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Paging through 40 years of Christianity Today, one notices the advertisements for books in every issue. Mark Noll and David Wells might be right in chastising evangelicals for not thinking well (The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, 1994; and No Place for Truth, 1993; respectively), but evangelicals apparently do read. And what they have read over the last four decades tells us a lot about them.

Evangelicals, of course, care about evangelism. D. James Kennedy's Evangelism Explosion (1970) is probably the most widely used single guide, beyond Bill Bright's little tract on The Four Spiritual Laws. For those who sought to respond to the intellectual challenges posed to the faith, Josh McDowell offered Evidence that Demands a Verdict (1972), doubtless the most popular apologetics handbook of our time. And for those who needed inspiration as much as information, Elisabeth Elliot's powerful missionary books, preeminently her account of the Ecuador martyrs, Through Gates of Splendor (1957), motivated many to join in the evangelistic enterprise. A recipient of evangelism, Charles Colson told of his becoming Born Again (1976) and soon took his place as a leading figure in American evangelicalism. Evangelist Billy Graham, of course, has been the leading figure among American evangelicals, and he has served them with many books through the years. His study of Angels: God's Secret Agents (1977) has been, to his own surprise, the biggest seller.

The receptive response to Graham's angelology may have presaged the astonishing success of This Present Darkness (1976) and subsequent novels by Frank Peretti, whose tales of supernatural conflict revived a long-dormant evangelical interest in spiritual warfare. Such warfare also was guided and inspired by John Wimber, leader of the Vineyard movement and author (with Kevin Springer) of Power Evangelism (1986), the book that introduced "signs and wonders" into the American evangelical lexicon. Even Peretti's sales, however, pale in comparison to the bestseller of the 1970s, Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth (1970). Lindsey imaginatively freshened up dispensational eschatology for a new generation, and many others followed in his wake.

Lindsey's success showed that, in at least some respects, evangelicals continued to care about the Bible. Sometimes they have gone to war over it. Harold Lindsell's The Battle for the Bible (1976) called evangelicals to arms over the question of inerrancy, and Jack Rogers and Donald McKim's effort to show that evangelicals did not have to share Lindsell's views on The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible (1979) merely added fuel to the fire.

Another firestorm of controversy over the Bible was touched off by Henry Morris and John Whitcomb by their defense of "creation science" in The Genesis Flood (1961). Indeed, the cry of "creation versus evolution" continues to ignite evangelical interest decades later, as it did decades before among fundamentalists. It was George Marsden's account of Fundamentalism and American Culture (1980) that helped the many evangelical heirs of the fundamentalists to understand why they acted and thought as they did. Marsden's book more than any other marked the emergence of the prominent new school of evangelical church history that had been foreshadowed by Timothy Smith and Ernest Sandeen in a previous generation.

Mostly, though, evangelicals have preferred to read and profit from the Bible. Berkeley Mickelsen's widely used textbook, Interpreting the Bible (1963), gave evangelicals helpful guidelines. Scottish scholar F. F. Bruce led the way in offering evangelicals useful commentaries, although William Barclay's even more popular paperback series (begun in the 1950s and revised virtually until his death in 1978) introduced the common reader to critical theories previously unfamiliar to most evangelicals. For pastors and scholars, George Ladd (notably in A Theology of the New Testament [1974] and The New Testament and Criticism [1967]) and Roland Harrison (especially in his ubiquitous Introduction to the Old Testament [1969]) encouraged evangelicals to benefit, if cautiously, from modern critical study of the Bible. Many of those pastors, furthermore, probably were taught the basics of preaching the Bible from a primer like Haddon Robinson's Biblical Preaching (1980) and a sophisticated consideration of the preacher's task from works such as John R. W. Stott's Between Two Worlds (1982). American evangelicals focused on the Bible in the most basic respect as they generated a profusion of paraphrases and translations, most notably Kenneth Taylor's Living Bible (1971) and the New International Version (1973)-with Eugene Peterson's currently popular The Message (1993) only the latest in this stream.

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September 16 1996, Vol. 40, No. 10