THE DISPENSATIONALISTS:

THE DISPENSATIONALISTS:

Embarrassing Relatives or Prophets Without Honor:

Reflections On Mark Noll's The Scandal Of The Evangelical Mind

William Kostlevy

There is irony in Mark A. Noll's intriguing critique of the anti-intellectualism of North American Evangelicalism, a critique found in his The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. As a gifted scholar, Noll's own research has played a central role in the growing recognition of the broader significance of Evangelical currents in American history and culture. As such, Noll and his colleagues at the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicalism at Wheaton College have greatly facilitated research in contemporary and historic Evangelicalism. The results have greatly increased our knowledge of the diverse and competing traditions that comprise the so-called Evangelical Movement.^{^[1]} In fact, the results have been so stunning that popular Evangelical beliefs and practices are now seriously and, even more remarkably, objectively studied in elite research universities. For example, in 1992 alone important historical research into popular Evangelicalism resulted in the publication of landmark studies of Creationism and millennialism. These studies would have been impossible without the work of Noll and his colleagues.

Of course, the irony is that such scholarly research into the popular beliefs of Evangelicals was neither the intent of Noll nor the Pew Charitable Trust which has funded much of the research into contemporary Evangelicalism. The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind is, in part, Noll's response to these two remarkable award-winning studies. They are Ronald Number's account of the origins of Creationism in Seventh Day Adventism and its rapid spread among North American Evangelicals and Paul Boyer's story of the origins and spread of popular millennialism among these same Evangelicals.^{^[2]} Although moving far afield from these two case studies, Noll convincingly demonstrates that the popular Evangelicalism of Creation Science and prophecy charts bears little resemblance to the scholastic orthodoxy of the Protestant Reformation or the doctrinal ruminations of the New England Puritan divines.

Noll's work is divided into four parts: An introduction of the problem (Evangelical gullibility and anti-intellectualism); a narrative describing the historical roots of anti-intellectualism; several case studies; and a conclusion. Although I share Noll's concern about popular Evangelical anti-intellectualism, I remain unconvinced by his historical reconstruction of the history and emergence of popular Evangelical gullibility.

Noll is, of course, an accomplished historian whose work on the Princeton theological tradition, evangelical Biblical scholarship, and the history of Christianity in America has played a significant role in shaping both the internal understanding of Evangelicalism and the image that Evangelicalism presents to the world. A person with impeccable evangelical credentials, Noll is a graduate of Wheaton College, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and Vanderbilt University. In fact, Noll, along with his colleagues Nathan Hatch, George Marsden, Harry Stout, and Joel Carpenter, provide overwhelming evidence that contemporary Evangelicalism has considerable intellectual depth.^{^[3]}

Given Noll's knowledge and accomplishments, it is ironic that the fundamental flaw in the Scandal is rooted in the author's refusal to accept the implications of his own scholarship.^{^[4]} Clearly disappointed that popular North American Evangelicalism is not Protestant orthodoxy, Noll roots Evangelicalism in a mythical history of declension. Accepting the logic of the critics of the American perfectionistic-revivalist tradition, especially the Princeton tradition, Noll condemns his villains-the Holiness Movement, Pentecostalism and Dispensationalism, albeit with little evidence, for not being Lutheranism, Presbyterianism, or even Catholicism. Amazingly-and I consider this unforgivable-the author's love of Protestant orthodoxy is so uncritical that he even suggests that the Lutheran doctrine of simul justus et peccator encourages toleration for different points of view. As a perfectionistic, chiliastic, Anabaptist, sympathetic to Pietism, to my knowledge Lutheranism, except where diluted by Pietism (which in many areas remains the dominant expression of Lutheranism) has a notorious history of intolerance.

Fundamentally, Noll's book is marred by its basic presupposition that the story of Evangelicalism is the story of the fall of Evangelicalism's "immediate ancestors," the Puritans (40). The author, of course, knows better. Acknowledging that Evangelicalism has always been made of "shifting movements and temporary alliances" (8), and later that Evangelicals are products of the separation of church and state, the Christian-American cultural synthesis created in the wake of the American revolution, revivalism, and fundamentalism (59), Noll repeatedly berates Evangelicals for departing from the purity of Reformation doctrine. Completely neglecting the international and non-English speaking antecedents of American Evangelicalism, especially the crucial role of the Middle Colonies in the revivalist tradition, Noll inaccurately suggests that Puritanism-exemplified by its great son, Jonathan Edwards-is, or at least should be, the normative Evangelical model. Not surprisingly, the work concludes with a sorrowful lament that Evangelicals are very unlike their Lutheran, Reformed, and Catholic neighbors (247).

