TGC Reviews

Something New

Christopher Catherwood, The Evangelicals: What They Believe, Where They Are, and Their Politics (Crossway, 2010), 166 pages.

I recently read James Davidson Hunter’s To Change the World (Oxford, 2010), an honest assessment of how evangelicals have failed to engaged culturally in ways that will actually produce cultural change. Coupled with Collin Hansen’s recent discussion with Greg Thornbury on the disappearance of the Reformed cultural agenda, it’s difficult to throw off the feeling of a martyr’s death by irrelevancy. But just at the right time Christopher Catherwood’s The Evangelicals comes to my rescue. Equally as honest, but hopeful for evangelicals, Catherwood gives us insights about the movement internationally. A point worth noting:

Our Christian confidence is that God will perfect his kingdom, and we look forward with eager anticipation to that day, and to the new heaven and earth which righteousness will dwell and God will reign forever. Meanwhile, we rededicate ourselves to the service of Christ and of people in the joyful submission to his author over the whole of our lives (109-110).

One of my favorite parts is actually the afterword where Catherwood—again, bringing me back from irrelevancy—makes the case that we should be happy to call Calvinistic baptists, Reformed baptists. Being a thankful baptist myself, I’m happy to see these discussions go my way at times.

Something Old

Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1994), 274 pages.

One of the more acclaimed books and heavy-handed critiques of the anti-intellectualism of evangelicals is Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Evangelicals, according to Noll (an evangelical himself), have “neglected sober analysis of nature, human society, and the arts.” He reminds us that we have “a worthy line of North American stalwarts” to follow after in John Wesley, Jonathan Edwards, Francis Asbury, Charles Hodge, Moses Stuart, and others, who “believed in the life of the mind, and they believed in it because they were evangelical Christians.” An interesting aspect to this book is the personal offense Noll takes by this decline. He doesn’t just write as a concerned scholar, but a “wounded lover.”

It might be worth noting that D. A. Carson’s Evangelicalism: What Is It and Is It Worth Keeping? (Crossway, 2011) is coming this spring. It just so happens that Carson dedicates a small portion of the book to critiquing another work by Mark Noll, Is the Reformation Over?