Mark A. Noll Quotes

Republicanism was easier to evolve than to define.

If intellectual life involves a certain amount of self-awareness about alternative interpretations or a certain amount of tentativeness in exploring the connection between evidence and conclusions, it was hard to find any encouragement for the intellectual life in the self-assured dogmatism of fundamentalism.

The Book that made the nation was destroying the nation; the nation that had taken to the Book was rescued not by the Book but by the force of arms.

The author finds any freaking, and remarkably objective, way to estimate religion's influence on American society before the Civil War. The population closely aligned with evangelical sympathies was three or four times the size of the voting population in 1860

Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe in Christ even more boldly, for he is victorious over sin, death, and the world. 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. No sin will separate us from the Lamb, even though we commit fornication and murder a thousand times a day. So you think that the purchase price that was paid for the redemption of our sins by so great a Lamb is too small? Pray boldly - you too are a mighty sinner.

Thompson's message was straightforward: if God through divine revelation so clearly sanctioned slavery, and even the trade in "strangers," how could genuine Christians attack modern slavery, or even the slave trade, as an evil?

The English Puritans who migrated to Plymouth, Boston, New Haven, and other North American sites did so in order to continue the efforts to purify self, church, and society that were being frustrated in the mother country. Of many striking features of the Puritans, one of the most remarkable was their zeal in developing a Christian mind.45

I was brought up in a Christian environment where, because God had to be given pre-eminence, nothing else was allowed to be important. I have broken through to the position that because God exists, everything has significance.360

The Gospel of John tells us that the Word who was made flesh and dwelt among us, full of glorious grace and truth, was also the Word through whom all things- all phenomena in nature, all capacities for fruitful interaction, all the kinds of beauty- were made. To honor that Word as he deserves to be honored,evangelicals must know both Christ and what he has made.

Evangelicals do not, characteristically, look to the intellectual life as an arena in which to glorify God because, at least in America, our history has been pragmatic, populist, charismatic, and technological more than intellectual.

The tight link that Protestants perceive between Scripture and salvation explains the great energy they have poured into studying, distributing, and translating the Scriptures, as well as producing the never-ending deluge of printed material explaining, mediating, parsing, debating, exploring, and riffing on the Bible.

But for the sake of simplicity we can speak about four dimensions: the way that evangelicals (1) adopted republican theories of politics, (2) took as their own democratic theories of society, (3) embraced liberal views of the economy (all discussed in this chapter), and (4) domesticated the Enlightenment for Christian purposes (examined in somewhat greater detail in the next chapter).

An older, Puritan approach to Scripture tended to prevail in the American South, where the Bible was regarded as a set of definite, positive laws

In appealing for Christian scholarship, the point is not primarily academic respectability, and certainly not the mindless pursuit of publication for its own sake that bedevils the modern university. The point is rather that the comprehensive reality of Christianity itself demands specifically Christian consideration of the world we inhabit, whether that consideration is of social theory, the history of science, other historical changes, the body, the arts, literature, or more.

Evangelicals have been distinctive in featuring the crisis conversion. But what is essential to Christianity is the whole life committed to God, from the beginning of faith until death.

Dogmatic kind of biblical literalism that gained increasing strength among evangelicals toward the end of the nineteenth century was reduced space for academic debate, intellectual experimentation, and nuanced discrimination between shades of opinion.

Cultivating the mind was absolutely essential, Luther held, because people needed to understand both the word of Scripture and the nature of the world in which the word would take root.

To see in the past that very godly people were able to maintain bizarre interpretations of Scripture should be a caution for us all.

The crisis created by an inability to distinguish the Bible on race from the Bible on slavery meant that when the Civil War was over and slavery was abolished, systemic racism continued unchecked as the great moral anomaly in a supposedly Christian America.

But in their defense of the supernatural, fundamentalists and their evangelical heirs resemble some cancer patients. In facing a drastic disease, they are willing to undertake a drastic remedy. The treatment of fundamentalism may be said to have succeeded; the patient survived. But at least for the life of the mind, what survived was a patient horribly disfigured by the cure itself.