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Mark A. Noll Quotes & Sayings

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Famous Quotes By Mark A. Noll

Mark A. Noll Quotes 1458925

Thus, it is taking more American churches to field one missionary than churches in other parts of the world. For example, whereas there is one crosscultural missionary supported by every 0.7 evangelical churches in Singapore, by 2.1 churches in Hong Kong, 2.4 in Albania, 2.5 in Sri Lanka, 2.6 in Mongolia, 4.2 in South Korea, 4.9 in Myanmar, and 5.3 in Senegal, in the United States the ratio is 7.6 churches to one missionary.[6] The proper conclusion from this flurry of numbers would seem to be that, while the United States contains a whole lot of evangelical churches, those churches are not now as proportionately active in crosscultural missionary activity as many churches in the non-Western world. Evangelical dynamism in these other churches has replaced, or is replacing, the evangelical dynamism of American churches as the leading edge of world Christian expansion. That expansion seems to be tracking the earlier pattern of American adjustments to Christianity-after-Christendom. — Mark A. Noll

Mark A. Noll Quotes 1980919

Dogmatic kind of biblical literalism that gained increasing strength among evangelicals toward the end of the nineteenth century was reduced space for academic debate, intellectual experimentation, and nuanced discrimination between shades of opinion. — Mark A. Noll

Mark A. Noll Quotes 1797355

The English Puritans who migrated to Plymouth, Boston, New Haven, and other North American sites did so in order to continue the efforts to purify self, church, and society that were being frustrated in the mother country. Of many striking features of the Puritans, one of the most remarkable was their zeal in developing a Christian mind.45 — Mark A. Noll

Mark A. Noll Quotes 2184240

The crisis created by an inability to distinguish the Bible on race from the Bible on slavery meant that when the Civil War was over and slavery was abolished, systemic racism continued unchecked as the great moral anomaly in a supposedly Christian America. — Mark A. Noll

Mark A. Noll Quotes 962287

In i86o the income of the nation's churches and religious voluntary societies came quite close to matching the total receipts of the federal government. Today the ratio of annual federal income to annual religion-related giving is about twenty-five to one. — Mark A. Noll

Mark A. Noll Quotes 1782102

Americans claimed to be following a higher law, even when this higher law only turned out to be a personal preference. — Mark A. Noll

Mark A. Noll Quotes 1262906

Most evangelicals also acknowledge that in the Scriptures God stands revealed plainly as the author of nature, as the sustainer of human institutions (family, work, and government), and as the source of harmony, creativity, and beauty. Yet it has been precisely these Bible-believers par excellence who have neglected sober analysis of nature, human society, and the arts. The — Mark A. Noll

Mark A. Noll Quotes 537214

To put it most simply, the evangelical ethos is activistic, populist, pragmatic, and utilitarian. It allows little space for broader or deeper intellectual effort because it is dominated by the urgencies of the moment. — Mark A. Noll

Mark A. Noll Quotes 1689802

The great truth of the Incarnation is that the Son of God became flesh and dwelt among us. In this foundational truth we may emphasize the nature of the Son of Man himself, or we may emphasize his taking on flesh and dwelling among us. The condemning scandal for evangelicals is that they have neglected this second emphasis and all that it implies about the possibility of thinking about this realm of flesh. Their redeeming scandal is that they have not yet forgotten the first. — Mark A. Noll

Mark A. Noll Quotes 719675

But in their defense of the supernatural, fundamentalists and their evangelical heirs resemble some cancer patients. In facing a drastic disease, they are willing to undertake a drastic remedy. The treatment of fundamentalism may be said to have succeeded; the patient survived. But at least for the life of the mind, what survived was a patient horribly disfigured by the cure itself. — Mark A. Noll

Mark A. Noll Quotes 1738849

Cultivating the mind was absolutely essential, Luther held, because people needed to understand both the word of Scripture and the nature of the world in which the word would take root. — Mark A. Noll

Mark A. Noll Quotes 89348

As shown in the splendid recent biography by Harry Stout, Whitefield's style - popular preaching aimed at emotional response - has continued to shape American evangelicalism long after Whitefield's specific theology (he was a Calvinist), his denominational origins (he was an Anglican), and his rank (he was a clergyman) are long since forgotten.65 — Mark A. Noll

Mark A. Noll Quotes 2188459

An older, Puritan approach to Scripture tended to prevail in the American South, where the Bible was regarded as a set of definite, positive laws — Mark A. Noll

Mark A. Noll Quotes 1949458

Proof-texting did not cause great damage so long as the culture as a whole held to general Christian values, but when those general Christian values began to weaken, the weakness in evangelical theologizing - even more, in thinking like a Christian about the world in general - became all too evident. — Mark A. Noll

Mark A. Noll Quotes 2112179

The Keswick, "higher-life" movement ... also contributed to a reduction of interest in biblical theology and deeper scholarship. No Christian in his right mind will desire anything other than true holiness and righteousness in the church of God. But Keswick had isolated one doctrine, holiness, and altered it by the false simplicity contained in the slogan, "Give up, let go and let God." If you want to be holy and righteous, we are told, the intellect is dangerous and it is thought generally unlikely that a good theologian is likely to be a holy person ... You asked me to diagnose the reasons for the present weakness and I am doing it ... If you teach that sanctification consists of "letting go" and letting the Holy Spirit do all the work, then don't blame me if you have no scholars!171 — Mark A. Noll

Mark A. Noll Quotes 2184686

But for the sake of simplicity we can speak about four dimensions: the way that evangelicals (1) adopted republican theories of politics, (2) took as their own democratic theories of society, (3) embraced liberal views of the economy (all discussed in this chapter), and (4) domesticated the Enlightenment for Christian purposes (examined in somewhat greater detail in the next chapter). — Mark A. Noll

