According to Yale Professor Mark A. Noll, “coming to know Christ provides the most basic possible motives for pursuing the task of human learning.” (ix-x) In his book, Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind, Noll follows up the work of his earlier book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. In his new book Noll seeks to mend Evangelical deficiencies in being able to intellectually engage our world by providing a path for Evangelicals to recover and strengthen their intellectual voice.
As already hinted at above, this path to recovery is intricately linked with the person of Jesus Christ. According to Noll, “the great hope for Christian learning is to delve deeper into the Christian faith itself. And going deeper into the Christian faith means, in the end, learning more of Jesus Christ.” (22) However, Evangelicals have often ignored Christian traditions insight into the person and work of Jesus Christ because of its focus on the Bible as the highest authority for Christian living. At times this focus on the bible alone has denied Evangelicals the access to the rich faith tradition of the early church as particularly expressed through creeds. Noll address this issue when he writes:
“Christian bodies that claim to follow ‘no creed but the Bible’ put themselves at an enormous disadvantage for many purposes, not least for promoting Christian learning, because they cut themselves off from the vitally important work that has been accomplished by the numberless assemblies making up the communion of saints. That communion stretching back in time to the apostolic age and out in space to the end of the earth is crucial for grasping the meaning of divine revelation in itself and for understanding how that revelation illuminates the world as a whole.” (1)
Noll turns to the most significant Christian creeds and explains how they can help Evangelicals reverse the “scandal of the Evangelical mind” and become able to intellectually engage their world while remaining distinctively committed to biblical authority and the Christian faith.
The early church had as its resource creeds to draw from which besides teaching orthodox Christianity provided starting points for Christian intellectual exploration. Noll writes, “The prime defining statements that resulted – especially the Apostles’ Creed, the so-called Nicene Creed, and the Chalcedonian definition of Christ’s divine-human unity – all functioned as key resources for meeting those needs. Yet beyond their historical value for worship, proclamation, catechesis, and theology, the creeds offered – and continue to offer – precisely what is needed as a grounding for Christian learning. They do so because they represent the distillation of concentrated reflection on Scripture and of hard-won wisdom time-tested by Christian experience.” (1-2)
Noll briefly introduces what the different creeds can contribute to Christian learning. Firstly, the Apostles Creed “brings together in an entirely fruitful way 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. The creed, thus, offers full cause for taking seriously that fact of the physical world as created by God, but also the drama of redemption that relativizes all terrestrial realities in eternal perspective.” (14) Thus when we engage in thinking Christianly about an issue we must always maintain this animating orientation between focus on the immediate and on things to come. Whenever these this double orientation is lost one could say a Christian perspective is lost. Focusing only on this world leads to hopelessness and despair because the movement of world history (salvation history) is lost. Likewise, focusing only on the world to come, leaves Christians otherworldly and keeps us from fulfilling our God given purposes here and now.
Secondly, the Nicene Creed affirms that “God accomplished human salvation through the incarnation, and that the incarnation’s full revelation of God took place in the materiality and through the events of this world” (18) Noll writes, “If the world and human culture constitute the venue that God chose to reveal himself in Christ and accomplish his great work of salvation through Christ, then that world and culture have been lent an extraordinary dignity – not in and of themselves, but as the God-blessed arenas of redemption.” (18-19) Thus Christian learning can affirm that God himself reveals himself in the world and through events occurring in that world (particularly through salvation history).
Thirdly, the Chalcedon definition of Christ affirms “the consubstantiality between the divine and the human, a consubstantiality that is resolved (but not fully explained) in Jesus Christ. The Definition steered a course between extremes.”(21) Firstly, “to stress too much the divine reality present within human life would have moved toward a super spiritual gnostic literalism (Gnosticism, an ancient heresy, claimed that only certain adepts could see the true nature of all things as essentially spiritual and also recognize the gross unreality of the human or material realm).” (21) Secondly, “To stress too much the human shape of divine revelation within the world would have moved toward a water-thin modernism (a recent heresy maintaining that only certain learned rationalists could see the true character of all things as essentially natural and also recognize the mythic unreality of the supernatural realm).” (21) Thus the Chalcedonian definition of Christ helps us to avoid both of these heresies when we try to think Christianly about issues. Noll argues that “if the tension of Chalcedon could be maintained – fully divine and fully human in one integrated entity – believers possessed the most solid basis imaginable for the union of true Christianity (grounded in divine realities) and true scholarship (grounded in interaction with the world), and, in the words of Chalcedon, with ‘no confusion, no change, no division, no separation.’” (21)
It’s hard to do Mark Noll’s proposal justice in such a short post. Do you believe that the three creeds that he draws on are able to provide guidance and a foundation for Christian learning and scholarship?
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