{"id":373,"date":"2014-02-06T16:32:23","date_gmt":"2014-02-06T16:32:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beta.dminlgp.com\/?p=373"},"modified":"2014-08-12T22:54:19","modified_gmt":"2014-08-12T22:54:19","slug":"philip-seymour-hoffman-mark-noll-and-the-evangelical","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/philip-seymour-hoffman-mark-noll-and-the-evangelical\/","title":{"rendered":"Philip Seymour Hoffman, Mark Noll, and the Evangelical Mind"},"content":{"rendered":"

Signs of Life<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is hard to believe that Mark Noll\u2019s groundbreaking shaming of evangelical culture, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, <\/em>is now 10 years old.\u00a0 I first read it in 2000 at Dallas Theological and for many of my professors and classmates it was a clarion call.\u00a0 To be clear, Noll was not saying that evangelicals were not serious about biblical and theological scholarship, but \u201cto think within a specifically Christian framework- across the whole spectrum of modern learning (7).\u201d\u00a0 In a sense, evangelicals had become anti-intellectualist, utilitarian, and escapist, living in a well constructed evangelical ivory tower, at best, or a ghetto, at worst.\u00a0 The scandal of the evangelical mind, was that there was no mind.\u00a0 Noll however in 1994 saw glimpses of change, and in a very real sense a new generation of scholars, artists, and intellectuals have emerged from the evangelical wasteland.<\/p>\n

My own organization Cru, made significant changes in how it understood ministry and engaging culture during this time period.\u00a0 Before, all students were either just future staff or future supporters.\u00a0 But, about 8 years ago, the organization made a massive change\u2026 attempting to encourage, train, and launch not only student movements, but also movements by graduating students in the worlds of law, medicine, art, music, and business.\u00a0 In many ways, Noll\u2019s vision is starting to come to fruition.\u00a0 Evangelicals can now be found throughout the music, arts, film and film industries as well as across academia.\u00a0 Francis Collins headed up the Human Genome Project.\u00a0 Miroslav Volf is one of the most respected theologians and public thinkers at Yale. His Center for Faith and Culture is a bastion of thinking about the intersection of religion and public life, and is populated with other evangelicals.\u00a0 \u00a0I have two friends who are evangelicals on the faculty of the University of Texas (one in science and the other in business), an institution in Texas known as a bastion of liberalism and secularism.\u00a0 At the same time, dispensationalism is a spent force, sidelined by irrelevance.\u00a0 And even the religious right has gone the way of the buffalo, dying out with its progenitors.<\/p>\n

Evangelicalism has had a widening affect across the board.\u00a0 U2, with deep Pentecostal and evangelical roots, (what other rock band travels with a pastor?) has created popular rock and social movement with a Christian ethos. They were well ahead of their time, and have inspired an entire generation of Christians to do great work and make great art that is both Christian and accessible and relevant. \u00a0Two of our most acclaimed actors have evangelical roots and connections: Tom Hanks and the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman.\u00a0 Hanks grew up as an evangelical and is currently a practicing Orthodox Christian.\u00a0 Hoffman was a practicing Catholic enamored with Jesus whose sister was an evangelical, and who often brought him to church.\u00a0 His connection to the faith of his sister led him to discover faith, Jesus, and Catholicism in new ways.\u00a0 The connection was profound for one of the greatest actors of our time: \u201c\u2019There was something that was so heartfelt and emotional,\u2019 he said. \u2018Nothing about it felt crazy at all. And my sister was certainly the sanest person you could ever meet. It all felt very real, very guttural, even rebellious. My time with my sister and her circle of friends is something I still think about today.\u2019 He noted that he is often defensive about the way that many actors react to the idea of evangelical Christians.\u201d (see more here: http:\/\/bustedhalo.com\/features\/the-gospel-according-to-philip-seymour-hoffman<\/a>)\u00a0 It is not difficult to observe the redemptive threads running through the characters they have played. Then there is Tony Hale, an Emmy award winning comedic actor who starred in one of the most critically acclaimed comedies of all time: Arrested Development.<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0 Hale has worked hard to be a force for opening the door to more and more for dedicated Christians into the arts to do their craft professionally and excellently while living out their faith.\u00a0 From Volf to Hale, all of this would have been scandalous in the evangelical world 10-20 years ago.\u00a0 The reality is that evangelicals are more and more, doing art and scholarship well and with the mind of Christ.<\/p>\n

A Word of Caution<\/strong><\/p>\n

One thing that Noll might be missing in his survey of American evangelicalism is that evangelicalism has often grown on the margins of society. \u00a0It is easy to see why those on the margins, often without access to education and advancement, have not had the ability to advance the life of the mind.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think this is the case across the board, but it needs to be explored.\u00a0 Conversely, the mainline \u00a0denominations have done an excellent job of being engaged in the pursuit of a Christian intellect.\u00a0 Presbyterians and Episcopalians tend to have high levels of education, and access to academic, political, artistic, business, and literary influence.\u00a0 In my home Presbyterian church you can just as easily sit in the pew next to business tycoons, assorted Ph.Ds, university professors, Hollywood actors, and noted artists.\u00a0 For the conservative evangelicals in the mainline, Noll\u2019s thesis seems quaint and far off.<\/p>\n

However, there is of course a dark side to the pursuit of intellect.\u00a0 My past denomination is witnessing it firsthand.\u00a0 Christianity always functions best when it is a movement, when it is orthodox in its application of faith, when it is active and practical, and when it is centered on Jesus. In the great mix of things, one can lose their soul in the pursuit of intellect for intellect\u2019s sake.\u00a0 Within my previous denomination, the PCUSA, this very much had become the case.\u00a0 The pursuit of intellectual menagerie became unmoored from an orthodox faith, evangelism, and vision for practical application.\u00a0 These things are now belittled as oppressive and colonial, while the denomination teeters ever closer to a one sided secularist agenda that by their own admonition is identical to that of the wider liberal culture.\u00a0 The denomination now spends more time and resources on divestment from oil companies and condemnations of Israel, than it does on church planting and evangelism.\u00a0 Not to say that those things are necessarily wrong, but one has to ask if the denomination has lost focus.\u00a0 The reality is telling, of the 10,000 churches, half don\u2019t have a pastor, and each year hundreds are closed or flee to a more vibrant denomination.\u00a0 At the current rate, the denomination will cease to exist within a generation or two.\u00a0 Hoffman may have been onto something, Christianity is powerful when it is emotional and guttural.\u00a0 Perhaps we need to develop a faith that is fully orbed, neither reticent of emotions or the mind.<\/p>\n

What we must strive for is excellence of the academy and the mind, but not lose our activist and evangelistic zeal.\u00a0 Above all, here we find Noll\u2019s admonition in his follow up to Scandal, Jesus Christ and The Life of the Mind.<\/em>\u00a0 True Christian intellectualism and scholarship will come only when it is deeply rooted in the life, incarnation, and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the traditional creeds of the historic faith.\u00a0 This is the way forward.<\/p>\n

Noll\u2019s contribution to evangelicalism as movement is without hesitation, excellent.\u00a0 Any serious evangelical should read both of these books both as a reflection and a calling to a greater intellectual mission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Signs of Life It is hard to believe that Mark Noll\u2019s groundbreaking shaming of evangelical culture, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, is now 10 years old.\u00a0 I first read it in 2000 at Dallas Theological and for many of my professors and classmates it was a clarion call.\u00a0 To be clear, Noll was not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"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":[2,147],"class_list":["post-373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dminlgp","tag-noll","cohort-lgp3"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373","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\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=373"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1697,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373\/revisions\/1697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}