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    The Real Scandal of the Evangelical Mind
    The Real Scandal of the Evangelical Mind
    The Real Scandal of the Evangelical Mind
    Ebook49 pages44 minutes

    The Real Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

    By Carl Trueman

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    About this ebook

    What is an evangelical . . . and has he lost his mind? Carl Trueman wrestles with those two provocative questions and concludes that modern evangelicals emphasize experience and activism at the expense of theology. Their minds go fuzzy as they downplay doctrine. The result is “a world in which everyone from Joel Osteen to Brian McLaren to John MacArthur may be called an evangelical.”

    Fifteen years ago in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, historian Mark Noll warned that evangelical Christians had abandoned the intellectual aspects of their faith. Christians were neither prepared nor inclined to enter into intellectual debates, and had become culturally marginalized. Trueman argues that today “religious beliefs are more scandalous than they have been for many years”—but for different reasons than Noll foresaw. In fact, the real problem now is exactly the opposite of what Noll diagnosed: evangelicals don’t lack a mind, but rather an agreed upon evangel. Although known as gospel people, evangelicals no longer share any consensus on the gospel’s meaning.

    Provocative and persuasive, Trueman’s indictment of evangelicalism also suggests a better way forward for those theologically conservative Protestants famously known as evangelicals.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMoody Publishers
    Release dateJan 1, 2011
    ISBN9780802478153
    The Real Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

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    • 5/5
      Carl Trueman's observation that the "evangelical" movement has lost its evangel is prophetic for the North American Christian church in 2023. It is past time for all professing faithful churches to look again to the guiding North Star of scripture and return to the eternal truths contained within. It's sad to review how far the church has strayed from divine wisdom in recent history. Mr. Truenan reminds us that biblical truth needs to bind "the church" not a desire for cultural acceptance.

    Book preview

    The Real Scandal of the Evangelical Mind - Carl Trueman

    spheres.

    Introduction

    It has been some fifteen years since Mark Noll, then a professor of history at Wheaton College, published his famous tract for the times, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.¹ Writing from the context of a Christian liberal arts college, Noll expressed in the book his frustration at what he saw as evangelicals’ intellectual and cultural sterility. For a book that arguably stated the obvious, it made a remarkable impact, with its titular phrase becoming a veritable cliché—a cliché that I am happy to adapt for the title of this essay.

    Professor Noll blamed many aspects of evangelicalism for the cultural wasteland he said it had become, prominent among them the American predilection for dispensationalism, with its passive, pull up the drawbridge and wait for the end of the world mentality toward general cultural pursuits. (Although, one might note, American dispensationalists have been far from passive in at least one area of cultural engagement: conservative politics.) The other area of intellectual suicide identified by Noll was literal, six-day creationism.

    While these two beliefs were in Noll’s view symptomatic of the intellectual malaise within evangelicalism, underlying his analysis was a broader conviction that American evangelicalism historically had faced internal opposition to intellectual and cultural engagement. Professor Noll hinted at this same critique in one of his lesser-known books, Between Faith and Criticism, where he also offered a somewhat rose-tinted perspective of the British scene. Evangelicals in the United Kingdom modeled a better paradigm for combining faith and learning,² he said, whereas American evangelicalism, with its fundamentalist-revivalist-pragmatic roots, had always been inherently anti-intellectual.

    Catholic scholar Etienne Gilson’s words about Francis of Assisi summarize well Professor Noll’s complaint against evangelicalism and its leaders: It is clear that he never condemned learning for itself, but that he had no desire to see it developed in his Order. In his eyes it was not in itself an evil, but its pursuit appeared to him unnecessary and dangerous. Unnecessary, since a man may save his soul and win others to save theirs without it; dangerous, because it is an endless source of pride.³

    Such anti-intellectual obscurantism, of which Noll said dispensationalism and six-day creationism were the most obvious manifestations, had made evangelicals a marginal group. Not in the broader culture, of course, where the evangelical vote was politically significant, but rather in those sections of society where ideas were the stock-in-trade, where mainstream intellectual engagement took place. To a professor at Wheaton College, which had long aspired to be the evangelical Harvard, this marginalization was cause for heartbreak and lament.

    Fifteen years later, the intellectual and cultural poverty of American evangelicals would seem to continue, even as church attendance is holding up reasonably well in the U.S. (at least in comparison to other industrialized nations). Without making a judgment for or against any of the following positions, I would add these common beliefs of evangelicals to dispensationalism and six-dayism as causes of the movement’s social and intellectual marginality: biblical inerrancy, opposition to women’s ordination and homosexuality and abortion, religious exclusivism, and

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