Mark Nollâ??s famous judgment that there is not â??much of an evangelical mindâ? has opened many eyes to the need for serious Christian scholarship in our time. It has also obscured the real accomplishments of past evangelicals. He said it in 1994 and even in 2015, many believers feel a palpable sense of defeatism. The Big Bad Wolf of Secularism seems all too fearsome. Maybe itâ??s better to have another youth group lock-in, rather than train them in theology and Bible.
Christians havenâ??t always had this mindset, despite our anti-intellectual stereotype. As I explore in Awakening the Evangelical Mind, a group of brilliant young Christians joined together in 1940s Boston to think deeply, learn widely, and vindicate the faith. This pack of midcentury Protestants called themselves the â??new evangelicals.â? Led by pastor Harold Ockenga and theologian Carl Ferdinand Howard Henry, and allied with evangelist Billy Graham, they championed a freshly intellectual and culturally engaged brand of evangelicalism that broke with the separationist, preeminently defensive program of fundamentalism.
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