Kicking the Habit of Dualism, A Seven Step Theological Recovery Programme

Abstract

I'm still trying to get over Mark Noll's Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Its opening sentence struck like a bolt of lightening. "The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind". His statement applies as much to African evangelicalism as it does to American evangelicalism. Many of the forces that encouraged anti-intellectualism among North American evangelicals have been brought to Africa by western missionaries (revivalism, dispensationalism, keswick piety, fundametalism) or by westernized African evangelicals. Noll's book has been read as a call to abandon intellectual apathy and to engage in serious academic work and foster serious intellectual life. Such a reading of Noll does not go far enough. Noll, himself a committed evangelical scholar, sees two obstacles to the rebirth of evangelical intellectual life. Anti-intellectualism is surely the first. But a close second is a world intellectualism in which evangelicals who are personally Christian uncritically accept current academic thinking in their respective disciplines.