial objection grows from a consideration of the modern academy. Surely evangelicals are better off avoiding the political in-fighting, manifest secularization, power mongering, and ideological warfare that so often characterize modern academic life and that have been the subject of sharp public criticism in recent years.26 If evangelicals inhabit a brackish intellectual backwater, they are still spared the perils of a tumultuous sea upon which ships are going nowhere. A great modern university might keep the sort of inscription that still adorns Kinsey Hall on the campus of the University of California at Los Angeles — “Psalm 119:18. Open thou mine eyes that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law.” But the reality of what occurs in the research universities often mocks the pieties of earlier generations. When this argument is made with Christian subtlety — as it has been made, for instance, in a recent apology for teaching-centered higher education by Mark Schwehn of Valparaiso University — the argument carries weight.27 Schwehn’s case for the virtues of attending to students as people as opposed to the pursuit of research as an end in itself, for historically anchored religious conviction over ultra-chic ideological posturing, is compelling. The weight of such an argument means that an appeal for intellectual effort must be precise. In appealing for Christian scholarship, the point is not primarily academic respectability, and certainly not the mindless pursuit of publication for its own sake that bedevils the modern university. The point is rather that the comprehensive reality of Christianity itself demands specifically Christian consideration of the world we inhabit, whether that consideration is of social theory, the history of science, other historical changes, the body, the arts, literature, or more. Christian appeals for learning should not ask for a downgrading of teaching, an elitist rejection of insights from ordinary people, or an aestheticism that excludes all but the cognoscenti. They should ask rather that explorations into the broader and deeper reaches of the intellect be considered a complement to, rather than competition against, person-oriented, teaching-focused, and democratically inspired intellectual life. The most serious objection to the promotion of Christian learning comes, however, from the Scriptures. The words of Jesus that commend a childlike spirit or that relativize the wisdom of the world provoke sober reflection. “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth,” is the prayer recorded in Matthew 11:25-26, “because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure.” An even stronger check to the unqualified pursuit of knowledge comes from the apostle Paul, who, with cutting force, told the Corinthians why they should not swarm for the wisdom of the world: “Think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things — and the things that are not — to nullify the things that are...” (1 Cor. 1:26-28). The force of such passages is underscored by the undeniable fact that higher learning has often been a snare to faith. In the first instance, the conclusions that intellectuals have reached about the human condition or the structures of the world have often undermined Christian beliefs. More damaging to Christianity than the things learned, however, is pride in learning itself. The kind of blunt observation that Martyn Lloyd-Jones offered to a group of college students in 1969 — “If you are out for intellectual respectability you will soon get into trouble in your faith”28 — lacks nuance, but it also reflects hard-won wisdom. The world of learning is a treacherous place. Pride of intellectual accomplishment is a real threat to humble faith. Intellectuals are susceptible to a temptation to trust in their own wisdom as a substitute for trusting in the “foolishness” of the gospel. Appeals for learning must acknowledge the seriousness of these objections. At the same time, however, Christian appeals for Christian learning are able to show how resources of the faith itself justify an unpretentious, humble pursuit of knowledge. Paul ended his recommendation of “the foolish things of the world” by stating his main concerns: that “no one may boast before him” (v. 29), that the Corinthians would recognize that in Christ is found the ultimate “wisdom from God” (v. 30), and that they would cultivate the habit of “boast[ing] in the Lord” (v. 31). Learning may have a greater tendency to inculcate pride than some other human activities, but only relatively so. Business executives who boast in their firms, parents who boast in their children, gardeners who boast in their tomatoes, patriots who boast in their nations — all are called, with scholars who boast in their books, to subordinate the object of their affections to the absolute glory that belongs to God alone. A Christian appeal for Christian learning also will not presume that learning is the ultimate or only value. Instead, by following Paul’s precepts in 1 Corinthians 12:14-26, the Christian who is committed to the life of the mind will regard the tasks to which other believers are called with the same respect that he or she accords to the intellectual life. Just as, in the apostle’s phrase, “the eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you,”’ so the scholar cannot say to the illiterate believers, “I don’t need you.” And vice versa. Evangelical culture in America has run to antagonistic polarities: conversion to the exclusion of gradual growth in grace, the immediate experience of the Holy Spirit instead of the contemplation of God in the created realm, the prizing of popular