“I hope the book is widely read by pastors, academics, and thoughtful lay people, who have — or wish they had — a compelling and reliable vision for God’s new global work in our time. So what I am trying to do here is give a glimpse into Noll’s three passions and the foil of his personal faith.”

Historian Mark Noll has written more than a “personal memoir” narrating his pilgrimage from his non-pugilistic, “genuine all the way down,” Cedar Rapids, Baptist fundamentalism to his nuanced, Calvinistic, world-Christian, historically informed Protestantism. There is that. And it is riveting reading (at least for a fellow Wheaton classmate, and fellow lover of the supremacy of Christ in all things).

But, given the way this professor of history at Notre Dame is wired, and given the convictions that drive his life and work, his own story could never be the main point — witness his “grave suspicion about personal memoir as a genre.” There is a much bigger story to tell. His own story is a foil — fascinating foil — for the expression of the passions of his life (even historians have these): the nature of the Christian faith, the nature of Christian thinking about history, and the paradoxes and limitations of human life.

The book is titled From Every Tribe and Nation: A Historian’s Discovery of the Global Christian Story (Baker Academic, 2014). And once Noll was arm-wrestled into writing it (by Joel Carpenter and Robert Hosack), he was in his element — grave suspicions and all.

I hope the book is widely read by pastors, academics, and thoughtful lay people, who have — or wish they had — a compelling and reliable vision for God’s new global work in our time. So what I am trying to do here is give a glimpse into Noll’s three passions and the foil of his personal faith.

The Foil of Personal Faith

Noll’s way of doing historical writing over the last 30 years, by conviction, has not foregrounded his personal faith. This book is different. Here we meet a man of deep biblical conviction, for whom the realities of the Christian faith are “the most important things in [his] own life” (xii). By my reckoning the most significant theological statement in the book is this:

The cross, in sum, was God’s everlasting “no” to the most fundamental human idolatry of regarding the self as a God. It was God’s final word of condemnation for all efforts to enshrine humanity at the center of existence. (18)

That last sentence is laden with implications for historical methodology, which I will come back to at the end. But first and foremost, this statement is Noll’s declaration of his surrender to the totality of God’s grace.

This accounts, it seems, for why, in spite of Noll’s years of teaching at Notre Dame, and his deep appreciation for Roman Catholic Nicene orthodoxy, “Yet, over this same period, my own commitment to the classical Protestantism of the Reformation has also become stronger, especially accounts of sin, grace, and salvation” (183).

He had been gripped (like many of us), during the days of graduate studies, by the explosive witness of the sixteenth century to the gospel: “The riches of classical Protestantism opened a new and exceedingly compelling vision of existence” (12).

Noll became a kind of Luther-like, Hodge-like, Kuyper-like, nuanced (because historians nuance everything) Calvinist, who lives on the razor’s edge between making his own expression of faith universally normative, and “descending into cultural relativity” (166). In other words: “As basically a Calvinist myself, I nonetheless saw immediately that the best hymns came from many points on the Christian compass” (52).

Foundational to the riches of the Reformation was not only “the perspicuity of the scriptural message of redemption in Christ” (183), but also the reality of the Bible’s stunning divine-human perfection: “I was more and more convinced that the Bible told the story of salvation as perfectly as could be imagined, but less and less concerned to resolve the difficulties involved in stating how the living word was fully revealed in the written word” (56).

This foundation, and this compelling vision of existence, has found its most intense personal expression in Noll’s experience of the Lord’s Supper. Yes, there is the characteristic intellectual engagement: “The experience that prompted the deepest reflection on the nature of Christianity in my own life as a Christian was regular celebration of the Lord’s supper” (52).

But more deeply, Noll gives us a brief glimpse into the “cyclone of emotion” experienced in the old Scot’s Form at his Presbyterian church. Like many former Lit. majors, at the times of deepest emotion, Noll turns to poetry — his own poetry — to express the depths (53). And then this comment: “Over the years, the intellectual frisson became an existential epiphany” (54).

The Nature of the Christian Faith

Pondering and experiencing the presence of God in the Lord’s Supper was a bridge to the nature of the Christian faith that Noll’s exposure to world Christianity was making clearer. The Lord’s Supper is a kind of incarnation — a kind of translation — of divine reality into the particularities of the physical, cultural, personal, human present. And so is all of Christianity — first manifest in the incarnation of Christ, and then in the missionary expanse of the church into one culture after the other.

Foremost among Noll’s formative influences, in this regard, was the seminal thinking of missionary-historian Andrew Walls of the University of Aberdeen — “a lonestar had arisen for me” (90). Among the crucial insights obtained from Walls Noll says,

The most compelling is the awareness that “world Christianity” displays the essential character of Christianity itself. In a word, cross-cultural adaptation has been essential where Christianity flourishes because Christianity itself began and continues through the divine gift of cross-cultural communication. . . .

Following on the original act of translation in Jesus of Nazareth are countless re-translations into the thought forms and cultures of the different societies into which Christ is brought as conversion takes place. (96–97)

This meant “that the history of Christianity constantly unfolds new depths and new understanding of the Christian faith itself” (97). In other words, fresh incarnations of Christianity — fresh translations of it into more and more cultures — drew out of the faith aspects that were really there, but had not been seen as clearly as they now are in this new cultural translation.

Read More