Book review: The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind
by Carl Wieland
Before this book came into my hands, I had already seen extracts indicative of its
profound hostility towards creationism. I had heard, not without dismay, that it
carried endorsements by such as J.I. Packer and, of all people, Francis Schaeffer’s
protege, Os Guiness.
Reading it certainly confirmed that dismay, but this book cannot be simply dismissed
as one more anti-creationist tirade. There is in fact a great deal in it which Christian
thinkers need to digest, in spite of its tragically wrongheaded approach to the
authority of Scripture.
To call evangelicalism back to its heritage of intellectual rigour, to worshipping
God with the ‘whole man’, heart and mind, is certainly
commendable as such. The ‘scandal’ to which Noll refers is that ‘there
is not much of an evangelical mind’ (in the corporate sense, and not referring
to evangelical theology per se). As the jacket blurb points out, evangelical
protestantism, the largest and most active religious group in America, makes
‘only a slight contribution to first–order public discourse in North
America: it neither sponsors a single research university, nor supports a single
periodical devoted to in-depth interaction with modern culture, nor cultivates attitudes
that treat the worlds of science, the arts, politics, and social analysis with the
seriousness that God intends.’
Which of us would not deplore, along with Henry Blamires (as approvingly quoted
by Noll on p. 5), the way in which
‘Except over a very narrow field of thinking, chiefly touching questions of
strictly personal conduct, we Christians in the modern world accept, for the purpose
of mental activity, a frame of reference constructed by the secular mind and a set
of criteria reflecting secular evaluations.’?
Ironically, reading the book makes it clear that this is the very problem which
afflicts Noll and his colleagues.
In spite of his lack of depth in the philosophy of science and epistemology, Noll
is clearly a gifted historian and writer. His expert tracing of the historical background
to much of modern American evangelical thought is both instructive and enjoyable.
Nevertheless, the book is fatally marred by the author’s prejudices in the
area of origins and science, an issue he acknowledges as crucial by devoting so
much space to it. McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College, Noll
has dedicated his book to his colleagues at Wheaton, well known for their theistic
evolutionist/progressive creationist antipathy to those who take Genesis as meaningful
history.
He spends much more time attacking creationism than he does on his other chief bogeyman,
the ‘prophecy movement’ (for want of a better term).1 He presents the idea of global Flood and recent Creation
in six days as being some sort of quasi-heretical invention this century, traceable
to the Adventist writer Ellen White,2
but is substantially misleading in this. The modern movement is not an invention
of creationism, but its revival. The evangelical flirtation in the latter part of
last century with ideas such as local flood, gap theories, day-age ideas and the
like did not have its basis in exegesis. Rather, it arose in an attempt to ‘harmonise’
Genesis with the increasingly popular ideas of those such as Hutton and Lyell who
were advocating a great age for the earth. Prior to that, evangelical commentaries,
for hundreds of years, had no difficulty understanding, in agreement with modern
creationists, the overwhelmingly obvious meaning of Genesis. [Ed. note:
This is well documented in Doug Kelly’s book Creation and Change,
published after Dr Wieland’s review.]
Noll’s emotional involvement in the issue often surfaces from beneath a thin
veneer of scholarly objectivity. His assessments are occasionally so far over the
top as to border on the bizarre. For example, he claims (p. 14) that creationism
rests on a
‘fatally flawed interpretive scheme of the sort that no responsible Christian
teacher in the history of the church ever endorsed before this century.’
Even his own colleague at Wheaton, biologist Pattle Pun, has admitted that there
would be no doubt that the creationists were right about the fact that Genesis obviously
teaches a straightforward creation of everything, recently, in six ordinary days,
followed by a world Flood ‘were it not for the hermeneutical considerations
of science’.3
We see here, as in so many of the ‘evangelical’ books attacking creationism,
that discussions of biblical interpretation are really a smokescreen. The real issue
is one of authority—the words of God or the praises of men. As
Dr Aw Swee Eng (formerly biochemistry professor at Singapore University)
said to me recently, the reason why creation science ministries arouse so much hostility
from those who have compromised on these crucial, foundational issues in their own
thinking is because our very existence ‘is a rebuke to their
compromise’. So Noll really puts the boot in, in no uncertain terms. Not only
are the creationists, in his view, the most visible symptom of the problem, it is
clear that he regards them (us) as the main ‘scandal’ for Christendom.
Those who have been influenced by them are described as ‘enslaved to the cruder
spirits of populist science’ and as ‘bereft of self-criticism, intellectual
subtlety, or an awareness of complexity’.
The author of Scandal does not grapple with creationist arguments—he
treats them with an aloof disdain, as if everyone with a neurone in their skull
would know that, by definition, such a position must be wrong. He is happy to acknowledge
members of the generally theistic evolutionist American Scientific Affiliation as
‘careful Christian thinkers’,4
whereas on the same page (p. 197) the creationists are smeared with prejudicial
reference to their alleged ‘noisy’ approach.
Anyone involved with our ministry will have experienced some of the immense rage
of the evolutionist establishment as expressed in some very savage distortions,
even public ad hominem attacks based on demonstrated fabrication. It is
therefore a very bitter pill that Noll is asking us to swallow when he blames
creationists for pushing the religion-science issue ‘to the brink
of warfare’.
Further, there is the issue of intellectual honesty. Noll says that if the consensus
of modem scientists is
‘that humans have existed on the planet for a very long time, it is foolish
for biblical interpreters to say that “the Bible teaches” the recent
creation of human beings.’
