In The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, Mark A. Noll delineates the intellectual consequences of the Evangelicals embrace of didactic Enlightenment thinking. In the generations following Jonathan Edwards most evangelicals adopted Enlightenment procedures to express their thoughts and intellectually engage in science, philosophy, history, politics, arts and theology. Noll notes the importance of the relationship between evangelicals and Enlightenment when he writes: “This evangelical embrace of the Enlightenment at the turn of the eighteenth century still remains extraordinarily important nearly two centuries later because habits of mind that the evangelical Enlightenment encouraged have continued to influence contemporary evangelical life. Of those habits, the most important were a particular kind of commitment to objective truth and a particular ‘scientific’ approach to the Bible.” (83) Noll specifically links Evangelicalism with the didactic Enlightenment which holds that, “all humans possessed, by nature, a common set of capacities – both epistemological and ethical – through which they could grasp the basic realities of nature and morality. Moreover, these human capacities could be studied as scientifically as Newton studied the physical world. Such rigorous study, especially of consciousness, would yield laws for human behavior and ethics every bit as scientific as Newton’s conclusions about nature.” (85) This emphasis on human capacities is a significant shift away from what had characterized Protestant Christianity in the US – particularly Puritanism and eighteenth century revivalism (Jonathan Edward, Whitfield etc.). Noll points out that “Protestant traditions from the Reformation as well as the major themes of the revival had stressed human incapacities more than natural human abilities, and both had stressed the evil effects of sin on the mind more than confidence in human reason.” (86) As to “why” Evangelicals were willing to embrace this emphasis on human capacity, Noll argues that “the Scottish Enlightenment offered evangelicals and other Americans exactly what they needed to master the tumults of the Revolutionary era. In the midst of an era marked by a radical willingness to question the verities of the past, the intuitive philosophy provided by the Scots offered an intellectually respectable way to establish public virtue in a society that was busily repudiating the props upon which virtue had traditionally rested – tradition itself, divine revelation, history, social hierarchy, an inherited government, and the authority of religious denominations. [….] For evangelicals who wanted to preserve traditional forms of Christianity without having to appeal to traditional religious authorities, the common sense reasoning of the Scottish Enlightenment … was the answer.” (87)
Instead of regurgitating in more detail all of Noll’s arguments I want to focus my discussion on what he has to say about how Enlightenment thinking is reflected in the practice of nineteenth century revivalism and particularly that of Charles G. Finney.
Mark Noll points to how this Enlightenment thinking shaped Finney’s theology of revivalism when he writes:
“The push, even in the realms of the Spirit, was to rationality and scientific predictability. [….] His Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1835) summarized a new approach to evangelism. Since God had established reliable laws in the natural world, we know that he was also done so in the spiritual world. To activate the proper causes for revivals was to produce the proper effect: ‘The connection between the right use of means for a revival and a revival is a philosophically [i.e., scientifically] sure as between the right use of means to raise grain and a crop of wheat. I believe, in fact, it is more certain, and there are fewer instances of failure.’ Because the world spiritual was analogous to the world natural, observable cause and effect must work in religion as well as in physics.” (96)
Finney’s mechanistic understanding of revival / evangelism still shapes and influences Evangelicals approach to evangelism. Whenever evangelism is reduced to some kind of formula or steps that lead to success it is shaped by Enlightenment categories of thinking. It has a tendency to place the success or failure of producing conversions on the use of the right technique. This emphasis on technique when it comes to conversion is a definite shift towards elevating human agency and minimizing God’s work in the process of conversion. Thus there is a need for Evangelicals to reflect on the assumptions that are inherent in their theologies of evangelism.
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