wisdom over against pronouncements from authorities, a fascination with heaven while slighting attention to earth, a devotion to the supernatural and a neglect of the natural. A Christian appeal for Christian learning does not ask for these polarities to be reversed — for example, to have the natural exclude the supernatural or the present exclude the future. It calls rather for the mutual interdependence of the body, a reunion of characteristics that American experience has ruthlessly divorced, and a willingness to acknowledge that the sovereign Christ can be exalted by humble activity in every legitimate sphere of human life, including the life of the mind. The importance of cultivating the mind for Christ can also be seen more generally by realizing the practical matters at stake in such activity, by heeding the weight of two different historical arguments, and — most important — by attending to the truth concerning God, the world, and ourselves. Utility Two questions highlight the reasons why attention to the mind is an intensely practical matter. Apart from all concern for what is true, or what the church has done historically with respect to the intellect, believers in the modern world should recognize that the thinking of Christians is a matter of immensely pragmatic significance. First is a question with great practical implications. Who will be our tutors, the ones who teach us and our children about life? The institutions of learned culture and the great engine of the American mass media are the two prime contenders for this task in our world. The universities nourish the thinkers who propose grand paradigms through which we examine the world. To mention only one of several possible examples, the related problems of medical ethics and equitable provision of health care are immensely complex issues. They also bear, directly or indirectly, on Christian values at every point. Yet evangelicals have not been in the habit of thinking long and hard about the ramifications of such matters. Thomas Harris, chair of the department of biomedical engineering at Vanderbilt University, states succinctly the problem with that inattention: “I fear evangelical and conservative Christianity is not coming to grips with these issues, particularly within higher education.”29 The same could be said about many other issues of our day — principles to guide foreign relations with the troubled nations of the formerly Communist world; insights into the complicated questions of human understanding that currently plague every sphere of academic endeavor; criteria by which to support (or dismantle) programs for providing the jobs that mean so much for human dignity (and, for the church, a way to support its many activities); and means to pacify the racial tensions that at the end of the twentieth century constitute the most obvious threats to peaceful civilization over the whole world. These are all issues that require two things if Christians are to bring the love of Jesus into the modern world as it really is — first, profound study of the issues themselves; second, study informed by profoundly Christian convictions. The world of popular culture looks very different from the worlds of academia and professional think tanks, yet popular culture provides as much instruction for our daily lives as do the universities. David Letterman, George Lucas, the producers of MTV, and the movers and shakers of Hollywood offer a never-ending series of flashy stimulants that have a profound intellectual effect. Each of us is developing a mind, with which we reason about all areas of life — political allegiance as well as Christian conversion, the meaning of money as well as the meaning of the Bible, the effects of democracy as well as the effects of sin. Who will teach us how to reason about these matters? Who will be our guides pointing us to truth and light? If evangelicals do not take seriously the larger world of the intellect, we say, in effect, that we want our minds to be shaped by the conventions of our modern universities and the assumptions of Madison Avenue, instead of by God and the servants of God. But if we take this action by inaction, we are saying that we want our lives to be shaped by cultural forces — including intellectual forces — that contradict the heart of our religion. A second, related question asks how we will live in the world. This too is an intensely intellectual question. How we live in the world depends in large measure on how we think about the world. For contemporary Christians of all sorts it is a very easy matter simply to adopt the herd instincts of mass popular culture — to assume that life exists as a series of opportunities for pleasure, self-expression, and the increase of comfort. But it is also possible as Christians to take the other extreme, to think that the world through which we move is just an unreal shadow preparing the way for our home beyond the skies. Such thinking is not altogether wrong. The Christian belief in eternity is one of the most important of our convictions. At the same time, not to think about the ways in which life can be lived because of God and for God is to cheapen a whole realm of existence. In contrast, to accept life in this world as a gift from God, to live as though a deeper understanding of existence leads to a deeper understanding of God, requires dedicated and persistent thought, even as it requires dedicated and persistent spiritual vitality. In 1912, the Presbyterian Bible scholar J. Gresham Machen stated carefully the way that thinking affects practical life. His words are as prescient today as they were for the less complicated world that he