I Kissed Evangelical Elitism Goodbye

On growing disillusioned with disillusion

Recently Andrew Walker, inspired by Bethel McGrew, posted on X that the real evangelical problem is not the “Scandal of the Evangelical Mind” (citing Mark Noll’s book of that title) but a different scandal, the scandal of compromising evangelical elites (which is the title of Walker’s post in article form). I won’t comment on the people called out within both pieces, but I concur with the general claims. You might think that as a professor at Wheaton, one of the remaining “evangelical” colleges often accused of being “elite” that I would be defending myself or my institution from such charges; but instead I agree. Walker is perfectly correct that “bearing witness is more important than earning accolades.” Too many of us have thought otherwise, and the lure of the Inner Ring that Lewis and McGrew warn of is terribly real, and—to state the obvious—can be just as much of a problem on the Right as on the Left.

Though such dynamics have always been in play, I first percieved their intensification about ten years ago. A friend invited me to a lecture by a historian of evangelicalism hosted here at Wheaton. We had invited this speaker (perhaps unwisely) because our archives are what made the person’s research possible. But the speaker, about my age, used his research to undermine evangelicalism, and seemed to enjoy doing so. Our archives became a tool of exposure to advance his career. I am no stranger to ex-evangelical tirades, and there is nothing wrong with honest critique; but here was a spirited take-down that was indirectly subsidized by evangelicalism in order, it seemed quite apparent, to win the favor of another constituency.

Soon this posture, which was never without select representatives, became a sellable schtick. It almost seemed that the normative way to advance your career was to be the first to undermine what was left of the evangelical movement. Indeed, this continues to be one very effective way to build a podcast audience or a speaking platform. It is all done in the name of “prophetic” honesty, but obviously more is at play, not the least of which is the fact that bash equals cash. Sometimes I find myself in independent bookstores in towns with intellectural pretensions only to see that those undermining books, and those books alone, are the ones that make headway into what’s left of the Christianity part of the generic “Spirituality” section.

But to cite one of those “elite” scholars from an older generation, that’s not the way it’s supposed to be. If Noll (along with Wolterstorff, Plantinga, Marsden and others) had succeeded in making Christianity respectable in the academy, I thought the point was to work just as hard, to create something just as good if not better, perhaps bringing in concerns to which Noll et alia had been insufficiently attentive, or to make similar contributions in other fields, that is, to make an impact similar to Noll’s by offering fresh Christian approaches to sociology or geology. At least that was the plan as I understood it.

But that didn’t exactly work out for many of us. Frankly, some of us (and I would include myself in that some) did not have the talent, discipline or stamina of Mark Noll. Others of us had very close-run ins with the true corruption of higher education, or the job market hit us like a nail-riddled two by four. Still others just saw through it all. And I don’t mean by that we saw through dumb postmodern rescramblings (which I hope goes without saying). I mean we saw through the entire Kantian “research” enterprise that the dumb postmodern rescramblings were intended to challenge. Indeed, to speak in terms of the study of history, “good training” in fact led some of us to see that the entire project of understanding a given epoch on its own terms, for the purposes of contributing “knowledge” to an expanding discipline that exists for its own sake, was itself beset with almost irredeemable fractures.

I recently exchanged words with a colleague at Wheaton who has come to similar conclusions. He came to see the absurdity of being a “Kierkegaard scholar” (and if you don’t get that joke, which a good portion of Kierkegaard scholars apparently do not, then you know nothing of Kierkegaard). In the same way, it became plainly apparent to me how ridiculous it is to be a scholar of icons, the entire point of which is to put you in touch with God. “An icon without spiritual vision is not an icon at all,” said Pavel Florensky, “but a board.” How funny to discover that, as a Byzantine art historian, I had earned advanced certification in the study of boards. Here is Vladimir Lossky making a similar point in his classic book The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church:

We have become “Kantian,” always ready to push back everything which transcends the laws, or rather the habits of fallen nature into the noumenal realm, that of ‘objects of faith.’ The philosophical defense of the autonomy of our limited nature, closed to the experience of grace, is a conscious affirmation of our unconsciousness, it is the ‘anti-gnosis,’ the ‘anti-light,’ the opposition to the Holy Spirit which opens in human persons a perfect awareness of communion with God.

Another name for that ethos is Wissenschaft (research).

