The State of the Evangelical Mind

Reflections on the Past, Prospects for the Future

Todd C. Ream, Jerry A. Pattengale, Christopher J. Devers, Todd C. Ream, Jerry A. Pattengale, Christopher J. Devers

• Editorial: IVP Academic
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780830874088
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Religious Education

Two decades on from Mark Noll's Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, could we now be on the threshold of another crisis of intellectual maturity in Christianity? Or are the opportunities for faithful intellectual engagement and witness even greater now than before? These essays invite readers to a virtual "summit meeting" on the current state of the evangelical mind. The insights of national leaders in their fields will aid readers to reflect on the past contributions of evangelical institutions for the life of the mind as well as prospects for the future. Contributors include: - Richard J. Mouw- Mark A. Noll- Jo Anne Lyon- David C. Mahan and C. Donald Smedley- Timothy Larsen- Lauren Winner- James K. A. Smith- Mark GalliThe State of the Evangelical Mind frames the resources needed for churches, universities, seminaries, and parachurch organizations to chart their course for the future, both separately and together, and provides readers an opportunity to participate in a timely conversation as they consider what institutional and individual role they might play. This is not a book to define or diagnose evangelicalism broadly, and there's no fear-mongering or demonizing here, but rather a call to attend to the evangelical mind and the role played by interlocking institutions in its intellectual formation and ongoing vitality. It will encourage—and challenge—those who want to be part of the solution in a time of need.

1 • REFLECTIONS ON THE PAST

EVANGELICAL
INTELLECTUAL LIFE:
REFLECTIONS on the PAST

MARK A. NOLL

I WOULD LIKE TO BEGIN these reflections on the recent past by commemorating four enterprises with which I was privileged to be personally connected. All four facilitated, supported, published, disseminated, or otherwise promoted intellectual efforts that combined demonstrable excellence and a meaningful connection to the evangelical world. Of course, no one person’s experience can speak comprehensively about a religious phenomenon as diffuse as contemporary evangelicalism or a terrain as capacious as contemporary intellectual life. Nonetheless, capsule histories of these four enterprises do provide concrete particulars most historians like. The four are the Reformed Journal, the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals, the Pew Evangelical Scholars Program (which included the Pew Younger Scholars Program), and Books & Culture. Taken together, these histories also point to several conclusions that underscore the complexity of our subject, the state of the evangelical mind in the recent past.1 In a word, it is the best of times, and it is the worst of times.

A TALE OF WOE?

The William B. Eerdmans publishing company began the Reformed Journal (RJ) in 1951. In 1990, after four decades, Eerdmans announced its cessation. The monthly came into existence because young and restless Dutch-Americans, most associated with Calvin College or Calvin Theological Seminary, wanted to season the traditional theological fixations of their Reformed tradition with broader cultural awareness. The magazine was funded by accounting legerdemain at Eerdmans’s highest levels, and the editors worked on the magazine by moonlight. Its pages sometimes rehearsed quite a bit of inside Dutch baseball, authors contributed gratis, and circulation never strayed far above three thousand. Yet right from the start, the Reformed Journal contributed a refreshing note to American religious journalism. At first, the magazine concentrated on the denominational affairs of the Christian Reformed Church and educational debates at Calvin.

But then, even as the book business at Eerdmans broadened out to publish more self-identified evangelical authors like Carl F. H. Henry, the magazine also broadened out to a wider assessment of issues at the intersection of Christianity and society in general. Some of those new issues spoke to the concerns of mainline Protestants, but quite a few also drew growing attention from evangelicals, like a friendly debate in 1966 between Lewis Smedes, still then at Calvin College, and Henry, editor of Christianity Today. The debate was over how much hope for social reform should be placed in regenerated individuals (Henry) as opposed to the working of the gospel plus efforts to enlist all people of good will in shaping governmental policy (Smedes).2 The magazine was never evangelical by any narrow definition, yet over time its European confessional stance came to engage and enlist a growing number of self-identified evangelicals, as well as a number of mainline Protestants, a few Catholics, Mennonites, and Pentecostals.

After reading the Journal for several years, I submitted an essay for publication in 1981. Then through George Marsden’s mediation, I was asked to serve on the editorial committee, a rare honor for someone who had not done duty at Calvin and, after George, only the second editor for whom “evangelical” might have been an obvious designation. One of the unusual opportunities of service on that committee was the privilege of attending occasional editorial meetings, either at Eerdmans’s own facility or at one of the several Grand Rapids eateries whose personnel seemed on unusually familiar terms with the RJ regulars.

