These [evangelical] barriers [to supporting intellectual pursuits] include an immediatism that insists on action, decision, and even perfection right now, a populism that confuses winning supporters with mastering actually existing situations, an anti-traditionalism that privileges one’s own current judgments on biblical, theological, and ethical issues (however hastily formed) over insight from the past (however hard won and carefully stated), and a nearly gnostic dualism that rushes to spiritualize all manner of bodily, terrestrial, physical, and material realities (despite the origin and providential maintenance of these realities in God). In addition, we evangelicals as a rule still prefer to put our money into programs offering immediate results, whether evangelistic or humanitarian, instead of into institutions promoting intellectual development over the long term.
I’m still sitting on this from Mark Noll. No doubt American exceptionalism, individualism, capitalism are all knit together with American Evangelicalism. No doubt Evangelicalism is wholly New World — a swing of the pendulum that opposed Old World aristocracy and feudalism. But it, too, has become its own aristocracy. Is it just a hard push to balance out the swinging pendulous ball? Or do we need to start all over and make a new way to talk about faith in this postmodern condition?
The rhetorician in me says that there is no new way of talking and trying to do so will only ignorantly replicate and even reinforce the same problems. Noll wants to talk in an older way — more like Jonathan Edwards and less like Rick Warren, more historically Protestant than currently relevant.
I can go for that. In reading his listing of such traditions:
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.
I realized that the only place I really fit is “Reformed.” So I’ve dropped the moniker “Reformedish” and have gone whole-hog with stating the obvious.
So please excuse me now while I start memorizing my new confession. 🙂 My tulip theme seems even more appropriate.
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3 thoughts on “Noodling with Noll”
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Welcome to the dark side… all will be assimilated ;o)
Resistance is futile. 🙂
Strangely, while I find myself becoming more Reformed all the time, one of the things that holds me back are statements from my Reformed friends that “all intellectually seriously Protestants eventually become Reformed.” That bothers me–it reminds me too much of similar statements from my Catholic friends, or from secularists, who claim a similar monopoly on serious intellects.
I find your comments on Noll and the question of “pushing back the balance” compared to “a whole new way of talking” even more thought-provoking. I think you and I have danced around this question elsewhere. I need to (re)read Noll and others. But my convictions that there is never anything new under the sun and that most theological errors arise from overcorrection against other theological errors combined with (among other things) my sense of history and view of Scripture lead to towards looking for balance rather than something radically new.
I’d like to think I’m a rhetorician. But despite what I’ve learned from Burke, perhaps I still stand closer to Cicero and Aristotle.
I thought of you today as I listened to Rick Ross talk about Heaven’s Gate…I missed you. It makes me all so sad.