Reviews for The stranger on the shore

The average rating for The stranger on the shore based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-12-11 00:00:00 Denise Davis The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind / 0-8028-4180-5 I read about Mark Noll's book through Fred Clark's superb Slactivist blog, and was intrigued. Although I am no longer a Christian myself, I do enjoy the writings of Christian intellectuals and I am sensitive to their pain in belonging to a community that, by and large, defines itself as anti-intellectuals and all others as apostates. I am surprised, therefore, to find myself in a position where I cannot recommend Noll's book. "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind" is plagued with the rambling tone of a poorly edited dissertation, with random and often jarring attempts to 'sound' scholarly, without actually contributing such. For instance, the first chapter is largely taken up with a side-detour into 'defining our terms' and include such terms as "America" defined here as: "Throughout the book, "America" will mostly mean the United States", with a side note to the effect that Canada will be tossed in now and again. I honestly don't see the point of any of this, and the whole thing feels like a bad attempt at sounding like a textbook - say "United States" when necessary, "Canada" where appropriate, and "North America" when needed, and move on with the point. Similarly, the lackluster attempts to define such 'exotic' terms as "anti-intellectual" and "the mind" seem to have risen less out of an actual need to connect with the reader and more out of an attempt to sound like what Noll thinks an intellectual should sound like. More to the point, I think Noll has fundamentally missed the point entirely with his book. While I could not agree more that evangelical Christianity needs to embrace the mind and intellect more (or at least stop outright rejecting it), Noll laments the lack of really intellectual Christian colleges and truly intellectual Christian periodicals - places where intellect is nurtured from a uniquely Christian perspective - but, in saying so, I feel that he has completely missed the point entirely. The problem, I feel, with Christian periodicals and Christian schools is not that they are not intellectual (they are not), but that they are 'Christian' at all. 'Christian' periodicals and colleges aren't Christian in order to nurture the intellect from a 'Christian perspective' (a meaningless statement), but rather they are 'Christian' out of an isolationist goal - a way to prevent 'secular' thoughts and concepts from intruding onto the brain, and thereby remaining safe from the world. Such an isolationist perspective - that the very *existence* of secular thoughts and influences will taint one's spirituality - cannot help but be anti-intellectual to the core, for if intellectualism is an attempt to understand the world, isolationism is an attempt to avoid such understanding entirely. Mark's stated goal for 'Christian' colleges and periodicals is that such devices should exist in order to nurture the intellect from a "Christian perspective". This statement is, however, meaningless in my opinion - and seems to suggest that a Christian would (and indeed *should*) interpret, say, the literature of Margaret Atwood or the art of Picasso in a fundamentally different way than would, say, an atheist, or a Muslim, or a Wiccan. Indeed, I find the very idea almost appalling - in as much as a person's chosen religion gives them a different way of looking at the world around them, Noll seems to be suggesting that a person's religion should *always* give them a fundamentally different viewpoint from everyone else, in all things and at all times, and that these difference of opinions should be nurtured to the exclusion of all else. To the contrary, I believe that if evangelical Christianity is ever to shed its anti-intellectual trappings, it *must* also shed its isolationist policies, as the one is a direct consequence of the other. To that end, I think that Noll has the completely wrong solution: we must have fewer Christian colleges, not more. Beyond this point, I think Noll's book would profit greatly from tighter editing and much clearer picture of what he wants to say and how to say it - eschewing the pseudo-scholarly language for something clearer and more direct. ~ Ana Mardoll

Review # 2 was written on 2015-08-11 00:00:00 Shannon Adams The Puritans who settled Massachusetts combined heart-felt devotion to Christ with a love of theology. They practiced a vigorous intellectual life centered on the Bible and embraced cutting edge science like inoculation against disease. By the time of the First Great Awakening however, this tradition had degenerated into a formal and lifeless orthodoxy. Noll argues that during the First Great Awakening evangelicals like George Whitfield tried to revive the church with biblical preaching and a theatrical style that appealed to the masses and called for an emotional response. Whitfield unwittingly contributed to the anti-intellectualism of the time and promoted an anti-institutional Christianity that would abandon the intellectual centers of the culture. This biblical democratism meant that the Bible does not belong to me as part of a historical community known as the church but it belongs to me as an individual. For most evangelicals the Bible became a book dropped from the sky for self-help purposes (97). Edwards resisted the anti-intellectual tendencies of experience based revivalism, but evangelicals continued to abandon the life of the mind and have been paying the price in academic credibility ever since. Noll cites creation science as exhibit A, because it fails to allow the book of nature to help us interpret the book of Scripture. Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield were better in this regard than evangelicals who seem to think it's a virtue to abandon cutting edge scientific research to unbelievers and fight for a twenty-four hour creation days (which is not even the historical position of church fathers like Augustine). This is one reason why evangelicals haven't developed any major research universities. Where evangelicals did try to maintain intellectual credibility they attempted to articulate Christian truth in the secular, rationalistic, and mechanistic language of the Enlightenment. This was a cultural accommodation that tempted the church give up the home field advantage it enjoyed during most of Western civilization. Noll calls Witherspoon, Hodge, and Warfield to account for making revelation dependent on reason for its credibility. In concert with the Enlightenment marginalizing Christian faith to the private sphere, Noll points out how dispensationalism, the holiness movement, and Pentecostalism compound the scandal by putting forth a Christianity that turns the things of earth “strangely dim.” Noll reminds us that what is distinctive about American Christianity is not necessarily essential to the gospel. Thus evangelicals need to rediscover history. Noll also points out that evangelicals have preserved the one thing that can revitalize the Christian mind--the gospel. Thus Noll is still a fan of his own tradition, and he calls evangelicals to scandalize the scandal by reentering the intellectual centers of cultural without compromising the gospel and the authorty of biblical revelation. This means reaffirming that since God is the author of both Scripture and nature the two books interpret each other as we press on. Noll also promotes a Reformation theology that embraces a comprehensive view of the world that affirms the goodness of creation and the need to redeem it with Christian action. Since Noll published Scandal in 1994, evangelicals have continued to rediscover history and press forward with scientific research in intelligent design and the human genome project ( a la Francis Collins who doesn't seem to be a fan of Intelligent Design, :(). But much of the church growth movement continues to play to our radical individualism with its focus on self-help and personal success. Evangelical Christians still need to be challenged by Noll to scandalize the scandal.