Tried With Fire

I am continuing to read The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind in bits and pieces when I get the chance. Every time I pick it up my assumptions are challenged. According to Mark Noll, the Enlightenment had a huge impact upon our country but not just in the secular sphere. American Christianity embraced it as well, which leads me to ask: - Is our propensity toward biblicism less biblical and more a product of the Enlightenment?  - Does biblicism afflict the American culture more than other countries because of our history? - Is our study of the Bible also influenced by this? Are we taking Enlightenment principles of studying the material world and applying it to the Word of God? Is this good or bad? What are the implications? This may not seem practical, but I want to know why I think the way I do and where it came from. Am I child of the Enlightenment (I think the answer is "yes") and to what degree? Just because I am a Christian does not automatically mean that my ...

The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind. 1 The following quote from The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind isn't meant to point a finger. I freely admit to being too terrified to read the front page of a newspaper after 9/11. I was also the kid who looked out the window to see if the moon had turned bright red, if my parents were late getting home, for fear that they had been raptured and I was left behind. Within weeks of the outbreak of this conflict [the 1991 Gulf War], evangelical publishers provided a spate of books featuring efforts to read this latest Middle East crisis as a direct fulfillment of biblical prophecy heralding the end of the world. The books came to various conclusions, but they all shared the disconcerting conviction that the best way of providing moral judgment about what was happening in the Middle East was not to study carefully what was going on in the Middle East. Rather, they featured a kind of Bible study...