Mark Noll on The Bible in Public Life
October 01, 2005
Mark Noll’s last very interesting article for Books & Culture has gone online finally, so I will mention it now, as it has come in and out of my thoughts in the past month, and I think I can now say something worthwhile about it.
It is dull until halfway, so do not be deterred. At the beginning and end, Noll rehearses his already well-aired admiration for MLK and Lincoln’s use of the Bible and God in public. I.e, they were very humble, and their religious rhetoric reached out to all people and was never used as a weapon against anyone. Noll tells us this is what we need now, and he seems to be motivated by the idea that many substantial right-wing politicians (or pastors?) are chronically using God as a bludgeon in the public sphere. The interesting part concerns how the Bible (namely the Authorised Version) was used to define a common public discourse that was perfectly fine for politics in the past, but now those days are gone. The more the Bible is used in public today, the more divisive and marginal it becomes … unless we (meaning “evangelicals”) start using it just right in a very nice way.
Who will show us the way?
Noll looks for past models of marginal biblicists: catholics, jews and blacks in the nineteenth century, and there is much in the colorful narrative that ensues to complicate and perhaps confound Noll’s framing argument and sentiments. (Regrettably, Noll seems oblivious to this.) For instance, Noll describes how black Americans read scripture to find in it the necessary complement to liberal democracy: spiritual and political liberation come together. So is the proper use of scripture a kind of liberal Constantinianism?
The nineteenth-century rabbi Noll focuses on was very astute. He appreciated the benefits and hazards of the American Protestant Old Testament biblicism influencing the culture around him. He wanted to exploit the benefits of this while taking the proper view that Judaism is particularistic and exclusive; it is not to be identified with the U.S. or any nation. (It would have been interesting to learn of his response to Zionism, but this wasn’t included.)
The Catholic model Noll selected consists of some Italian Jesuits who had a full and essentially pantagruelist critique of American liberalism and protestantism. They were in good agreement with with the rabbi, but they put more of an emphasis on the need for magisterial control and the weight of tradition to constrain eccentric and endlessly divisive uses of scripture. They were convinced of the necessity of a general religious consensus in a nation. Very particularistic and robust antiliberalism! Then Noll goes into some things on Catholic Quebec where a religious nationalism very much like the American sort never had the bad results Noll sees it having in the US. That struck me as a rather unexpected analysis from an Evangelical, as Catholic Quebec had such laws that allowed one to toss foreign proselytizers in the clink. This seeming antipluralism was not mentioned.
It was quite surprising to find that Profesor Noll is so positive about a particularistic and antiliberal Catholic position. Evidently he sees it as a legitimate position with a lot to commend it. He does get a little awkward and shuffly about how we (meaning “evangelicals”) clearly can’t get many North Americans to accept the Bible as normative for public affairs and the need for a single magisterial authority, but that idea calls sensitive, thinking folks to mull it over in “a moment of calm reflection.” Odd, isn’t it? What is the point of this reflection?
I’m not sure what to make of that, but maybe it has something to do with the dubious prospects for the unhinged Evangelical epistemologies discussed in this American Prospect article unless they get nailed down by a single, magisterial authority. Evangelical colleges, which this article discusses, have been acting as para-ecclesial magisterial authorities for Evangelicals for quite some time, attempting to compensate for the doctrinal, theological, catechetical, and pastoral voids behind Professor Noll’s well-known “Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.” But they have not influenced their natural constituency much–the evangelical rank and file–as their relationship is essentially commercial, and like most colleges, increasingly “customer-service” oriented, no mater how much it is spiritualized with pietistic rhetoric and high ideals. A rift remains and is perhaps deepening between those in the schools who have done much thinking, like Professor Noll, about the ideas and habits evangelicals should adopt with respect to faith and culture. But even if this were not so, there is nothing resembling a consensus on the things that are open and closed to debate unless one counts common points of prejudice and avoidance rather than settled doctrine:
But the insistence on the quantity and even the rigor of the debate [at Evangelical colleges] obscures the real issue: just what is subject to debate. What a worldview does is cleave the world into two, identifying in one column those first principles that are taken as given (there is a God, Jesus Christ is His only son) and, in the other column, the many beliefs, values, and positions that one might hold that are less certain (like under what conditions preemptive war is justified). Exactly which beliefs get put in which column is going to have profound political consequences, even if the worldview isn’t taught with an explicitly or predominantly political end in mind. If you suggest to students that an opposition to abortion and a defense of “traditional marriage” are foundational aspects of a Christian worldview, you will very likely produce reliable Republican voters.
During an afternoon I spent at Wheaton College in Illinois, I asked professor Mark Noll, a renowned evangelical historian who is as thoughtful and as dedicated to free inquiry as anyone in Christian intellectual circles, how the faculty at Wheaton would react to a student who became a socialist. “Almost all of the faculty would love to have a graduate who becomes a socialist,” Noll said with some relish, “who can explain, in patient, thorough terms, why the mandates of the Christian gospel demand socialism.” What about a student whose faith led him or her to endorse gay marriage or to support choice on abortion? “It would be much harder to get a hearing,” Noll says. “Marriage and abortion are close to where the pietism and puritanism intersect.” Put another way, they’re pretty firmly in that first column.
There is much I could remark on in this article and even in this small quotation, but that will have to wait. I will note the absurdity that mere “suggestions” to college students will result in certain voting patterns. In my view, what students come to think in and after college has far more to do with their learning and experiences many years earlier. The author is also clearly convinced of the correctness of positivism and the possibility of separating facts from values, which is what he sees as being most wrong in Evangelicalism. But the legitimate insight he inadvertently reveals is that Evangelicals who reject the positivist paradigm are forced to define and firm up that “first column” of non-negotiable givens, and here they turn to scripture and the creeds, which as always, raise more problems and conflicts than they solve in the absence of the regulating influence of a tradition and magisterial body. For one example, as the author implies, homosexuality is not addressed much in scripture and not at all in the creeds, but that point itself is an interpretive argument itself–the relevent sources and their relative authority.
A paradox: why are sola scriptura Protestants so extremely far away from favoring “activist justices,” whose influence they regard as tantamount to the elimination of the Supreme Court and legal precedent in general in favor of a system that favors individual interpretation? How can one go so far in rejecting tradition and authority in the church (and often as a general principle) while also trying to support them in the state? Well I suppose that is the whole problem. Though officially separated from it, the state became the church after the Reformation.
This is Mark Noll on The Bible in Public Life in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: Bad Moto-Scootah | Next: Orion Magazine, October Issue | TrackBack (2) | Comments (0)
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