Note the breathtaking arrogance. It doesn’t appear to matter what the Bible
text actually says—if it disagrees with the majority view of fallen humanity,
it cannot be said to be teaching that. A more honest position would be to admit
that, if the Bible were to teach something that is completely at odds with actual
fact, then it has in effect been falsified. Instead, it seems, we should engage
in an emperor’s clothes charade, pretending it does not teach what it so clearly
does.
One can wholeheartedly concur with Os Guiness5
as quoted in the Noll book (p. 23) that
‘Evangelicals need to repent of their refusal to think Christianly and develop
the mind of Christ.’
That is in fact what our ministry is all about—one can only think Christianly
if that is based on biblical foundations. Evangelicalism will only regain its intellectual
vigour when it puts its philosophical house in order. First, it needs to withdraw
its support en masse from the Christian institutions which have sat back
complacently and allowed their own faculty members to work at denying the foundations
of the Gospel message, by teaching such things as death/bloodshed before sin, no
global Flood judgment, etc. Such institutions have, in effect, been pulling the
intellectual teeth from Christianity by setting Christian thought onto pathways
which have shown, over and over, to lead only in one direction. Whether in the history
of Christian educational institutions, or even whole denominations, the ‘cracks’
of compromise in the Genesis foundations of doctrine have led to an increasingly
liberal understanding of the rest of the Bible, and ultimately, via mysticism, to
naturalism.6
Those concerned about the absence of Christian intellectualism should actually welcome
the modern creationist movement (while not necessarily embracing all of its adherents)
for grappling head-on with the most significant intellectual challenges to Christianity.
In particular, they should welcome the increasing signs that there is a growing
breadth and maturity to the movement, precisely in those areas of science related
to the crucial issues of catastrophic geology and the age/dating question.
If that handful of scientists and intellectuals Currently engaged in the task of
building a sound creation model on solid biblical foundations were to be supported
en masse by the evangelical community (this in itself would greatly swell their
numbers), there could indeed be a basis for a true Christian cultural revival, encompassing
all areas of human thought and endeavour. Somehow, I don’t think Mark Noll
would be pleased.
Footnotes
- The reader could easily get the (misleading) impression from Noll’s
book the extreme, sensationalistic premillenialism is somehow inexorably linked
to the creation movement. Return to text.
- Presumably this particular name is dropped in to foster prejudice
in the average evangelical’s mind against creationism. Return to
text.
- Pun, P.T., 1987. Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation,
March 1987, P. 14. Return to text.
- Even vigorous anti-evolutionist Phillip Johnson is granted this
label—but then, he is careful not to espouse a literal Genesis, which seems
to be the cardinal sin according to Noll. Return to text.
- I believe his mentor, the late Francis Schaeffer, would be dismayed
at Guiness’s endorsement of this book. It’s not only that Schaeffer
(while never quite going far enough in an area [science] in which he felt ill-equipped)
gave an enormous amount of authority to the book of Genesis in his own writing (for
example, Whatever Happened to the Human Race?). It is that the people that
Noll upholds, directly or indirectly, have an approach to Scripture which Schaeffer
recognised as disastrous—people such as Howard Van Till, many of the American
Scientific Affiliation, and Wheaton College’s theistic evolutionists. Noll’s
own approach is highlighted on p. 244, where he appears to disparage inerrancy,
then just afterwards seem to encourage the very ‘retreat to the upper storey’
that Schaeffer so frequently wrote against. That is, Scripture is only regarded
as true and authoritative for the ‘upper storey’—abstract areas,
like good works and salvation. Schaeffer recognised that for the Bible to be relevant
to the ‘religious’ areas, it must be accurate and reliable wherever
it purports to make statements pertaining to ‘science, history and the cosmos’.
Return to text.
- The book is full of ironies. Noll extols the Christian intellectual
virtues of the late Princeton divines Charles Hodge and B.B. Warfield. However,
it was precisely their willingness to accommodate ideas which did havoc to the natural
sense of Genesis, and therefore to the entire Creation/Fall/Redemption framework
of Christianity, which paved the way for Princeton becoming a bastion of liberalism,
naturalism and atheism. Noll is co-editor of Charles Hodge: What is Darwinism? And
Other Writings on Science and Religion (a compilation of Hodge's relevant
works). Hodge clearly recognised that Darwinism was rank atheism. Nevertheless,
the recent re-release of Hodge’s anti-Darwinist polemic (the next in the series
edited by Noll is to be B.B. Warfield’s writings on science/religion/evolution)
can be seen as consistent with Noll’s whole crusade against literal creationists.
Hodge's onslaught was against the Darwinian mechanism. He seemed unconcerned at
the way in which evolution’s long ages denied the authority of Genesis as
history, and postulated death before man, for example. If anything, Hodge was a
‘softening up’ influence, whose vigorous opposition to ‘Darwinism’
diverted attention from the extent of his compromise. B. B. Warfield had even less
problems with Darwin—he was in a sense the archetypal evangelical theistic
evolutionist. With this historical one-two punch, Noll presumably is hoping to demonstrate
that if these ‘great evangelical theologians’ could oppose naturalism,
yet not have any problems with the ‘obvious facts of science’ (such
as long geological ages before man, and in Warfield’s case, even evolution
itself) how can modern-day creationists presume that such positions are not orthodox?
Return to text.
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