Review:
Mark Noll, as a Bible
believing scholar of history, writes from within academia. His book Jesus
Christ and the Life of the Mind advocates for the centrality of Jesus
Christ as Creator, Sustainer and Redeemer as a foundation for learning in all
the disciplines within academia. He
concentrates specially on the areas of history, science and Biblical exegesis. He tackles contemporary issues within those
fields (i.e., the creation vs. evolution debate in science, the influence of
modernist thinking in exegesis) with the thoroughness as a historian. Noll
says, “If even a few readers are moved to think about how their scholarship might
be connected organically to the great narratives summarized by the Christian creeds,
or if only a few are spurred to pursue academic projects that draw self-consciously
on their Christian faith, the effort [in writing this book] will be worthwhile”
(Mark Noll, Jesus
Christ and the Life of the Mind, Eerdmans 2011, p. 147).
But his basic call for a Christian
use of the mind in all areas of learning makes his book relevant beyond
academia. He provides a link and a
stimulus for all thinking through the Person and work of Jesus Christ. That
stimulus provides an important foundation for the life of the mind.
M.L.
Codman-Wilson, Ph.D. 3/28/14
Excerpts:
“Christianity is defined by
the work and person of Jesus Christ. The doctrinal truths supporting this
assertion – as set out in scripture and summarized in the major Christian
creeds – provide a compelling reason for pursuing human learning. At the same
time, they also offer strong protection against…the idolatry that is potent
among scholars” (p. IX). The proper
place to begin serious intellectual labor…is the heart of our religion, which
is a revelation of God in Jesus Christ” (p. XII).
The Creeds
“Because the creeds
represented the most intense effort imaginable, to root the biblical realities
of Jesus Christ in the reigning thought forms of the fourth and fifth century,
they remain important for later eras because they were such superlative
exercises in Christian thinking when they were first written…The main creedal
statements represented the most important efforts to summarize what the early
Christians knew they had experienced, but also knew they needed to formulate
for themselves and for others as carefully as they could” (pp. 2, 8).
“The Apostles’ Creed, and
early statements anticipating it, responded not so much to doctrinal disputes,
as to the need for baptismal teaching…The Apostles’ Creed brings
together…confidence in God the creator of the material realm and God the father
of believers through the saving work of Christ. In turn, that combination
offers precisely the tension Christian scholarship requires between life
focused on this world and life convinced of the world to come” (pp. 13,14).
“The Nicene Creed has been a
bedrock foundation for Christian worship and theological reflection for over 1,600
years and in all the major Christian traditions….For the sake of intellectual
activity, it is especially momentous that the creed linked its affirmation of
the full deity of Christ – “light from light, true God from true God,…consubstantial
with the Father” with the confession that Christ was incarnate, “for us humans
and for our salvation”…accomplished by the life, death and resurrection of the Son
of God” (p. 18).
The Preeminence of
Jesus Christ
“The New Testament could not be clearer in its
multiple affirmations about the role of Christ in creating the world (John 1:2-3, Colossians 1:15-16, Hebrews 1:2). That affirmation carries the strongest possible implications
for intellectual life…Loyalty to the reality of Christ the Redeemer does not
require disloyalty to the reality of Christ the Creator…To confess Christ is to
make an extraordinary strong statement to the value of studying the things
Christ has made” (pp.
45-26).
“John’s statement that “the Word became flesh and made his dwelling
among us”…properly deflates the dangerous tendency to over-spiritualize an
understanding of God’s work in the world: John 1:14 does not say that the Word
became nous [mind]. It says that the Word
became sarx [flesh] – the bodily
stuff of God’s good creation. The Word became flesh, not in some abstract realm
of truth where only minds exist, but in history…Dwelling among us, he was seen
by flesh and blood, particular human beings. Pretty material stuff. Pretty
historical. Glorious” (pp. 33-34).
“The Jesus Christ who saves
sinners is the same Christ who beckons his followers to serious use of their
minds for serious explorations of the world. It is part of the deepest
foundation of Christian reality – it is an important part of understanding who
Jesus is and what he accomplishes – to study the world, the human structures
found in the world, the human experiences of the world and the humans who
experience the world” (p. 41).
“Apart from the work of some
philosophers, serious academic research guided by explicit Christians norms,
has been thin on the ground for at least 200 years…Resources, however, are
abundant for trying to advance scholarship on a Christian foundation. For
instance, the claim that modern science, ethics, aesthetics, history, social
science, psychiatry and even criticism rest on a presumed or a submerged theism
deserves much more consideration than it regularly receives” (pp. 43-44).
Contingency,
Particularity and Self-Denial
“For any number of reasons,
Christian realities do not make sense until and unless they’ve been
experienced. They are in that sense contingent realities. The contingency of
the incarnation and the work of Christ would seem to justify a related
commitment to empirical procedure as a way of learning about the world…The
principal is that, if we want to know something, we must not only think about
that something but actually experience it…In the New Testament, the message of
the apostles did not primarily concern necessary truths of reason, but rather
truths hard-won through experience” (pp. 52, 50).
“The particularity at the
center of Christianity justifies a rooted, perspectival understanding of truth
that embraces unabashedly the crucial significance of all other particularities
of time, place, cultural value, and social location…God used the particular
means of the incarnation to accomplish a universal redemption…To confess that
Christ experienced a very particular life in first century Judea, and that he
is the universal Savior of the world offers a scholar who trusts the Christian
story, extraordinary intellectual balance when studying other particular lives
in other particular places” (p. 58).
