Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (9781467464628) by Noll Mark A

Author:Noll, Mark A.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Inscribe Digital
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE LINGERING EFFECTS OF THE INNOVATIONS

But surely the author doth protest too much. Surely we are flogging a dead horse by being so preoccupied with beliefs and practices from the early twentieth century that must now exert only a residual effect on the evangelical community. To be sure, the specific theological propositions of dispensationalism probably do not have quite the importance across the evangelical spectrum that they once did. Fundamentalist intellectual habits, however, have been more resilient than fundamentalism itself. Several matters from recent evangelical history indeed illustrate the continuing sway of those early patterns of thought.

On predispositions in the use of Scripture, we should remember that, after the Bible, the best-selling book of any sort in the United States during the 1970s was Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth, a populist interpretation of world events in terms of historicist dispensationalism.51 The evangelical predilection, when faced with a world crisis, to use the Bible as a crystal ball instead of as a guide for sorting out the complex tangles of international morality was nowhere more evident than in responses to the Gulf War in early 1991. Neither through the publishing of books nor through focused consideration in periodicals did evangelicals engage in significant discussions on the morality of the war, the use of the United Nations in the wake of the collapse of Communism, the significance of oil for job creation or wealth formation throughout the world, the history of Western efforts at intervention in the Middle East, or other topics fairly crying out for serious Christian analysis. Instead, evangelicals gobbled up more than half a million copies each of several self-assured, populist explanations of how the Gulf crisis was fulfilling the details of obscure biblical prophecies. The systems of biblical interpretation promoted in those best-sellers were all variations on dispensational theology.

The same sort of conclusion must be made for characteristic evangelical predilections for looking at the world. For the last half-decade, two sensationally popular novels by Frank Peretti—This Present Darkness (1986) and Piercing the Darkness (1989)—have consistently topped religious best-seller lists, they have spawned dozens of imitations, and they have set the tone for evangelical assessment of cause-and-effect connections in the world. These novels present a nearly Manichaean vision of life where conflicts on earth are paralleled by conflicts between angels and demons in the heavens, and where the line between good and evil runs, not as Solzhenitsyn once wrote, through the heart of every individual, but between the secular forces of darkness on one side and the sanctified forces of light on the other. To the extent that Peretti’s vision reflects evangelical perceptions more generally, it shows an evangelical community unwilling to sift the wheat from the chaff in the wisdom of the world, unprepared to countenance the complexity of mixed motives in human action, and uninterested in focusing seriously on the natural forces that influence human behavior. Although formally connected to the scriptural command to resist the devil, the stark dialectic of spiritual warfare found in these

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