Serious discussions dominated these meetings, often with matters of world-historic import on the table, but they were almost always lightened with what from an outsider’s viewpoint could only be called eccentricities. One of the latter moments, which occupies a permanent place in Journal lore, illustrated the less-than-frictionless alignment of American evangelical mores and inherited Calvinist traditions. It involved the presence of the third evangelical member of the editorial committee and, not coincidentally, the first woman. As recorded by editor-in-chief Jon Pott, “The younger generation had its own stories to add—of, for example, the time [one of the original editors] was asked by one of the newer editors, in the service of a more enlightened etiquette, not to light up a cigarette after lunch, causing much silent consternation in a founder for whom the Journal, at least of cherished memory, practically was smoke.”3

For more evangelicals than just myself, the ability to consider infinitely important matters with a light touch was a tonic. Just as eye-opening was serious treatment of culture, politics, society, and art as a natural exercise exploring venues created by God, sustained by God, and potentially reflecting the glory of God. The Reformed Journal became for quite a few evangelicals an intellectual lighthouse in an otherwise dreary landscape. It did so by showing, month after month, that believers could write intelligently about (and sometimes dispute among themselves about) a vast range of issues—all the way from details of Calvinist theology to the movies and Billy Graham and gender questions to US and Canadian politics and the experience of cancer and caring for terminally ill relatives and novels and much more.

The second enterprise was the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals (ISAE), created at Wheaton College in the early 1980s. The ISAE emerged out of an informal network of younger historians from evangelical backgrounds who shared research interests in historical aspects of Protestant life in North America. It required the willingness of Wheaton College to house programs that pushed the college beyond what it had previously attempted in research, collaboration, and publication. It was made possible by the philanthropic largesse of the Lilly Endowment and the Pew Charitable Trusts, funding agencies that chose to direct some of their means to self-identified evangelical projects. And it took advantage of new interest among academic historians in the religious dynamics of the American past.

In November 1979, Wheaton College sponsored a conference titled “The Bible in America,” which yielded a book of the same title published by Oxford University Press in 1982, with contributions from Harry Stout, George Marsden, Timothy Weber, Grant Wacker, Richard Mouw, Gerald Fogarty (a Catholic priest), Nathan Hatch, and myself. Hatch, then a young professor at the University of Notre Dame, secured funding from the Lilly Endowment for this effort, and I arranged for Wheaton’s sponsorship through the college’s new Billy Graham Center. The conference attracted a lively audience, with at least modest interest in the book that followed. Its publication had been eased by the recent success at Oxford University Press of George Marsden’s Fundamentalism and American Culture and by the fact that George contributed one of the key essays to the Bible book.

Lilly then provided funding to establish a center at Wheaton to study other aspects of American religious history, with special concentration on the contributions of evangelicals. Effective leadership came first from Joel Carpenter, then Larry Eskridge, Darryl Hart, and Edith Blumhofer, with the background support of a widening network of historians, some from evangelical institutions, some teaching in secular settings, and quite a few from beyond recognizable evangelical circles. Major funding for programs continued to come from Lilly and Pew, with substantial monetary aid from Wheaton for continuity and overhead.

Before the ISAE closed in 2014 as a result of Wheaton College funding being shifted to more direct support of its undergraduate programs, the ISAE sponsored more than thirty separate projects on topics ranging from Jonathan Edwards and evangelical mass media to the history of theological education, women in twentieth-century Protestantism, missionaries abroad as well as the impact of missions on Americans at home, and more. These projects led to the production of about twenty-five books, several videos for church use, and even one musical CD. Of the books, about a third were published by Oxford University Press, another third from evangelical publishers (primarily Eerdmans and Baker Books), and a final third from a variety of university presses. Chapters in these books were contributed by about 250 different authors, of whom many were clearly evangelical, but with just as many coming from other Christian traditions or from none.

For some who took part in the ISAE from institutions without PhD programs, the institute functioned as a kind of graduate-level education without the mechanism of a graduate school. In this graduate school without walls, however, it soon became obvious that serious study of evangelical and evangelical-like forms of Christianity did not have a natural stopping place at American borders. Raising eyes to take in Britain did not seem like a stretch. But in the early days of the ISAE, no one was thinking about Canada, much less the rest of the world. Yet once the ISAE set out to undertake serious study of evangelical history, it soon became apparent that such an enterprise could not be contained within the nontrivial but still artificial boundaries of American national experience.

One example suggests how the involvement of scholars from outside the United States affected the understanding of “evangelicalism” more generally. For the second edition of a book that arose out of an ISAE conference, Religion and American Politics: From the Colonial Period to the Present, I asked five observers from outside the United States to comment on the recent history of the book’s theme. Four were self-identified evangelicals from Australia, Britain, France, and Germany; one was a Danish journalist who had traveled widely in the United States and written with considerable empathy about the church life she had observed. The time was early in the second term of President George W. Bush. I knew something about our French contributor’s political opinions, since he had published books in France excoriating the American Christian Right, but I knew next to nothing about the politics of the others. Yet all five, to one degree or another, expressed amazement, chagrin, or outrage at the way American evangelicalism had been hitched to right-wing political causes.

An assessment by James Turner, then a professor of history at the University of Notre Dame and himself Catholic, indicates the standing achieved by the institute, at least to its friends. He wrote, “The ISAE has established itself as the intellectual and organizational center of the New Evangelical History.” Its historians “haven’t just told us about evangelicalism. They’ve told larger stories of American history” that have revealed “the centrality of evangelicalism in the wider American past.” Turner went on to say that “the incorporation by many historians of evangelical and more generally religious themes in their work is ‘evidence of a revolution worked within the last generation of professional historians. . . . I can think of no other center for American historical scholarship in my professional lifetime that has worked quite the influence of the ISAE.’”4

The third enterprise was a series of fellowship programs funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and headquartered at the University of Notre Dame that flourished in the 1990s. These programs, with conceptual leadership provided by Nathan Hatch and implementation by Michael Hamilton, may have represented the most focused effort in all of American history to spur evangelicals to sharper, clearer, deeper, and more influential thinking. With approximately fifteen million dollars over those years, the Pew Evangelical Scholars and Pew Younger Scholars programs “provided research fellowships for college and university professors, scholarships for graduate students, and seminars of various sorts for Christian academics at different stages of their careers.”5

Because the Notre Dame Pew programs deliberately kept definitions of “evangelical” flexible, they succeeded not only at supporting substantial numbers of self-identified evangelicals. They succeeded also at establishing strong links with other Christians who were not evangelicals and with academic leaders who, though without an identifiable religious stance themselves, were nonetheless ready to take part in this effort. Because of the Pew programs, hundreds of students from evangelical colleges were helped to prepare for graduate school, scores of evangelical graduate students were funded in leading doctoral programs, and dozens of older scholars were assisted in finishing their writing projects.

The remarkable range of major books supported by the Pew Programs included, among many others, C. Stephen Evans, The Historical Christ and the Jesus of Faith (Oxford University Press, 1996); Richard Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament (HarperSanFrancisco, 1996); E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America (Yale University Press, 2003); Roger Lundin, Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief (Eerdmans, 1996); Lamin Sanneh, Encountering the West (Orbis, 1993); Dale Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution (Yale University Press, 1996); Geoffrey Wainwright, Lesslie Newbigin: A Theological Life (Oxford University Press, 2000); and Nicholas Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim That God Speaks (Cambridge University Press, 1995). Of these eight authors, three at the time when their books came out were Methodists, three were members of the Christian Reformed Church, one was a Baptist, and one was a Roman Catholic.

My own prejudiced judgments about the significance of the Pew programs are certainly influenced by the fact I received a major grant myself, which provided indispensable assistance in publishing America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln, and also from the chance to serve for several years on the selection committee that had the very difficult task of selecting grant recipients from an extraordinary number of worthy applicants—some of whom seemed to figure that a fellowship was worth identifying, however implausibly, as evangelical. Yet even to observers without that kind of intimate participation, the Pew initiatives at Notre Dame helped many evangelicals advance as scholars, even as they enabled the general evangelical world to become more confident in the academy at large.

The fourth enterprise, Books & Culture: A Christian Review, marked in some ways the resurrection of the Reformed Journal, though now with color, striking graphics, and an ambition to reach well beyond Reformed, Kuyperian, and Calvinist circles. The magazine first appeared late in 1995 and remained an intellectual beacon in a public landscape grown ever more congested with blogging, gotcha journalism, and ideological echo chambers, until financial necessity at its parent, Christianity Today, brought the magazine to a close in December 2016. The confluence of several strands of postwar Protestantism made Books & Culture happen.

First came a considerable number of writers, advisors, and readers who mourned the passing of the Reformed Journal. Grand Rapids was their Mecca and the Christian Reformed Church an ecclesiastical home base. But having already made the move out into broader venues, many of them enlisted willingly as firm supporters of this new venture. Books & Culture, as a tabloid-sized bimonthly, did not narrowly replicate the understated elegance of the Reformed Journal’s gray-on-white monthly pages. But it did sustain the effort to...