I started reading a book that has been around since 1994 – The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind by Dr. Mark A. Noll who was then Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College, and now teaches history at the University of Notre Dame. The first paragraph of the first page jumped out at me and made me feel defensive.
The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind. An extraordinary range of virtues is found among the sprawling throngs of evangelical Protestants in North America, including great sacrifice in spreading the message of salvation in Jesus Christ, open-hearted generosity to the needy, heroic personal exertion on behalf of troubled individuals, and the unheralded sustenance of countless church and parachurch communities. Notwithstanding all their other virtues, however, American evangelicals are not exemplary for their thinking, and they have not been so for several generations.
This critique by one of our own is rather stinging, but historically I believe is accurate. My question is this… are we making progress? Is this still as true in 2009 as it was in 1994? Or do you believe this is completely off target?