“Christology also provides a
sure antidote to the moral diseases of the intellectual life. As all other
God-given gifts and capacities can be turned to evil uses, so also scholarship
can be abused to glorify the creature instead of the Creator…A Christ-centered
understanding of why all people require an atoning savior demands that scholars
not trust their own wisdom as a source of their own self-worth” (pp. 61-62).
“Scholarship that is keyed expressly
to the person and work of Christ, will not be disoriented by confronting the
paradoxical or the mysterious…It will realize the value of particulars because
of Christian universals; and it will be humble, charitable, self-giving and
modest” (p. 64).
Christological
Thinking and History, Science and Biblical Exegesis
“Christianity has always
displayed an innate tendency toward historical realism, in large part because
it depends upon events that believers – in their creeds, their liturgies, their
dogmatics, their prayers – assert really happen. Moreover, Christian practice
is predicated on the tacit assumption that these past events can be known
reliably today and can provide meaning for present life (however far distant
they occurred in the past)” (p. 78).
“Increased confidence in the
truthfulness of historic Christianity – in the religion defined by the
Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Chalcedonian Definition concerning
the person of Christ – can set minds at ease about the human ability to
understand something about the past…The creeds affirm that God created the
world, including the universe of human interactions; that God testified to the
noetic capacities of humanity by becoming incarnate in human flesh; and that,
by providing for human salvation through the person of Jesus Christ, God showed
that people could discover at least partial truth about events and
circumstances in the past as well as the present. These creedal realities should inspire
confidence that, because of how God has configured the world, research into the
past may actually uncover the truth about the past…The story of redemption
rests on real history and …believers may know that history assuredly” (pp. 81, 82, 85).
“Of the many books that have treated the record of
religious-science engagement since the sixteenth century, the best have demonstrated
that there has never been a simple conflict between biblical theology and
natural science. Rather, that history has been marked by a sustained series of
negotiations, breakthroughs, well-published flash-points, much conceptual
rethinking, lots of ignorant grandstanding, some intellectual overreaching by
starry-eyed avatars of a supremely all-competent “Science,” some intellectual
overreaching by determined “defenders” of Scripture, much noncontroversial
science carried out by Christians, a huge quantity of scientific advance
accepted routinely by believers, and much more” (pp. 102-103).
“During recent decades, much
of the conflict involving religion and science has resulted from polemicists on
all sides carrying deeply entrenched convictions, attitudes, and assumptions
into the present…When conservative Bible-believers object to different aspects
of modern science, they do so on the basis of assumptions as well as
arguments. Often missing in those
considerations, however, are direct appeals to the heart of the Christian faith
as defined by the person and work of Christ. Coming back to that center offers
a better way of discriminating more accurately between assumptions well-grounded
in solid theology and those that are not” (pp.
109-110).
“To find out what might be
true in nature, it is necessary to ‘come and see.’ The process of ‘coming and seeing’ does not
lead to infallible truth about the physical world since there is no special
inspiration from the Holy Spirit for the Book of Nature as there is for the
Book of Scripture. But ‘coming and seeing’ is still the method…for learning
about all other objects…This means that scientific results coming from
thoughtful, organized and carefully checked investigations of natural
phenomenon must…be taken seriously” (p.117).
“The
Chalcedonia Definition of Christ as fully divine and fully human in one
integrated person…is a way forward. It is not a way forward along the path of
late medieval univocity when it was assumed that a natural explanation for any phenomenon
was a fully sufficient explanation. It was not a way forward along the path of William
Paley’s natural theology, where it is assumed that humans may have God-like
knowledge about the final purpose of physical phenomena, and it is not a way
forward that either trivializes the scriptures, or distrusts modern science for
ideological reasons. It is instead a way forward that tries to give both the
study of nature its proper due as made possible because of Christ’s creating
work, and the interpretation of scripture its proper due as revealing the mercy
of redemption in Christ” (p. 121).
“Satisfactory
resolution of problems stemming from responsible biblical interpretations
brought together with responsible interpretations of nature will not come
easily. Such resolution requires more sophistication in scientific knowledge,
more sophistication in biblical hermeneutics, and more humility in spirit than
most of us possess. It is not wishful thinking to believe that such resolution
is possible…If, therefore, humbly responsibly thinking, properly equipped
scientifically and hermeneutically, conclude that the full picture of human
evolution, now standard in many scientific disciplines, fits with a trustworthy
interpretation of scripture, that conclusion can be regarded as fully
compatible with historic Christian orthodoxy as defined by the normative creeds”
(p. 124).
“The
Bible story may indeed be considered a metanarrative subsuming all other
narratives, or a truth that relativizes all other forms of knowledge. But as
metanarrative and final truth, the Bible does not speak directly about everything
per say…With the scriptures own statements about themselves in view, attitudes
about studying the world – eagerness to exploit secondary ways of knowing –
should be opened up rather than shut down. This openness to experiencing the world,
in turn, is exactly what a biblical vision of divine creation, with Christ as
the active agent, encourages….J. I. Packer says, ‘evangelical emphasis on the Bible
has often lead to the neglect of the other important elements of Christian thought…and
from the searchings and findings of the physical, historical, and human
sciences, with their never ending quests to push out further the walls of human
knowledge’” (pp. 128, 129).
But
now, “fairly substantial Christian thinking is being carried out in different
ways throughout the landscape inhabited by North America’s amorphous evangelical
constituency” (p. 154).