The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

De: Mark A. Noll

Narrado por: Trevor Thompson

Duración: 9 h y 43 m

Resumen del Editor

“The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind". So begins this award-winning intellectual history and critique of the evangelical movement by one of evangelicalism’s most respected historians.

Unsparing in his indictment, Mark Noll asks why the largest single group of religious Americans—who enjoy increasing wealth, status, and political influence—have contributed so little to rigorous intellectual scholarship. While nourishing believers in the simple truths of the gospel, why have so many evangelicals failed to sustain a serious intellectual life and abandoned the universities, the arts, and other realms of “high” culture?

Over 25 years since its original publication, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind has turned out to be prescient and perennially relevant. In a new preface, Noll lays out his ongoing personal frustrations with this situation, and in a new afterword he assesses the state of the scandal—showing how white evangelicals’ embrace of Trumpism, their deepening distrust of science, and their frequent forays into conspiratorial thinking have coexisted with surprisingly robust scholarship from many with strong evangelical connections.

©2022 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. (P)2022 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

Reseñas de la Crítica

Winner, Christianity Today Book of the Year Award

Fascinating and Necessary, but…

This book is well researched and the information bears out significant implications for all Christians in the United States on both sides of the reformation divide. The author makes his points eloquently, and still manages to make the material understandable for the average listener.

That said, I would hazard listeners to take some of his points with a grain of salt. For my brothers and sisters in Christ in the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, this book can often feel unnecessarily polemical in nature. There are a handful of moments in each chapter in which the author takes potshots at the Catholic/Orthodox churches, without which the point would still have been conveyed in its entirety. This uncharitable commentary serves no real purpose other than to laud the popularity of Protestant theologies in the United States, and at one point refers to Catholic/Orthodox churches as “European churches” that are dying out due to their strict formalism. Unfortunately, these unnecessary potshots keep patent the reformation rift that ecumenical dialogue has been attempting to mend. The author makes no attempt to hide this prejudice, which marred an otherwise enjoyable work.

All in all, I still recommend giving this book a shot. It has a great deal of worthwhile information for the inquiring mind, and sheds greater light on a subject of which perhaps most individuals are completely unaware.