D. A. Carson, writing in his 1996 book The Gagging of God, expresses appreciation for Mark Noll’s 1994 book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. He does, however, think there was a missing angle in that book. Over 25 years later, I think the problem Carson identifies may be worse today in some quarters than it was back then:
While Noll rightly excoriates the anti-intellectualism that characterizes a wide swath of contemporary evangelicalism, especially in the populist approaches of some leaders, and easily marshals evidence that would sometimes be funny if it were not so sad, it seems to me he overlooks the most serious loss of a truly biblical mind. It is the loss of biblical outlook among Christian intellectuals.
In other words, I worry less about the anti-intellectualism of the less educated sections of evangelicalism than I do about the biblical and theological illiteracy, or astonishing intellectual compromise, among its leading intellectuals.
Evangelicalism has many sons and daughters whose primary vocation is the life of the mind: writers, thinkers, scholars, academicians, researchers—in field after field. They are not inferior to other thinkers in similar fields. But with rare exceptions they have not made the impact they might have because their grasp of biblical and theological truth has rarely extended much beyond Sunday school knowledge. In the main, they think like secularists and bless their insights with the odd text or biblical cliche. They cannot quite be accepted by the secular guilds (unless of course they keep their mouths shut completely about their faith), and they cannot revolutionize intellectual life in the West because they do not think like consistent Christians who take on the status quo and seek to replace it with something better.
—D.A. Carson, The Gagging of God (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), 483–84.
