Reviews

Noll (history, Wheaton Coll. A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada, LJ 11/1/92) castigates his fellow American conservative evangelicals for losing their intellectual credibility since Darwin. They have followed St. Paul's injunction to be ``fools for Christ'' to the point of being simply fools, instead of heeding Jesus' call to be ``wise as serpents.'' Their scholarly pursuits include such dead-end propositions as ``creation science,'' end-time apocalyptic prophecies, and biblical inerrancy instead of research and writings contributing positively to American intellectual life. What distresses Noll most is that evangelicals seem not to care. He provides extensive historical background showing how this was not always the case and indicates how Christian scholars might recapture lost ground. Passionately and brilliantly argued, this book is recommended for informed lay readers and specialists.-Richard S. Watts, San Bernardino Cty. Lib., Cal.

Claiming that ``the scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind,'' historian Noll sets out to trace the reasons for what he sees as the great divorce between intellect and piety in North American Evangelical Christianity. In a breathtaking panorama of evangelical history from the Great Awakenings to the present, Noll shows that early Evangelicals like Jonathan Edwards embraced the use of reason as an expression of faith in the Creator of the natural world. The advent of Fundamentalism and Pentecostalism, Noll contends, with their emphases on dispensationalism and other-worldliness, fostered anti-intellectualism. Since politics and science, in the form of the religious right and creationism, have been the secular arenas in which the Evangelical mind has most publicly expressed itself, Noll focuses on them to explore ways in which the mindlessness ``scandal'' has created a lack of adequate Christian thinking about the world. Finally, Noll is hopeful that the work of contemporary Evangelical scholars will recover a respect for intellect. Required reading for those seeking to understand the often peculiar relationship between Evangelical religion and secular culture, this is a brilliant study by--yes--a first-rate Evangelical mind. (July)