Mark A. Noll Quotes 1642269

Suddenly both parties have become theologians, the one side quoting the Pentateuch to justify slavery, the other side quoting the gospel to condemn it: ... the people of the thirty-three United States, who are eminently and essentially political, cannot discuss a political matter without quoting the old and New Testa- ments!97 — Mark A. Noll

Mark A. Noll Quotes 1616583

The author finds any freaking, and remarkably objective, way to estimate religion's influence on American society before the Civil War. The population closely aligned with evangelical sympathies was three or four times the size of the voting population in 1860 — Mark A. Noll

Mark A. Noll Quotes 1512277

In appealing for Christian scholarship, the point is not primarily academic respectability, and certainly not the mindless pursuit of publication for its own sake that bedevils the modern university. The point is rather that the comprehensive reality of Christianity itself demands specifically Christian consideration of the world we inhabit, whether that consideration is of social theory, the history of science, other historical changes, the body, the arts, literature, or more. — Mark A. Noll

Mark A. Noll Quotes 80974

Thompson's message was straightforward: if God through divine revelation so clearly sanctioned slavery, and even the trade in "strangers," how could genuine Christians attack modern slavery, or even the slave trade, as an evil? — Mark A. Noll

Mark A. Noll Quotes 1326576

It was no coincidence that the biblical defense of slavery remained strongest in the United States, a place where democratic, antitraditional, and individualistic religion was also strongest. — Mark A. Noll

Mark A. Noll Quotes 1277743

The Gospel of John tells us that the Word who was made flesh and dwelt among us, full of glorious grace and truth, was also the Word through whom all things- all phenomena in nature, all capacities for fruitful interaction, all the kinds of beauty- were made. To honor that Word as he deserves to be honored,evangelicals must know both Christ and what he has made. — Mark A. Noll

Mark A. Noll Quotes 1243513

I was brought up in a Christian environment where, because God had to be given pre-eminence, nothing else was allowed to be important. I have broken through to the position that because God exists, everything has significance.360 — Mark A. Noll

Mark A. Noll Quotes 1082910

The story of theology in the Civil War was a story of how a deeply entrenched intellectual synthesis divided against itself, even as its proponents were reassuring combatants on either side that each enjoyed a unique standing before God and each exercised a unique role as the true bearer of the nation's Christian civilization. — Mark A. Noll

Mark A. Noll Quotes 1073529

Evangelicals do not, characteristically, look to the intellectual life as an arena in which to glorify God because, at least in America, our history has been pragmatic, populist, charismatic, and technological more than intellectual. — Mark A. Noll

Mark A. Noll Quotes 1028513

The Book that made the nation was destroying the nation; the nation that had taken to the Book was rescued not by the Book but by the force of arms. — Mark A. Noll

Mark A. Noll Quotes 1019309

Evangelicals have been distinctive in featuring the crisis conversion. But what is essential to Christianity is the whole life committed to God, from the beginning of faith until death. — Mark A. Noll

Mark A. Noll Quotes 916209

To see in the past that very godly people were able to maintain bizarre interpretations of Scripture should be a caution for us all. — Mark A. Noll

Mark A. Noll Quotes 879238

If intellectual life involves a certain amount of self-awareness about alternative interpretations or a certain amount of tentativeness in exploring the connection between evidence and conclusions, it was hard to find any encouragement for the intellectual life in the self-assured dogmatism of fundamentalism. — Mark A. Noll

Mark A. Noll Quotes 785662

The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind. — Mark A. Noll

Mark A. Noll Quotes 666539

Since the dawn of time, warring combatants have regularly reached for what support they could find to nerve their own side for battle. — Mark A. Noll

Mark A. Noll Quotes 666458

The tight link that Protestants perceive between Scripture and salvation explains the great energy they have poured into studying, distributing, and translating the Scriptures, as well as producing the never-ending deluge of printed material explaining, mediating, parsing, debating, exploring, and riffing on the Bible. — Mark A. Noll

Mark A. Noll Quotes 497017

The point of Christian scholarship is not recognition by standards established in the wider culture. The point is to praise God with the mind. Such efforts will lead to the kind of intellectual integrity that sometimes receives recognition. But for the Christian that recognition is only a fairly inconsequential by-product. The real point is valuing what God has made, believing that the creation is as "good" as he said it was, and exploring the fullest dimensions of what it meant for the Son of God to "become flesh and dwell among us." Ultimately, intellectual work of this sort is its own reward, because it is focused on the only One whose recognition is important, the One before whom all hearts are open. — Mark A. Noll

Mark A. Noll Quotes 324690

Republicanism was easier to evolve than to define. — Mark A. Noll

Mark A. Noll Quotes 168461

Smith, for example, claimed that if Americans defended slavery on the basis of the Old Testament, they should also defend practices like polygamy and the complete annihilation of defeated armies that are also prescribed in the Old Testament — Mark A. Noll

Mark A. Noll Quotes 168045

In sum, the ability of what had once been a socially responsible, moderately intellectual, Arminian evangelical Methodism and a socially responsible, reasonably comprehensive, Calvinistic Presbyterianism to make any kind of a sharp Christian impact on Christian thought, society, politics, or spirituality was fatally compromised by what Barry Mack has very precisely labelled 'the tragic failure of Church Union. — Mark A. Noll

Mark A. Noll Quotes 99952

Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe in Christ even more boldly, for he is victorious over sin, death, and the world. As long as we are here . . . we have to sin. . . . It is enough that by the riches of God's glory we have come to know the Lamb that takes away the sin of the world. No sin will separate us from the Lamb, even though we commit fornication and murder a thousand times a day. So you think that the purchase price that was paid for the redemption of our sins by so great a Lamb is too small? Pray boldly - you too are a mighty sinner. — Mark A. Noll