The most interesting part of Noll’s criticism is the fact that he chooses not to look closely at his own brand of evangelicalism: the Reformed churches.

When Mark Noll’s Scandal of the Evangelical Mind hit the market in the early 1990s it created a “title” wave that continues to move out in multiple directions. This fact alone means that if evangelicalism is going to reboot its examination of its own intellectual resources–a process already begun in the cultural liturgies series of James K. A. Smith–then it must grapple with Noll’s critique.

In my previous post I tried to set Noll’s work within the context of American religious historiography.

In this post I want to highlight some elephants in the room of Noll’s analysis.

Elephant #1: Populist forms of Christianity can be intellectual, just not populist forms of American evangelical Christianity

One of the questions raised by Noll’s analysis is whether populism can contribute to the life of the mind. As I said in my previous post, Noll locates part of the scandal in the culture of evangelicalism, which he describes as “activist, populist, pragmatic, and ultilitarian.”

Hofstadter disliked the populism that erupted under Andrew Jackson even though it led to the election of an Abraham Lincoln. Instead, Hofstadter contrasted cosmopolitanism, pluralism, and intellect to provincialism, sectarianism, and intuition. One colleague even wondered whether Hofstadter was objecting to democracy itself rather than anti-intellectualism.

Noll’s consigning the problem of the intellect to a populist culture and his hunger for evangelicals to trade wits with the cultural elite and produce Nobel laureates suggests his sympathies reside with Hofstadter.

There are some ironies in Noll’s account that amount to an elephant in the room.

First Irony: Benedictine monks are intellectuals, but holiness folks are not

He refers to Benedictine monks as examples of medieval groups that have encouraged serious thinking. This is an interesting move since many Benedictines are known for deep spirituality, but not always for promoting the kind of intellectual rigor Noll wants out of evangelicals.

Bernard of Clairvaux strongly encouraged students to leave the schools in Paris and convert by which he meant become a monk. He was opposed to the new learning of the schools at times and had Peter Abelard brought up on heresy charges as well as Gilbert de la Porree.

Why is he different from an A. W. Tozer who belonged to the Christian Missionary and Alliance (CMA) church, which came from the Higher Life Movement? Noll says the Higher Life Movement is part of the problem and yet Tozer was given an honorary doctorate by Wheaton and composed over forty books. Tozer was significantly impacted by F. F. Bosworth, an early pentecostal who eventually became a CMA member.

Second Irony: Franciscans are serious about learning and contemplation, but pentecostals are not

Noll makes the same claim about Franciscans that he did about Benedictines. This is also an interesting move given that many Franciscans were opposed to education and there was a debate over its importance within the order. In fact, a significant group of Franciscans (the spiritual Franciscans) engaged in end-time speculation because they adopted the thought of Joachim of Fiore.

Francis himself had charismatic visions, fasted to the point of having an emaciated body, reportedly preached sermons to birds, and left very few writings. Yet, he began a movement that is still with us.

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