addressed: “We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer, and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.... What is to-day a matter of academic speculation, begins to-morrow to move armies and pull down empires.”30 The Message of the Past Two different historical arguments can also be made to show how important the life of the mind is for ongoing Christian vitality. The first of these concerns evangelical Protestants specifically by noting the rich heritage of fruitful intellectual labor that accompanied the rise of Protestantism. The second is more general because it involves specific lessons about the vitality of Christian movements both before and after the Reformation. Protestant Precedent The condition of the evangelical mind in contemporary America could not be described as a scandal unless an earlier history existed to show that serious intellectual labor had been the norm for at least many Protestants in the evangelical tradition. In fact, that is just what a history of Protestantism reveals. The intellectual history of the Protestant movement as a whole is a daunting subject of gargantuan proportions. Enough can be offered here briefly, however, to show that the twentieth- century evangelical neglect of the mind is an aberration in a long history of Protestant efforts to give the intellect its due. At the start of the Reformation in the sixteenth century, many observers felt that Protestantism spelled death for the mind, not its renewal.31 They thought that it would bring to an end the very long tradition of Christian attention to the mind that was rooted in the early church and that had survived — sometimes with overwhelming brilliance and sometimes by the skin of its teeth — throughout the Middle Ages.32 By contrast, some of the Reformers’ first followers called into question the entire project of the intellect because of historic connections between the Catholic Church and Europe’s traditional educational institutions. The new Protestant commitment to the priesthood of believers also seemed to undercut the need for intellectual experts. Protestant belief in the activity of the Holy Spirit among the entire church seemed to deny the need for special efforts in learning. Was not merely “the Bible alone” enough? If a person possessed the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit, what need was there for learning? So it was that the Reformation appeared at least to some as a profoundly anti-intellectual movement. The counterargument — that mental activity was essential for valid Christian life — came from the leading Protestants themselves. They saw quickly that the cultivation of a more biblical spirituality required a more thorough attention to the mind. Martin Luther, who was never one to mince his words, promised in 1529 to write a book against parents who neglected the education of their children. In that book, he said, “I shall really go after the shameful, despicable, damnable parents who are no parents at all but despicable hogs and venomous beasts, devouring their own young.”33 Cultivating the mind was absolutely essential, Luther held, because people needed to understand both the word of Scripture and the nature of the world in which the word would take root. Furthermore, insistence on the priesthood of believers demanded more education, not less. It demanded that education be brought to the most ordinary levels and to the most ordinary people. Protestantism, in fact, marks the start of the move to universal education in Europe because its leaders insisted that all individuals had a responsibility to understand the world in which they lived and the spiritual world held out to them by Christian teaching. As a consequence of this defense of education, Protestants were active in establishing schools of all sorts. Inevitably, where Protestant schools were strongest, the Protestant Reformation made its greatest impact.34 Perhaps the most significant of the Protestant efforts to encourage Christian thinking took place in the Geneva of John Calvin.35 From his earliest days in that city, Calvin worked to instruct the mind and inspire the heart together. Calvin’s theology was not intellectualist; he believed that the Spirit must change the heart before the mind would accept the gospel. He also held that God manifested his sovereignty over every part of life, including the mind. Yet Calvin also believed that the Spirit of God had created the world so that it could be studied. He believed that the Spirit enabled nonbelievers to understand the workings of nature and human relationships in the world. These activities of the Spirit therefore deserved consistent attention in order to shape the minds of Christians to see all of life as the arena of God’s activity. Calvin championed learning in the home, he broadened the scope of education for the young people of Geneva, and he founded an academy, or university, for advanced study, to which Protestants came from all over Europe. There they found great seriousness about the gospel message itself, but also great seriousness about the classical languages, medicine, the natural world, and what we would today call politics and sociology. To be sure, Calvin did not glide effortlessly from his contemplation of God to the intellectual pursuit of the world. He was aware that God “chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise.” He insisted, as William Bouwsma has summarized, “on the limits of human rationality” and was open “to all the contradictory realities of human experience.”36 In his characteristic way, Calvin worked on the biblical passages that seemed to imply a rejection of human wisdom until he thought