{"id":21729,"date":"2019-02-21T20:09:39","date_gmt":"2019-02-22T04:09:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dminlgp\/?p=21729"},"modified":"2019-02-21T20:09:39","modified_gmt":"2019-02-22T04:09:39","slug":"a-higher-view-of-church","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/a-higher-view-of-church\/","title":{"rendered":"A higher view of church"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>In a classic and essential text from 1994, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, <\/em>evangelical historian Mark Noll writes with candor about the downward spiral of intellectual rigor at work in conservative North American Christianity. He traces the declining arc over centuries, beginning with the Reformation when there was still hope, through the influence of the Enlightenment, various Awakenings, Modernism and the reaction of Fundamentalism, to the present day. Parallel to this, he demonstrates how American political and cultural development intertwined with theological development to produce a unique identity for evangelicalism.<\/p>\n

While Noll is discouraged with the trajectory of evangelical thought, he is a gentleman in articulating his point. In Theology Today, <\/em>however, he gangs up on his tribe together with Cornelius Plantinga and David Wells, and they are clearly rankled:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe sad fact is that much evangelicalism, in James Hunter\u2019s characterization of it, has been cognitively bartering with modernity and has come away impoverished\u2014in fact, has been taken to the cleaners. Voyages of self-discovery, the desire to get rich or get happy, the neglect of old arts like reading and thinking, the professionalization of the clergy so that they are no longer ardent students of Scripture and its interpretation but rather ersatz managers and therapists\u2014all of these moves garnished with a D. Min. degree, so that, as a minister\u2019s social prestige drops, the number and kind of his advanced degrees rises to compensate; the loss of appetite for great, stately hymns and their replacement by pop songs from the Christian Billboard\u2019s Top Ten Singles<\/em>; the democratizing of the church to such a degree that learned opinion is immediately suspect as an elitist putdown\u2014these and similar unhappinesses make serious theology in the church uphill work.\u201d[1]<\/sup><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Furthermore:<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the sump level of the evangelical church, where wild eschatological speculation, wooden proof-texting, and anti-intellectual sermonizing reign; where worship has degenerated into a religious variety show hosted by some gleaming evangelist in a sequined dinner jacket and patent leather dancing slippers who introduces as special music a trio of middle-aged women in pastel evening gowns with matching muffs for their microphones–at this sump level, things are, of course, much worse. This is the level at which, Richard Lovelace once remarked, we need to tell some people who think they’ve gotten saved to get lost.\u201d[2]<\/sup><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So how has evangelicalism lost its way? If I\u2019m reading him correctly, I believe Noll would argue that evangelicalism began to be diminished when it lost a high view of church and began to emphasize individuality rather than the collective Body of Christ. Revivals on the American frontier called people to repent and believe, an individual and solitary act of conversion. My paternal grandfather, growing up a farm boy in the wheatfields of rural Saskatchewan, remembers throwing rotten tomatoes into the tent meetings until he was miraculously converted and eventually became a Nazarene preacher.<\/p>\n

This is all well and good, but Noll reveals what is missing: \u201cThe problem with revivalism for the life of the mind, however, lay precisely in its antitraditionalism. Revivals called people to Christ as a way of escaping tradition, including traditional learning. They called upon individuals to take the step of faith for themselves. In so doing, they often left the impression that individual believers could accept nothing from others.\u201d[3]<\/a><\/p>\n

Evangelicalism\u2019s abandonment of a high view of church means each person charts their own course and misses out on centuries of witness. Rather than submitting to a body where historical appreciation and intellectual depth grounds theology, individuals today are led to select their truth much like one would customize a burger at the local fast food joint. We claim to be thinking for ourselves but ignoring the cumulative thought and experience of thousands of church mothers and fathers results in a thin theological base which quickly cracks under pressure.<\/p>\n

Researcher Martin Marty summarized Noll\u2019s ideas in Commonweal <\/em>with this: \u201cEvangelicalism in [his] account has a generous heart and soul. Its hands do good works. But it has lost the kind of competence and interest in scholarship its forebears brought to their faith\u2026. For all the attacks Noll makes, this is a positive book. In evangelical terms, it is a call for mindless sinners to repent, to recover the mind for God and their movement. They are to delight in the world which God will take action to end, and from which Christ saves sinners, but also the cosmos which God created good and in which God is incarnate in Christ.\u201d[4]<\/sup><\/a> And may they do it not alone, but as integrated members of the larger Body of Christ.<\/p>\n

______________________________________<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Mark Noll, Cornelius Plantinga Jr, and David Wells, \u201cEvangelical theology today\u201d\u00a0Theology Today<\/em>,\u00a051(4) (1995), 495. Accessed on February 20, 2019. https:\/\/georgefox.idm.oclc.org\/login?url=https:\/\/search-proquest-com.georgefox.idm.oclc.org\/docview\/208071123?accountid=11085.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Mark Noll, Cornelius Plantinga Jr, and David Wells, \u201cEvangelical theology today\u201d\u00a0Theology Today<\/em>,\u00a051(4) (1995), 495. Accessed on February 20, 2019. https:\/\/georgefox.idm.oclc.org\/login?url=https:\/\/search-proquest-com.georgefox.idm.oclc.org\/docview\/208071123?accountid=11085.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind<\/em> (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), 63.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Martin Marty, \u201cA Shot Across the Brow — The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind by Mark A. Noll.\u201d\u00a0Commonweal<\/em>,\u00a0121, 22 (1994, Nov 04). Accessed on February 20, 2019. https:\/\/georgefox.idm.oclc.org\/login?url=https:\/\/search-proquest-com.georgefox.idm.oclc.org\/docview\/210399728?accountid=11085.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a classic and essential text from 1994, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, evangelical historian Mark Noll writes with candor about the downward spiral of intellectual rigor at work in conservative North American Christianity. He traces the declining arc over centuries, beginning with the Reformation when there was still hope, through the influence of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":100,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1017,147],"class_list":["post-21729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-lgp8","tag-noll","cohort-lgp8"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/100"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21729"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21729\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21735,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21729\/revisions\/21735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}