“Next in Line” by Mark A. Noll

Mark A. Noll

It’s been a long time coming, but Mark A. Noll’s Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind (a follow-up to his acclaimed 1994 work The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind) will be released in August. Here Noll describes his book’s main thrust, its place in history — and why its 2011 publication date feels so right to him.

It is a decided honor to be publishing Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind with Eerdmans during its centennial year. My original thought was that a kind of sequel to The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, which Eerdmans brought out in 1994, could possibly be published a decade ago in the firm’s ninetieth year. But competing duties, puzzles about just what I should write or was capable of writing, along with the thousand natural delays to which academic flesh is heir, conspired to make the book a centennial volume instead.

The new book ends with an afterword that tries to assess the current state of intellectual efforts by American evangelicals, and so in that sense it resembles The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Yet its main purpose is not to complain about how evangelical Protestants have slighted responsible intellectual effort but to propose what such efforts, grounded in the foundational beliefs that evangelical Protestants share with other Christians, might look like.

My thesis in the new book is that if believers look to Jesus Christ as their redeemer, they should also look to him for guidance in everything — including everything having to do with human learning. I develop this thesis by spelling out specific ways in which energetic engagement with the diverse forms of modern scholarship can rest directly on foundations of Christology.

To begin with, I discuss a significant foundation: the great Christian creeds and their summary of the person and work of Christ as revealed by Scripture. I then suggest that the main message of these creeds offers an ideal place from which to study the realities of nature, self, and society. A believer conscious of redemption in Christ possesses in that consciousness hints about the doubleness of reality (Christ is two natures in one person), its contingencies (Philip urged Nathanael to “come and see”), and its particularity (Christ was incarnate in Bethlehem as the Savior of the world). The same consciousness also stimulates humility that should keep Christian scholars from ever thinking they are justified by their good thoughts.

In an attempt to illustrate how Christology might function in practice, I look  to the classical doctrines of Christ for guidance and apply it to historical study, scientific understanding, and biblical scholarship itself. My point in giving these examples is not to define the only way that faithful believers might pursue intellectual tasks but to urge scholars to be self-conscious about drawing on the deepest reservoirs of the faith as they go about their work.

The experience of writing a sequel to an earlier book has led me naturally to think other thoughts about sequencing. I don’t believe it was until early graduate school days that first I heard the cliché, “Knowledge in the present is possible only because we stand on the shoulders of giants who have gone before.” That cliché is well-worn, but the truth it expresses is anything but out-worn — as publishing a book like Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind with Eerdmans during its centennial year powerfully attests.

I am vain enough or (hopefully) self-aware enough to think that some things in the new book have not been articulated exactly as they appear in its pages. It would, however, be the height of folly not to recognize that it follows paths that have been firmly trod by many others in Eerdmans’s publishing history. Thus, the arguments in Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind partake of a fuller historical consciousness than was found in the many books that Eerdmans published by Carl F. H. Henry, beginning with Remaking the Modern Mind (1946), The Uneasy Consciousness of Modern Fundamentalism (1947), and The Protestant Dilemma (1948). (Henry either did not experience the thousand natural delays to which academic flesh is heir, or he simply shrugged them off.)

Comparatively speaking, in my book historical instincts are more obvious by their presence and philosophical instincts more conspicuous by their absence than they are in any of the seven or eight volumes that Arthur Holmes published over the years with Eerdmans, including his pithy challenge from 1975, The Idea of a Christian College. This book continues to sell as more and more institutions of Christian higher education try to do the right thing in support of meaningful Christian learning.

Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind

The appeal of my book is also theological in a way that George Marsden’s five or six Eerdmans publications have not been, starting with A Christian View of History (1975) and ending with A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards (2008). My book’s chapter on science advances a little beyond Russell Mixter’s 1959 volume, Evolution and Christian Faith Today. I doubt, however, that my effort to explain how Christology might provide norms for studying Scripture adds to the immense quantity of first-rate biblical scholarship that Eerdmans has published over the decades — though that is possible.

If I am correct that the new book provides a fresh idea or two, it does so with the deepest indebtedness — to the earlier trail-blazing of Carl Henry and other “neo-evangelical” stalwarts, to the extraordinary efforts of Arthur Holmes and his generation of pioneering Christian philosophers, to the courage of Russell Mixter and other evangelical scientists who wrote in a much more constrained day than our own, to historians like George Marsden and Timothy L. Smith who showed the way for later generations, and to the immense industry of the Bible scholars beyond number who have published their books with Eerdmans.

To finish such a book in such a year, and then to be asked to contribute a few paragraphs about it to EerdWord, brings up one more reason for gratitude to those who went before. If any readers see that this short essay is actually an “As We See It” masquerading as a blog post, they too may reflect gratefully on the divine exuberance that enabled The Reformed Journal to be published by Eerdmans for so many years with so few visible means of support and with so much benefit. The sphere of thoughtful Christian journalism was for many years a little less lonely because of The Reformed Journal. Eerdmans did a magnanimous thing in its long, sacrificial subvention of that magazine, as it continues to do in this new media age by contributing a patient voice to the hurly-burly of the blogosphere.

Would you like to meet Mark Noll? He’ll be visiting the Eerdmans Bookstore August 13 at 10:00 a.m. as part of our Eerdmans 100th Anniversary Author Series to talk about his new book, answer audience questions, and sign customer copies. We hope to see you there!

 Click here to preorder Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind.

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