As scholars such as W. R. Ward have convincingly argued, New England Puritanism as shaped by the First Great Awakening is, in fact, perhaps best understood as one expression of a much larger European and North American movement of spiritual renewal. Fundamentally opposed to Protestant Orthodoxy, this Movement of experiential religion, including Methodism, is the primary shaper of American Evangelical piety.^{^[5]} Consequently, Noll's glorification of Protestant Orthodoxy, especially in its Lutheran and Reformed variants, entails a fundamental rejection of Evangelicalism. Expressed differently, the pathos, pain, and even anger which emanate from Noll's work are products of a wrenching discovery that the myth propagated by revivalist Protestants-the Moody, Sam Jones, Billy Sunday folks-that they were simply Bible believing purveyors of orthodoxy was their own self-serving creation. Denouncing innovation while honoring the Bible and religious experience, popular evangelists claimed to be preaching the old-time religion. In fact, the Keswick-dispensational formula that has dominated popular preaching since the 1870s was an inventive reconstruction of Christian orthodoxy that in various formulations has united Protestants of many varieties. Noll may be embarrassed by that formula, but the crowds that flocked to Billy Graham's crusades a century later-Lutherans, Reformed, Mennonites, United Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians-were not.

The primary "scandal" of the Evangelical mind, for Noll, is dispensational premillennialism. Embarrassed by Evangelicalism's fascination with eschatological timetables and dubious exegesis, Noll presents an affirmation of the eschatology of the magisterial reformation that flies in the face of one of the most significant developments in Biblical scholarship in the twentieth century, the rediscovery of the centrality of eschatology in the ministry of the historical Jesus. Although quick to condemn the eccentricities of prophecy devotees, Noll sadly expends little energy in attempting to understand one of the most neglected and little understood mass movements in twentieth century Evangelicalism.

Interestingly, Noll's central point that one of Evangelicalism's most prized doctrines-the blessed hope of Jesus' second advent-was a doctrinal innovation would not have surprised Daniel Steele, George Wilson, C. C. Cary, Isaiah Reid, Harmon Baldwin, Nettie Peabody, or a host of lesser-known Holiness folks. Knowing little of the internal history of the Wesleyan/Holiness tradition, Noll cannot be expected to understand the complex debate over millennarianism that raged in colleges, Bible schools and even rescue missions.^{^[6]} Rejecting the naive optimism of Progressive-Era America, the holiness rank-and-file, embittered by the depression of the 1890s and the decisive defeat of Populism in the 1896 presidential election, increasingly interpreted salvation as a this-worldly event to be inaugurated by the premillennial advent of Jesus. In fact, far from being participants in an otherworldly retreat from responsible citizenship, the clerks, domestics, housewives and workers who increasingly made up the Holiness Movement in the years after 1890 had few illusions that the temporal social salvation espoused by reformers and elite clergy would significantly alter their status on earth.

Denouncing accumulated wealth and those that possessed it, early Holiness champions of premillennialism, such as Albert Sims, L. L. Pickett, Seth C. Rees and W. B. Godbey, provided a class based social analysis that spoke with power to those disillusioned by the failure of Populism.^{^[7]} As L. L. Pickett, one of the earliest Holiness champions of the new eschatology, wrote in 1896: "...does he [Jesus] mean anything or nothing when he says 'sell that ye have and give?' There is much money locked up in idle land, unneeded cattle, in bank vaults, in vain and gaudy jewelry, in many things and at many places." Pickett's message that a person with "two houses, needless horses, or extra farms" would have their property confiscated by Jesus was welcome news for many who, while suspicious of socialist schemes and labor violence, longed for a redistribution of wealth and the resulting just social order. Insisting that the meek would truly inherit the earth, Pickett wrote in 1903, "[the] wealth and power of the world is very largely in the hands of those who use it for selfish purposes.... But in the day of His triumph, the humble-hearth poor of the earth shall be the possessors of the kingdom, the glory, the honor and wealth of the nations."^{^[8]}

Many Holiness radicals went far beyond Pickett, Sims, Godbey, and Rees. Building on the example of the apostolic church and the Holiness doctrine of entire consecration, Holiness radicals from Maine to California rejected the very notion of private property. Although outside the scope of this review, Holiness, Pentecostal, and Evangelical experiments in utopian communal living seriously challenged the prevailing social order while profoundly shaping twentieth-century popular Evangelicalism.^{^[9]} Premillennialism is, of course, a complex phenomenon. It can and sometimes does breed moral and cultural indifference, along with bad exegesis, bigotry, and numerous other sins. But, in the final analysis, I believe that Christianity when shorn of its millennial impulse largely serves the interests of the elite in church and society.^{^[10]}

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