he had reached a satisfactory conclusion:  By “being fools” we do not mean being stupid; nor do we direct those who are learned in the liberal sciences to jettison their knowledge, and those who are gifted with quickness of mind to become dull, as if a man cannot be a Christian unless he is more like a beast than a man. The profession of Christianity requires us to be immature, not in our thinking, but in malice (1 Cor. 14:20). But do not let anyone bring trust in his own mental resources or his learning into the school of Christ; do not let anyone be swollen with pride or full of distaste, and so be quick to reject what he is told, indeed even before he has sampled it.37 Calvin’s synthesis, combining a high view of God’s sovereignty with an earnestness about the mind, also characterized other parts of Protestant Europe, especially southern Germany, Holland, Scotland, and certain parts of England. In these places the faith of the Reformation became as influential for the shaping of thought as Thomas Aquinas’s work had earlier been for Catholic Europe. The goal was to bring every aspect of life under the general guidance of Christian thinking, to have each question in life answered by a response from a Christian perspective, and to extract from each savant of classical or Roman Catholic learning what was compatible with Calvin’s Protestant understanding of the Bible.38 In consequence, Protestants were encouraged to labor as scientists so that their scientific work could rise to the praise of God.39 By so doing, the early Protestants expressed their belief that God had made the natural world to be explored and that the results of such exploration showed forth his glory. At least some statesmen and theologians among the early Protestants carried on the same sort of enterprise with respect to government. They not only worked to make political and social organizations reflect the norms of justice they found in Scripture but also examined the contrasting rights of individuals, kings, and parliaments, and contributed to theories about democracy and the existence of republics.40 In general, they did what they could to make life in society reflect the goodness of God.41 Similarly, over its first centuries, Protestantism — sometimes in the face of contradictory ascetic tendencies — nonetheless provided an ethos in which artistic expression of unusually high quality flourished. It gave one musical genius — J. S. Bach — many of the themes for his noblest work.42 It undergirded a whole school of visual artists, who painted natural, urban, and domestic scenes sublimely on the bases of its principles.43 And it developed a poetics that, in the words of Barbara Lewalski, powerfully stimulated the poetic imagination “by promoting a profound creative response to the written word of scripture and inviting a searching scrutiny of the human heart.”44 In science, public life, the arts, and still other spheres, these early Protestants were attempting, in other words, to develop a Christian mind. The immediate ancestors of American evangelicals — those British Protestants who settled North America — were of this sort too. We know them as the Puritans because they attempted to purify England’s state church, purify the nation, and purify themselves as individuals. The English Puritans who migrated to Plymouth, Boston, New Haven, and other North American sites did so in order to continue the efforts to purify self, church, and society that were being frustrated in the mother country. Of many striking features of the Puritans, one of the most remarkable was their zeal in developing a Christian mind.45 In some respects, Puritans remained fundamentally ambiguous about the mind. They retained all of the earlier Protestants’ commitment to the supernatural character of God’s grace and the freedom of God in the operation of that grace in the world. In the last analysis, they did not worship a predictable deity. At the same time, the Puritans viewed the whole of life as a gift from the God of grace. They did not separate social, ecclesiastical, and theological concerns into artificially separated categories. The Puritan point of view was comprehensive; it saw religious significance in public acts and public significance in religious acts. Since they felt that good and evil could be readily identified in human affairs, the Puritans could not tolerate barriers between theological judgment and the events of daily life. Since they held that the battle between good and evil, between God and Satan, extended into every aspect of life, decisions in the communal life of the wider society had a moral significance equal to those enacted within the narrow confines of the church. Puritans, in sum, refused to compartmentalize life or exempt nonecclesiastical matters from religious scrutiny. Puritans did not minimize the theological conundrums involved in trying to understand the world within a Christian framework. But they persevered in the attempt. As the best recent student of the subject, John Morgan, has written, Puritans did not oppose Scripture and inspiration, on the one hand, against learning and traditional knowledge, on the other, but rather “attempted the more difficult task of scrupulously maintaining a delicate balance of spirit and philosophy”; they pursued “the dialectic of enthusiasm and learning.” In the apostle Paul’s own efforts to reason like a true follower of Christ, “they found the perfect historical parallel for their own existential quest for a way to balance, if not fully blend, enthusiasm and humane learning.”46 Undergirding the comprehensive scope of Puritan concern were deeply held convictions about God’s character