Wednesday 17 August 2011

Mark A. Noll on Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind


Mark A. Noll, Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 196pp., ISBN ISBN 9780802866370.


Having benefited from reading Mark Noll’s seminal The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (1994) when it first came out, I was interested to see this follow-up of sorts. Eerdmans make available the table of contents and introduction here.


Noll writes: ‘My contention in this book is that coming to know Christ provides the most basic possible motive for pursuing the tasks of human learning’ (ix-x).


More fully:


‘The message in this book for my fellow evangelicals can be put simply: if what we claim about Jesus Christ is true, then evangelicals should be among the most active, most serious, and most open-minded advocates of general human learning. Evangelical hesitation about scholarship in general or about pursuing learning wholeheartedly is, in other words, antithetical to the Christ-centered basis of evangelical faith’ (x).


I’ll be interested to see how Noll plays out these contentions...


Some 2009 lectures on the book’s material are available for download from ‘Thinking Matters’ here.

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