Mark Noll, professor of history at theUniversity of Notre Dame and former long-time professor at Wheaton College, has written a compelling spiritual memoir. The book is a personal and professional journey into the author’s deepening appreciation of the gospel and how it is communicated worldwide. Along the way, we are introduced to the people, institutions, and books that have proven pivotal to Noll’s own development.
In the introduction to From Every Tribe and Nation, Noll admits he was reluctant to write such a personal work. Yet a series editor, who is also a friend, urged him to endeavor a personal excavation on missions and global Christianity. Noll quips that ‘observing a historian undertake his vocation reminded him of an old Monty Python sketch’watching Thomas Hardy write a novel.’
Yet in crafting this inward and outward journey of discovery, Noll overcomes the concern of too stationary a story. As many readers know, Noll is an esteemed historian who is also a serious Christian. He draws the memoir’s title from the book of Revelation, ‘By your blood you ransomed for God saints from every tribe and language and people and nation.’ While his work is a wise backward glance, he maintains an ultimate hope in the future. We accompany Noll from his childhood Conservative Baptist church in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, his undergraduate days at Wheaton College, and almost a decade of graduate studies, including Trinity Divinity School, the University of Iowa, and Vanderbilt University. The book then chronicles the joys and discoveries of the academic life.
The beauty of the work is in the evocative details. He describes his pious parents’ dining room where one wall featured a world map with colored pins representing countries where his church supported missionaries. While growing up in a small town in the heartland, Noll writes about how the church opened a wider world to him. Missionaries home on furlough piqued his interest in foreign lands through requisite slideshows, speaking of distant cultures and the need for the world to know Christ. ‘Missionaries were the exemplars, and for me they helped crack open the world.’
Noll speaks for generations of evangelicals who were challenged by missionary calling and sacrifice. He speaks of the five young men who in 1956 made the ultimate sacrifice serving the Auca Indians in Ecuador. If anyone approached sainthood in these churches it would be the missionaries who died in ‘full-time Christian service.’ Noll lauds his home church’s members who were passionate about sharing the gospel and supporting missions. Yet this fundamental background was long on legalism and short on deep theology. And few thought critically about how missions might be better undertaken.
In a chapter titled ‘Rescued by the Reformation,’ Noll writes of the stark contrast with his youth when he was introduced to Martin Luther’s writings: ‘From internalizing much preaching about what I needed to do to be saved, I experienced existentially Martin Luther’s message about what God endured in order to save me.’ The Christian message he received in his childhood ‘seemed very strong on law and disconcertingly ambiguous about grace.’ He quotes from a letter that Luther wrote to his friend Melanchthon: ‘As long as we are here’¦we have to sin’¦.It is enough that by the riches of God’s glory we have come to know the Lamb that takes away the sin of the world.’ Noll was being schooled in a richer faith.
And then begin the friendships, teachers, and mentors in books and face-to-face encounters, who acted as guides along the way to his maturity. At every step, the author expresses gratitude for God’s grace in his life. In a chapter on ‘First Teachers,’ Noll details how his worldview expanded in college, and he credits several Wheaton professors for powerfully influencing him in cross-cultural awareness including: philosophy professor Arthur Holmes from Dover, England; English professor Clyde Kilby, promoter of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien’s work; and Robert Warburton, who captivated students by recounting trips to the People’s Republic of China to teach English as a Second Language. The seeds were now sown for thinking about Christianity and missions beyond America’s shores.
After graduate school, Noll took a few short teaching assignments before putting down roots at Wheaton’where course preparation was a thrilling learning experience:
Almost every year I was’¦responsible for a one-semester general survey of church history from the apostles to the present. Its divisions were conventional: the early church with a concentration on creed, canon and episcopate; the Middle Ages with special attention to Roman Catholic structures, reform and theology; Catholic reformers struggling to elbow Martin Luther aside; and the modern period with a gallop through pietism, the Wesleys, secularization, Kierkegaard, Newman, Lightfoot, Barth and the Second Vatican Council.
And his learning was not limited to the classroom. Over the decades, colleagues’such as George Rawlyk from Queens College in Canada’encouraged him to join them on trips to Romania, Belfast, and Africa. Few things compare, he says, to seeing people worship God in their own countries.
He writes of learning from his graduate students at Wheaton and more recently at Notre Dame, in their theses on missions, giving examples that circle the world. In teaching a course on ‘World Christianity since the Nineteenth Century,’ Noll discovered how the shape of world Christianity has changed dramatically over the past century. The statistics are stunning, which he shows from this excerpt from another writer:
Last Sunday, it is probable that more Chinese believers were in church than in all of so-called ‘Christian Europe’; as recently as 1970 there had been no legally open churches in China. Last Sunday, more Anglicans attended church in each of Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda than did Anglicans in Britain and Episcopalians in the United States combined (the number of Anglicans at church in Nigeria was several times the number in these other African countries).
The reader is reminded that American Christians are not the center of the global Christian story, nor is the Western church. ‘The ever-expanding numbers who are turning to Christ in the global South constitute the great marvel of recent history,’ he writes. As Noll comments toward the end of the book, ‘Global Christian history is unfolding at a dizzying pace, with ever multiplying questions about how the present has grown out of the past.’ As a reader, you realize at the close of this memoir that you, too, have taken a journey. You have thought more deeply than perhaps you ever have before about how the gospel has’and is’spread around the world.