and the revelation of himself to humankind. Puritans were strenuous moral athletes because of their vision of God, “a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.”47 Such a being deserved all the love, dedication, energy, and devotion that the creature, by God’s grace, could give back to him. Puritans, furthermore, believed that the Bible was God’s authoritative revelation to humanity and that its pages contained necessary and sufficient guidelines for the proper ordering of personal, ecclesiastical, and social life. Puritans developed an elaborate system of covenants, with intricate interweaving of personal salvation, church structure, and political organization. These covenants, Puritans felt, were merely the faithful exposition of the divine plan laid out in Scripture. Because God had graciously revealed his will in Scripture, Puritans proceeded with the confidence that every aspect of life could be ordered to the glory of God. The distinguishing characteristic of Puritanism was its effort to unite the theology of the Reformation with a comprehensive view of the world. From the testimony of the Continental Reformers and their own study of Scripture, the Puritans were convinced that a vital personal religion was the wellspring of all earthly good. They were equally convinced that all aspects of life — whether political, social, cultural, economic, artistic, or ecclesiastical — needed to be brought into subjection to God. This Puritan synthesis of heart religion and comprehensive concern for all areas of life drew upon the Continental heritage of Protestantism, but it was, in its fullest expression, the unique contribution of the English-speaking Reformation to the development of American civilization. The key contribution of the Puritans to the intellectual life of later evangelicals is their gift of a mind as well as a theological position, a set of principles concerning society as well as a stance toward the church, a worldview as well as a spirituality. The Puritans may have been wrong on particular questions involving the intellect. For example, I think they were altogether too confident that their specific interpretations of the Bible could be equated with the message of Scripture itself. They were just as blameworthy when they resorted to coercion to force these particular interpretations upon Quakers, Catholics, Baptists, and Native Americans who questioned their wisdom. Without making light of such failures, it is still possible to say that the glory of the Puritans was to believe what they believed and do what they did as parts of a self-consciously comprehensive intellectual effort. As a result, with Puritans like John Milton, John Bunyan, Anne Bradstreet, and Edward Taylor we can observe an identifiably Puritan aesthetic;48 with rulers like John Winthrop, William Bradford, and Oliver Cromwell we find the rudiments of an identifiably Puritan politics;49 and from many ministers and magistrates we discover a well-articulated Puritan social theory. In addition, the Puritans also worked out particular views on work, business ethics, recreation, sexual love, and many other spheres of what we now often call secular life.50 These manifestations of Christian thinking were rooted in the Puritans’ theology, ecclesiology, and piety, but they went well beyond these more explicitly “religious” concerns. What we see among the Puritans, in other words, are the fruits of a Christian mind. Modern evangelicals are descendants of the Puritans. And yet, for some reason, the Puritan kind of comprehensive thinking under God, the sort of mind shaped to its furthest reaches by Christian influences, we modern evangelicals do not enjoy. Other sorts of historical arguments show why that neglect touches the character of the faith itself. More General Historical Lessons Hard intellectual labor has never by itself led to a healthy church.51 Sometimes, in fact, the pursuit of learning has been a means to escape the claims of the gospel or the requirements of God’s law. It is also true that vital Christianity has existed, at least for brief periods, without a noticeable increase in seriousness about the intellect. Yet, generally, the picture over the long term is different. Where Christian faith is securely rooted, where it penetrates deeply into a culture to change individual lives and redirect institutions, where it continues for more than a generation as a living testimony to the grace of God — in these situations, we almost invariably find Christians ardently cultivating the intellect for the glory of God. The links between deep Christian life, long-lasting Christian influence, and dedicated Christian thought characterize virtually all of the high moments in the history of the church. On the other side of the picture, the history of the church contains a number of sobering examples of what happens when a spirituality develops with no place for self-conscious thought. The path to danger is not always the same, but the results of neglecting the mind are uniform: Christian faith degenerates, lapses into gross error, or simply passes out of existence. In the history of the church, Christian movements of long-lasting significance regularly have involved thinking at the most serious and most comprehensive levels. To be sure, such movements almost never arise because of intellectual efforts as such. Much more often they come into existence out of deep inner responses to God’s grace. Yet as such movements develop, they show great concern for the way in which Christians view the world at large. They are vitally interested in the Christian mind. We have seen that this was the case in the Reformation. It was