A Time to Laugh

Mark Noll’s book both impressed and frustrated me when I read it years ago. At least more recently in First Things, he admits that the “Scandal of the Evangelical Mind” is more hopeful than he thought ten years ago. He admits that he should have more obviously admitted that Evangelicalism (conservative and otherwise) is quite simply reifying American culture–my original criticism back in the day. I’m gratified though that he, too, feels frustrated that there are few fine believing poets, playwrights, and novelists. How can we truly claim any of the arts if we do not have the intellectual muscle necessary to support them? To do the arts without thinking about the arts is like printing money on our home laser printer. Sure — it might look pretty good, but it doesn’t have the gold behind it. History, too, must inform theology and daily living. If we can’t remember, our heads can’t really work, and our feet can’t really walk.

Without strong theological traditions, most evangelicals lack a critical element required for making intellectual activity both self-confident and properly humble, both critical and committed. In order to advance responsible Christian learning, the vitality of commitment must be stabilized by the ballast of tradition. Tradition without life might be barely Christian, but life without tradition is barely coherent.

Noll seems less modern and more creative in this later article. I am relishing his rhetorical solutions at the end:

Part of what makes it possible for a particular stream of Christianity to support vigorous intellectual life is simply the passage of time: an older movement obviously has had more opportunities to broaden out into fruitful scholarship. But another part is a self-conscious commitment to learn from the teaching and experience of past believing generations. The current dilemma for Christian learning in North America could be broadly described as follows. On the one side, Pentecostals, Southern Baptists, members of Holiness movements, seeker-sensitive churches, dispensationalists, Adventists, African-American congregations, radical Wesleyans, and lowest-common-denominator evangelicals have great spiritual energy, but they flounder in putting the mind to use for Christ. On the other side, Lutherans, Catholics, Anglo-Catholics, the Reformed, and the Eastern Orthodox enjoy incredibly rich traditions that include sterling examples of Christian thought, but they often display a comatose spirituality.

This picture is, of course, a generalization. Yet think how natural it sounds to talk of Pentecostal Signs and Wonders, intense holiness spirituality, vigorous seeker-sensitive evangelism, a dispensationalist devotion to Scripture, and Baptist missionary zeal. It seems equally self-evident that we can speak of such things as an estimable tradition of Lutheran sacred music, art history pursued from a Kuyperian Reformed perspective, profound social theory from Catholics, and a solid trajectory of Anglo-Catholic belles lettres. But try to shift and mix the categories and hear how unexpected some of the combinations sound: Kuyperian Reformed Signs and Wonders? Vigorous Catholic evangelism? An Anglo-Catholic devotion to Scripture? Intense Lutheran spirituality? Or, to run it the other way: Art history pursued from a Baptist perspective? A solid trajectory of seeker-sensitive belles lettres? Profound social theory from the holiness movement?

Now if we can only get him to list rhetoric in his academic disciplines in which the believer can flourish. Need to educate Noll on that front, I believe. After all, Augustine paved the way for the rhetorically-sensitive believer long before the belle lettres or even credobaptists.