Mark A. Noll > Quotes

“The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”
― Mark A. Noll

“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.”
― Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

“The point of Christian scholarship is not recognition by standards established in the wider culture. The point is to praise God with the mind. Such efforts will lead to the kind of intellectual integrity that sometimes receives recognition. But for the Christian that recognition is only a fairly inconsequential by-product. The real point is valuing what God has made, believing that the creation is as "good" as he said it was, and exploring the fullest dimensions of what it meant for the Son of God to "become flesh and dwell among us." Ultimately, intellectual work of this sort is its own reward, because it is focused on the only One whose recognition is important, the One before whom all hearts are open.”
― Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

“But in their defense of the supernatural, fundamentalists and their evangelical heirs resemble some cancer patients. In facing a drastic disease, they are willing to undertake a drastic remedy. The treatment of fundamentalism may be said to have succeeded; the patient survived. But at least for the life of the mind, what survived was a patient horribly disfigured by the cure itself.”
― Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

“The Gospel of John tells us that the Word who was made flesh and dwelt among us, full of glorious grace and truth, was also the Word through whom all things- all phenomena in nature, all capacities for fruitful interaction, all the kinds of beauty- were made. To honor that Word as he deserves to be honored,evangelicals must know both Christ and what he has made.”
― Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

“If intellectual life involves a certain amount of self-awareness about alternative interpretations or a certain amount of tentativeness in exploring the connection between evidence and conclusions, it was hard to find any encouragement for the intellectual life in the self-assured dogmatism of fundamentalism.”
― Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

“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.”
― Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

“Americans claimed to be following a higher law, even when this higher law only turned out to be a personal preference.”
― Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis

“An older, Puritan approach to Scripture tended to prevail in the American South, where the Bible was regarded as a set of definite, positive laws”
― Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis

“The Book that made the nation was destroying the nation; the nation that had taken to the Book was rescued not by the Book but by the force of arms.”
― Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis

“Since the dawn of time, warring combatants have regularly reached for what support they could find to nerve their own side for battle.”
― Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis

“The treatment of fundamentalism may be said to have succeeded; the patient survived. But at least for the life of the mind, what survived was a patient horribly disfigured by the cure itself.”
― Mark Noll

“dogmatic kind of biblical literalism that gained increasing strength among evangelicals toward the end of the nineteenth century was reduced space for academic debate, intellectual experimentation, and nuanced discrimination between shades of opinion.”
― Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

“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.”
― Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

“The crisis created by an inability to distinguish the Bible on race from the Bible on slavery meant that when the Civil War was over and slavery was abolished, systemic racism continued unchecked as the great moral anomaly in a supposedly Christian America.”
― Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis

“I was brought up in a Christian environment where, because God had to be given pre-eminence, nothing else was allowed to be important. I have broken through to the position that because God exists, everything has significance.”360”
― Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

“suddenly both parties have become theologians, the one side quoting the Pentateuch to justify slavery, the other side quoting the gospel to condemn it:... the people of the thirty-three United States, who are eminently and essentially political, cannot discuss a political matter without quoting the old and New Testa- ments!"97”
― Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis

“It was no coincidence that the biblical defense of slavery remained strongest in the United States, a place where democratic, antitraditional, and individualistic religion was also strongest.”
― Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis

“The story of theology in the Civil War was a story of how a deeply entrenched intellectual synthesis divided against itself, even as its proponents were reassuring combatants on either side that each enjoyed a unique standing before God and each exercised a unique role as the true bearer of the nation's Christian civilization.”
― Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis

“In the event, what actually happened was that citizens, without paying much attention to government at all, went about creating a national culture for themselves. Long before political parties became effective as national, democratic institutions, Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians were building the nerve system of a national culture.”
― Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis

“Ultimately, intellectual work of this sort is its own reward, because it is focused on the only One whose recognition is important, the One before whom all hearts are open.”
― Mark Noll

