Mark Noll’s Evangelical Mind is Moving To Notre Dame
February 10, 2006
Christianity Today reports that Mark Noll will be leaving Wheaton College to replace George Marsden on the History staff at Notre Dame. (Hat tip: Mirror of Justice)
Noll made no comment on the move, and there is no reason to think it has anything directly to do with Wheaton’s decision to terminate philosophy professor Joshua Hochschild because he became Catholic. As I previously wrote it is Wheaton’s right to hire and fire as they please. However, there is a much deeper connection that binds these two departures. As administrators at Wheaton and Notre Dame implicitly reveal, Wheaton’s historic choices regarding who can and cannot be hired certainly helps to make Notre Dame more attractive than Wheaton to such a leading Evangelical scholar/leader and Wheaton luminary as Noll:
“This is one of the most painful announcements I’ve had to make in my nine and a half years as provost,” says Stan Jones, provost at Wheaton. Noll has served as an inspiration and role model to students as well as other professors, Jones says. “I was inspired by his balance and maturity of thought.”
“We’re delighted to have him,” says John McGreevy, chair of the department of history at Notre Dame. “We feel we have a strong program already. Mark will augment that.” ….
“The position he is going to is fantastic,” says Jones. “There are two things Notre Dame is offering that Wheaton can’t. One is Notre Dame’s expansive intellectual community, especially in regard to history and religion. Another is the intensive training of a fine cadre of doctoral students.” ….
“One of the attractions for us is Mark’s interest in global Christianity,” says McGreevy.
Noll is also active in dialogue between Catholics and Protestants. Noll and Carolyn Nystrom recently published Is the Reformation Over? “One thing Mark is committed to is Protestant/Catholic dialogue,” says McGreevy. “Notre Dame is a good place to do that. There are lots of serious Catholics and Protestants who want to think about those issues.” [my italics]
Noll recently wrote in First Things that it is a sign of hope for “the evangelical mind” to witness “the increasing engagement between evangelicals and Roman Catholics that has contributed dramatically to improved evangelical use of the mind. …. So rapidly has the situation changed from the cold war that existed into the 1960s, that it is now barely conceivable that either Catholics or evangelicals could once have thought that either could get along without help from the other. The exchange between these traditions is probably more important to Catholics for reasons other than intellectual, but the life of the mind is where evangelicals benefit most. While evangelicals offer Catholics eagerness, commitment, and an ability to negotiate in a culture of intellectual consumerism, Catholics offer evangelicals a sense of tradition and centuries of reflection on the bearing of sacramentality on all existence.” (Source: The Evangelical Mind Today; see also The (Increasingly Catholic) Evangelical Mind)
Further discussion is appearing on the Ignatius Press blog, Titus 1:9, and, as usual, Amy Wellborn’s Open Book. Ignatius links to an interview they did with Noll on Is the Reformation Over?
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Amy Welborn writes on the latest Wheaton College news: Evangelical Protestantism, especially in the US, was/is really only able to thrive in an a-historical environment, in sort of the mystical, Wesleyan, pentecostal model. When you just have Scripture… [Read More]
Tracked on February 11, 2006 02:11 AM