Evangelical Thought

"Evangelicals do not, characteristically, look to the intellectual life as an arena in which to glorify God because, at least in America, our history has been pragmatic, populist, charismatic, and technological more than intellectual." ~The Scandal of The Evangelical Mind , 55.


"In a culture that mounted a frontal assault upon tradition, mediating elites, and institutions, the Bible very easily became... 'a book dropped from the skies for all sorts of men to use in their own way.'" ~Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 182; the quotation is from John W. Nevin.

"The Keswick, "higher-life" movement ... also contributed to a reduction of interest in biblical theology and deeper scholarship. No Christian in his right mind will desire anything other than true holiness and righteousness in the church of God. But Keswick had isolated one doctrine, holiness, and altered it by the false simplicity contained in the slogan, "Give up, let go and let God." If you want to be holy and righteous, we are told, the intellect is dangerous and it is thought generally unlikely that a good theologian is likely to be a holy person ... You asked me to diagnose the reasons for the present weakness and I am doing it .... If you teach that sanctification consists of "letting go" and letting the Holy Spirit do all the work, then don't blame me if you have no scholars!" ~ Iain H. Murray, D. Marytyn Loyd-Jones: The Fight of Faith, 1939-1981 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1990), 72-74.

"If that community's habits of mind concerning those things to which the community pays most diligent attention and accords highest authority - that is, to the Bible and Christian theology - are defined by naive and uncritical assumptions about the way to study or think about anything, so will its efforts to promote Christian thinking about the world be marked by naivete and an absence of rigorous criticism." ~The Scandal of The Evangelical Mind , 130.

"Thus, when fundamentalists defended the Bible, they did so by arguing for the inerrancy of Scripture's original autographs, an idea that had been around for a long time but had never assumed such a central role for any Christian movement. This belief had the practical effect of rendering the experience of the biblical writers nearly meaningless. It was the Word of God pure and simple, not the Word of God as mediated through the life experiences and cultural settings of the biblical authors, that was important." ~The Scandal of The Evangelical Mind, 33.