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EVANGELICALISM'S ROOTS

I read with great interest the symposium on Mark Noll's "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind" in your August 14 issue. One of the most difficult points about this debate is finding an adequate definition for the term evangelical. I think it is more accurate to see contemporary American evangelicalism as coming specifically out of the revival tradition of the nineteenth century. If this is the case, the spiritual forebears of today's "evangelicals" are not the Protestant Reformers, the Puritans, nor even Jonathan Edwards or George Whitefield. Rather, those spiritual ancestors would be nineteenth-century revivalists like Charles Finney, Jonathan Blanchard, and D. L. Moody. In this sense, the Princeton theologians of the nineteenth century, like Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield, could not even be called "evangelical" since they vigorously opposed the revival preaching and theology of leaders like Finney.

If twentieth-century American evangelicalism is the descendant of nineteenth-century revivalism (as Harold Bloom suggests in his book "The American Religion"), it should be no wonder that it does not have a high regard for the life of the mind in the broad cultural sense. While nineteenth-century revivalists believed in educating people in the faith (they founded such institutions as Oberlin College, Wheaton College, and Moody Bible Institute), they also showed little or no interest in the broad cultural, artistic, and intellectual issues of their day except when these were seen as posing a direct threat to their Christian beliefs (i.e., Darwinism). In such cases, their interests were more to refute error than to engage in intellectual debate. In the final analysis, Professor Noll may be lamenting the loss of a view of the "mind" that never existed. One can debate whether this was a positive or negative development. It should, however, not be a surprise, much less a "scandal."

- Pastor Paul Leggett

Grace Presbyterian Church

Montclair, N.J.

Your "Scandal?" continued the arrogant bias toward, and neglect of, the holiness movement that pervaded Mark Noll's "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind." Your forum featured an old boys club of four white males of the Calvinist Reformed tradition. Why did you not include a holiness scholar, such as Cheryl Sanders, James Earl Massey, Mildred Wynkoop, or Donald Dayton? While many scholars and pastors in the holiness tradition are uncomfortable being called evangelicals, if your forum participants are going to label us as a "reactionary" movement within evangelicalism, please include our scholars in the discussion. Perhaps our ability to combine the mind and Holy Spirit might teach the Reformed tradition a needed lesson.

- John E. Stanley

Mechanicsburg, Pa.

Your forum on the state of the evangelical mind with Noll, McGrath, Bock, and Mouw is classic. I, too, am concerned about the "overstatement, rhetorical overkill, prooftexting, and sloganeering" demonstrated by the "populist, anti-intellectual Christian remnant."

However, I think it needs to be stated that the lack of humility and self-criticism Mouw identifies in distorted grassroots pietism can be found at times in the Christian academy as well. I wonder if it is not more displeasing to God when it is found in the academy since the offenders there are presumably smart enough to know better.

- Susan Breeding

Wheaton, Ill.

Would you please ask the participants, next time, to answer the questions you ask and not the ones they prefer to answer? Their answers sounded like those of politicians in TV interviews.

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October 2 1995, Vol. 39, No. 11