also true for the monastic movements of the Middle Ages, which were (it is only a slight exaggeration to say) responsible for almost everything of lasting Christian value from roughly A.D. 350 to 1400.52 The great pulses of monastic reform — whether Benedict in the sixth century, the monks at Cluny in the tenth century, or the Dominicans and Franciscans in the thirteenth century — all had certain things in common. They all encouraged serious contemplation of God, acknowledged the desperateness of the human condition apart from God, and turned people inward to meditate on Scripture and to ponder the mercies of Christ. They all encouraged heroic missionary efforts and practical aid for the downtrodden. And they all promoted serious learning as an offering to the Lord. The intellectual activity of the monks during the so-called Dark Ages is justly famous. When the light of learning flickered low in Europe, monks preserved the precious texts of Scripture and other Christian writings. Monks kept alive an interest in the languages. Monks and friars founded schools that eventually became the great universities of Europe. Monks, in short, preserved the life of the mind when almost no one else was giving it a thought. By so doing, by God’s grace, they preserved the church. The culmination of intellectual activity among the monks was the work of Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1225-74).53 Aquinas was a Dominican friar who composed hymns, wrote biblical commentaries, preached, prepared manuals for missionary work among the Muslims, spent long hours in contemplating the work of Christ, and almost single-handedly reconstructed systematic Christian thinking. His most notable achievement was to adopt for Christian faith the teaching of Aristotle, newly rediscovered in Europe and widely considered to be the best possible guide for understanding the world. In all this, Thomas devoted rigorous intellectual efforts, as G. K. Chesterton once put it, to “the praise of Life, the praise of Being, the praise of God as the Creator of the World.”54 The work of Aquinas and like-minded friars left an extremely important legacy. He provided a model for reconciling the knowledge we gain through the senses with the truths we discover in Scripture. He proposed a theoretical explanation for some of the mysteries of the faith like the Lord’s Supper. And he offered a model for apologetics that respected both the intellect of non-Christians and the missionary mandate for believers. In an age where the thought forms of Aristotle had come to dominate learned discourse, Aquinas taught Aristotle to “speak like a Christian” and so preserved the conceptual power of Christian faith. Thomas Aquinas did not provide the last word on any of these matters. Luther and Calvin, for example, felt that he had overemphasized what we learn about God from nature at the expense of what we learn from Scripture. Yet what Thomas did provide was a formulation of the faith that has encouraged generations of believers to labor with their minds for the glory of God. In so doing, he left an intellectual perspective that has helped sustain the wider Christian church to this very day. Medieval monasticism along with the Protestant Reformation has been among the most influential movements in the history of the church. One of the reasons is that each cultivated the life of the mind. Each sought to develop specifically Christian thinking on the whole range of human experience. It is possible to make legitimate criticisms of both monasticism and the Reformation. Yet the positive lessons they teach are more important. These lessons concern Christian faithfulness, immersion in Scripture, zeal in spreading the gospel, and commitment to holistic Christian service. But perhaps the most important lesson concerns the Christianization of thinking, the elaboration of a Christian mind. That is one of the major reasons why both movements still speak powerfully to believers today who pray for the renewal of their minds in Christ. If the history of Christianity shows how fruitful it can be to cultivate the mind for Christ, it also indicates how dangerous it can be to neglect such activity. A word of caution is in order at this point. To follow either intellectuals who criticize simple piety or advocates of Christian experience who attack the life of the mind leads to difficulty. The gospel properly calls the whole person. In keeping with the Bible’s teaching concerning the various tasks given to different parts of the body, we may naturally expect Christians in different times and places to stress some things rather than others. The danger comes when the parts of the body, which are to complement each other — in this case, piety and the life of the mind — fall upon each other. One of the more interesting protest movements of the Middle Ages was mounted by the Albigenses. Their history illustrates how easy it is for Christian groups that undervalue the mind to lapse into the employment of non-Christian thinking. The Albigenses are named for the region in southern France where they flourished in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. They were a variation of the Cathari, or “Pure Ones,” who in the Middle Ages attempted to keep themselves unspotted from the pollutions of the flesh.55 Beyond doubt, the Albigenses possessed exemplary traits. In contrast to much official Catholicism, Albigensianism took morality and pastoral care with great seriousness. Albigenses knew the value of following God’s law. Their ascetic conduct often shamed less scrupulous church members, and so they were respected by the common people of southern France for nearly two