“Thus, it is taking more American churches to field one missionary than churches in other parts of the world. For example, whereas there is one crosscultural missionary supported by every 0.7 evangelical churches in Singapore, by 2.1 churches in Hong Kong, 2.4 in Albania, 2.5 in Sri Lanka, 2.6 in Mongolia, 4.2 in South Korea, 4.9 in Myanmar, and 5.3 in Senegal, in the United States the ratio is 7.6 churches to one missionary.[6] The proper conclusion from this flurry of numbers would seem to be that, while the United States contains a whole lot of evangelical churches, those churches are not now as proportionately active in crosscultural missionary activity as many churches in the non-Western world. Evangelical dynamism in these other churches has replaced, or is replacing, the evangelical dynamism of American churches as the leading edge of world Christian expansion. That expansion seems to be tracking the earlier pattern of American adjustments to Christianity-after-Christendom.”
― Mark A. Noll, The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith

“When they faded and Protestant leaders looked around, they recognized that a situation had come into existence that almost none of them had anticipated. That new situation was the presence of separate Protestant churches in separate parts of Europe.”
― Mark A. Noll, Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity

“That is why,” Chadwick explains, “the problem of secularization is not the same as the problem of Enlightenment. Enlightenment was of the few. Secularization is of the many.”[129]”
― Mark A. Noll, Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity

“What J. S. Bach gained from his Lutheranism to inform his music, what Jonathan Edwards took from the Reformed tradition to orient his philosophy, what A. H. Francke learned from German Pietism to inspire the University of Halle’s research into Sanskrit and Asian literatures, what Jacob van Ruisdael gained from his seventeenth-century Dutch Calvinism to shape his painting, what Thomas Chalmers took from Scottish Presbyterianism to inspire his books on astronomy and political economy, what Abraham Kuyper gained from pietistic Dutch Calvinism to back his educational, political, and communications labors of the late nineteenth century, what T. S. Eliot took from high-church Anglicanism as a basis for his cultural criticism, what Evelyn Waugh found for his novels in twentieth-century Catholicism, what Luci Shaw, Shirley Nelson, Harold Fickett, and Evangeline Paterson found to encourage creative writing from other forms of Christianity after they left dispensationalism behind — precious few fundamentalists or their evangelical successors have ever found in the theological insights of twentieth-century dispensationalism, Holiness, or Pentecostalism. As”
― Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

“By definition, the monastic way was designed precisely to allow creatures of the earth to rise toward a purer spirituality.”
― Mark A. Noll, Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity

“But the nature of that particular effect illustrates a powerful new trend in European Christianity that, taken in its many instances, constituted a vitally important turning point in the history of the church.”
― Mark A. Noll, Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity

“Again, if Scripture is the ultimate authority, how should it be interpreted? Lutherans and Anglicans tended to say that interpretations should follow the broad themes of the gospel that unite all parts of the Bible (yet long, arduous discussions between Lutheran and Anglican theologians in the 1530s resulted mostly in frustration at the inability to find a common expression of their faith). Most of the Anabaptists held that the key to interpreting Scripture was to follow New Testament commands literally, and especially to imitate the life of Christ, while reading the Old Testament symbolically. Many Reformed Protestants approached the Bible as a unified whole, but with special emphasis on the way that Old Testament revelation, especially God’s covenant with Abraham, led to New Testament realities like God’s covenanting with individuals, churches, and nations (though some who were not Reformed flatly denied that God any longer covenanted with nations).”
― Mark A. Noll, Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity

“On the other front, nuanced biblical attacks on American slavery faced rough going precisely because they were nuanced. This position could not simply be read out of any one biblical text; it could not be lifted directly from the page. Rather, it needed patient reflection on the entirety of the Scriptures; it required expert knowledge of the historical circumstances of ancient Near Eastern and Roman slave systems as well as of the actually existing conditions in the slave states; and it demanded that sophisticated interpretative practice replace a commonsensically literal approach to the sacred text. In short, this was an argument of elites requiring that the populace defer to its intellectual betters.”
― Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis

“(these are the autocephalic, or “self-headed,” churches like those of Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, or Russia, which carry on a substantially autonomous life).”
― Mark A. Noll, Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity