8/17/06
Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind – it was cited in Reading Scripture with the Church Fathers by Christopher A. Hall, who talks about Chafer’s pseudo-scientific way of exegiting the Scriptures in a vacuum.
Claiming that “the scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind,” historian Noll sets out to trace the reasons for what he sees as the great divorce between intellect and piety in North American Evangelical Christianity. In a breathtaking panorama of evangelical history from the Great Awakenings to the present, Noll shows that early Evangelicals like Jonathan Edwards embraced the use of reason as an expression of faith in the Creator of the natural world. The advent of Fundamentalism and Pentecostalism, Noll contends, with their emphases on dispensationalism and other-worldliness, fostered anti-intellectualism. Since politics and science, in the form of the religious right and creationism, have been the secular arenas in which the Evangelical mind has most publicly expressed itself, Noll focuses on them to explore ways in which the mindlessness “scandal” has created a lack of adequate Christian thinking about the world. Finally, Noll is hopeful that the work of contemporary Evangelical scholars will recover a respect for intellect. Required reading for those seeking to understand the often peculiar relationship between Evangelical religion and secular culture, this is a brilliant study by–yes–a first-rate Evangelical mind.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Noll’s book, which stuck in my mind from when I read about the idea of the pseudo-scientific approach, hits the deeper issue behind dispensationalism, it seems like.
Chafer claimed ‘logical procedure and scientific method’ as the keys to hermeneutics.
“The Enlightenment’s imprint left its mark as many evangelicals treated the Bible as a scientific text to be inductively studied through renewed reason alone. … Noll observes a self-confidence “bordering on hubris, manifested in extreme antitraditionalism that casually discounted the possibility of wisdom from earlier generations.”
Consider the claims of that seminar that ‘Precepts’ is putting on, claiming the same thing for Bible study: “personal study of the Word using the inductive study method, using the Word of God as your primary source.”
I noticed the reality one time when I was helping set up their TV, and Kay Arthur was busily telling the people what to think, which is certainly characteristic of the Ryrie Study Bible.
I went back to reread that part about Chafer’s bogus ‘scientific method’ in the Halls book and found that his source was Mark Noll. So in keeping with this period, I immediately ordered it. (Point at which Mark Noll came along.)