In a forum on the evangelical mind — which Professor Mark Noll of Wheaton College says is virtually nonexistent — Christianity Today magazine (August 14, 1995) enlists Noll and three other intellectual heavyweights to tell the world what ails conservative Christianity in the United States.
The disconcerting verdict is that — despite century-old schools like Wheaton College and scores of seminaries and a vast production of religious books and magazines — the evangelical movement is cognitively ineffectual. Even the Christian College Coalition of some 90 evangelical colleges and universities hardly gets a mention.
Prescriptions are offered by Mark Noll, author of The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (1994), Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary; Alister McGrath, now at Regent College, Vancouver, and progressive dispensationalist Darrel Bock of Dallas Theological Seminary. The participants have in common their postponement into the future of impressive evangelical intellectual achievement and their shared confidence that evangelicals should put less emphasis on the inerrancy of Scripture.
Noteworthy differences exist. Noll is most despairing about the evangelical mind. He sees the recent-earth creation theory and the politically uncritical Religious Right as having consumed intellectual capital that might have been better spent on larger issues. Mouw shares these reservations, but thinks sweeping deconstruction of the past is not needed. The contributions of Noll, Marsden, Hatch, and McGrath are viewed as the beginnings of a better era, although their efforts are more analytic than constructive.
But it is the prevalent attitude toward the Bible — especially embarrassment in respect to scriptural inerrancy — that is noteworthy.
Noll commends "seriousness about the Bible," but focuses on the history of redemption culminating in Jesus Christ. This may restrict revelation to matters of doctrine and ethics. Noll deplores as harmful to Christian thinking the invocation of inerrancy as a litmus test, stressing that evangelicals have "an implicit thorough trust" in the truthfulness of the Bible. But that comment deals with psychology more than theology.
Bock is somewhat more cautious. He thinks we should follow biblical proportions when expounding doctrine. Yet when one is discussing Christianity's epistemic foundations may it not be proper to violate such restriction? But to Bock's credit, he remarks that "to give some description of the Bible's trustworthiness without asserting Scripture's fundamental truthfulness leaves us in a no-man's land."
McGrath stresses the "trustworthiness and sufficiency of Scripture," which he regards as a fence erected to safeguard these features. The fence (inerrancy) is really not as important, he says, as the truth it's meant to safeguard. McGrath thinks we should emphasize "what Scripture says" rather than "why it is authoritative." But suppose Scripture says it is authoritative because it is veritably the word of the Lord — as the prophets declare some 1200 times? And suppose inerrancy is an indispensable part of the truth that inerrancy is intended to safeguard?
Mouw rejects the emphasis of theological moderates — shared also by previous Fuller president David Hubbard — that the term inerrancy is useless because it is variously defined. Instead, he affirms that, however we define it, the term is "helpful" because it guards "the message character of Scripture as precious." But this shifts the ambiguity from "inerrant" to "precious." The basic issue is the truthfulness, authority, inspiration, and inerrancy of Scripture, as the apostle Paul stresses in 2 Timothy 3:16. What the term inerrancy really guards is inerrancy.
Somewhere in the interview the emphasis emerges that Christian humility may lead us to forsake finality. But that proposal opens another can of worms.
Christianity Today could surely have located among its own senior editors evangelical intellectuals like James Packer, Kenneth Kantzer or Timothy George, or could have enlisted other scholars like D. A. Carson, David Wells or John Woodbridge (and perhaps even an alternative at Wheaton) who would have asked theologically decisive questions. Renewal of the evangelical mind should least of all accommodate ambiguity in the exposition of the doctrine of Scripture.
