Jesus Christ And The Life Of The Mind

Jesus Christ And The Life Of The Mind

In The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (1994) Mark Noll offered a bleak, even scathing, assessment of the state of evangelical thinking and scholarship. Now, nearly twenty years later, in a sequel that is more hopeful than despairing - more attuned to possibilities than to problems - Noll updates his assessment and charts a positive way forward for evangelical scholarship.

Noll shows how the orthodox Christology confessed in the classic Christian creeds provides an ideal vantage point for viewing the vast domains of human learning and can enhance intellectual engagement in a variety of specific disciplines, including history, science, and biblical studies. In a substantial postscript he candidly addresses the question How fares the "evangelical mind" today?

"If what we claim about Jesus is true, then evangelicals should be among the most active, most serious, and most open-minded advocates of general human learning. Evangelical hesitation about scholarship in general or about pursuing learning wholeheartedly is, in other words, antithetical to the Christ-centered basis of faith. Yet if there is an evangelical coloring to this book, and if evangelicals are the ones addressed most directly, I also hope that Catholics, Orthodox, other kinds of Protestants, and representatives of the world's proliferating indigenous churches will find encouragement for approaching human learning as a distinctly Christian enterprise. In addition, I hope that nonbelievers and believers adhering to other faiths may find some clues in these pages for why at least some Christian supernaturalists are wholeheartedly committed to the tasks of learning."

- from introduction
-Publisher.