hundred years. In the thirteenth century, internal crusades and an inquisition destroyed the movement. For our purposes the Albigenses are significant because they made it a principle to slight formal intellectual labor. Above all else they were moralists. The one thing that mattered was to live without fault. From the perspective of the late twentieth century, this aspiration seems entirely admirable, until we realize how thoroughly the Albigensian commitment to morality excluded cultivation of the mind. There was no interest in formal thought, even if there had been time. To devote attention to formal learning was to waste effort that was required for cultivating the ascetic life. This abandonment of the mind, however, encouraged a slide toward the ancient heresy of Manichaeism. This set of convictions, which had existed in various forms since the classical period, was dualistic; it made a sharp distinction between the life of the spirit and the life of the body. To the Albigenses matter itself was suspect. Redemption meant freeing the spirit from the body. With these beliefs the Albigenses were forced to interpret Scripture allegorically. Old Testament prophets could not have meant it literally when they urged the faithful to establish justice in Israel; Christ could never have taken on an actual body of flesh; the kingdom of God must be an utterly ethereal thing, not something that begins in the day-to-day life of each believer during this age. Given the precommitments of the Manichaean worldview, Albigenses found it necessary to twist the Scriptures. For the words and concepts of the Bible they retained a great affection. But because they had adopted a worldview opposed to that of the prophets, apostles, and Jesus himself, they were forced to reinterpret biblical words and ideas in order to harmonize them with their underlying worldview. The result was a group that did teach the church some valuable lessons about ethical seriousness. But it was also a group that, because it rejected in principle the cultivation of the mind, found itself trapped by a worldview alien to the gospel. The pietistic movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries also illustrate the perils involved in not treating the mind as a Christian resource. In general, Pietism was a very good thing, for it breathed a badly needed vitality into several parts of the church, including Protestants in Germany, Holland, England, and America, as well as their Catholic counterparts in France and other parts of southern Europe.56 But Pietism could also be carried to a dangerous extreme. The thrust of Pietism was to draw believers back from formal, dogmatic rigidity toward living Christian experience. This was a timely appeal, for much calcification had taken place in the churches since the cleansing experiences of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Many valuable things came from the Pietists, especially from the remarkably energetic work of Philipp Jakob Spener, August Hermann Francke, and the numerous institutions they established at Halle near Berlin. German Pietists inaugurated the first widespread missionary efforts among Protestants. Pietists generally encouraged renewed seriousness about the priesthood of believers, they turned laypeople back to eager study of the Bible, and they encouraged many acts of social compassion. The intellectual problem of Pietism lay in its excesses. Pietists had rediscovered the truth that Christianity is a life as well as a set of beliefs. The difficulty arose when some Pietists began to view Christian faith as only a life, without a concern for beliefs at all. This led to fascination with practice, deep involvement in spiritual experience, and absorption in the psychological dimensions of the faith. Objective realities of revelation were sometimes almost totally eclipsed. In the late eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant, who had been trained by Pietists, gave weighty support to the idea that God could not act in the world in ways unknown to human experience.57 In the early nineteenth century, certain Christian teachers trained by Pietists, of whom Friedrich Schleiermacher was the most famous, began to urge that “a feeling of dependence” was the foundation of Christianity. Always the church had had a place for Christian experience, but in living communion with the objective character of the gospel. Pietists quite properly protested when this objectivity came to be regarded as the sum and substance of the faith. But some overreacted by picturing the experience of the faith as the new totality. At its extreme, the Pietist emphasis on religious life gave very little attention to self-conscious Christian thought. To be consumed by feeling was to have no time for thinking through the relationship between God and his creation. Once this point had been reached, it soon became difficult to distinguish between those forms of feeling that remained within the Christian orbit and those that had spun off as meteorites with no fixed center. Pietism played an important role in the revitalization of the church in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Unchecked Pietism, however, played a role in the development of theological liberalism with liberalism’s fascination for the forms of religious experience. It played a part in developing the humanistic romanticism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where a vague nature mysticism replaced a more orthodox understanding of God and the world. And for more orthodox believers, Pietism sometimes led to a morbid fixation upon the Christian’s personal state at the expense of evangelism, study,