Fully cognizant that there are risks in entertaining skepticism about skepticism, I did as much of a deep of a dive as I could manage into the school of Kantian rehabilitation of late. And I do admire those who make a case for his compatibility with faith. To speak again in terms of history, there is something to be said for understanding an epoch on its own terms, with clarity and precision apart from any personal impact, safely quarantined from thorny (and divisive) metaphysical concerns. All such activity does, I fully admit, require a considerable measure of intellectual virtue. It’s not that the research enterprise that launched the modern disciplines in which some of us have been certified is illegitimate. It’s just disappointing. To borrow from George Herbert, “he shoots higher that threatens the Moon, than he that aims at a Tree.”

As a result, if I may boast just a little, I consider my own disillusionment to be more radical than that of the evangelical “elites” who may be compromising and selling out, catering to a need for esteem. I know there is something to be said for calling out the errors of one’s home community. Indeed, that is exactly what Noll was doing, which is why he described his famous book as an “epistle of a wounded lover.” But for some of the “evangelical elites” today it is all wound and no love, and that’s just boring. Maybe that’s why God played a trick on them by having the best of these critical historians of evangelicalism, Molly Worthen, show all of them up by herself converting to evangelicalism, and that’s not boring.

Meanwhile, I invite what’s left of the evangelical elite to join me in full scale disillusionment not with the church (how easy that would be), but with the entire enterprise of scholarship and publishing that some deploy to expose it. I also invite those those who criticize the compromising evangelical elite, and who think that the ideal would be to get back to that old style of Kantian “solid” scholarship, to enter with me into this deeper disillusionment as well, from which there is no going back.

The classic 1790 portrait of Immanual Kant (1724-1804), who—faced with warring Christian factions—insisted in Critique of Pure Reason on “leaving [metaphysics] in itself untouched as actual by itself but unknown.”

So what then, one might ask, am I even doing as a professor? If I don’t think that my job can be limited to the neutral Stanley-Fish style passing on of certain intellectual skills, what is the point? This is a very good question, but—if I may boast again—so is my answer. My aim as an educator is not to triple down on the mind, but, as the great Christian mystics have long counseled, to permit the mind to descend into the heart, and to make that a primary objective of what happens at a place like Wheaton. It turns out this is a lot harder to teach than the skills of research (which I concede must still be taught). Were I a Buddhist, I might counsel letting go of the mind entirely. But I’m not. As Kallistos Ware instructs in the classic book on the Jesus Prayer, one must “descend from the intellect into the heart… not from but with the intellect.”

Moreover, there is nothing anti-institutional or even anti-academic about this approach. It just requires an entirely different genealogy of Christian higher education. Instead of telling the big institutional secularization story that we’re familiar with (and which is not untrue), we would instead start in Alexandria, that African educational project where the holistic enterprise of Christian liberal arts actually began, and where those arts were mingled with the mysticism of desert Christianity. Such an approach would recognize that the fabled University of Paris was corrupt from its beginning, and would look instead to the reform movement in the St. Victor monastery just outside the city walls. The St. Victor motto was not credo ut intelligam (I believe in order to understand), but credo ut expiar (I believe in order to experience). I’m glad to report, by the way, that one such Victorine justification of evangelical higher education has already been penned.

The great city of Strasbourg, where “the mystic elements in the German tradition, combined with the new linguistic knowledge, had given humanism a new direction.”

This is the kind of education that was resumed by that burnt-out academic we call Meister Eckhart among the Beguines of Strasbourg. And it may not be coincidence that it was in Strasbourg, thanks to Jean Sturm (d. 1589) where some of the earliest and most successful Protestant educational experiments began. We rightfully appeal here at Wheaton to John Henry Newman’s University College Dublin lectures that became The Idea of a University. In fact all professors are required to read that great book in their first year. But do we even know of the Anglican educational experiment at Trinity College Dublin long before? There Jeremy Taylor’s lectures bear all the marks of the kind of educational mysticism I am describing: “Divine knowledge is to be felt, rather than talked of… we unite to God as a flame touches a flame and combines into splendour and to glory.” This style of contemplative education continues through the Christian college consortium that Wheaton is a part of, and thanks be to God, in many other places as well.

It is for good reason, therefore, that my colleagues and I devote a considerable amount of our time teaching contemplation in addition to (not in replacement of) academic “rigor.” It is not by accident that there are multiple courses at Wheaton being taught on the mystical tradition, and it is not by accident that we paddle into the woods with students for times of carefully directed solitary prayer. Ironically enough, such practices often lead to the best kind of academic work. But, of course, that is not the reason we do it.

One student who just graduated described the impact of this kind of education in a paper she wrote summarizing the best class she took at Wheaton:

We read one book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I was apprehensive, but the professor was well aware that I was not the only student entering his classroom with a preconceived notion of Nietzsche. Acknowledging this reality, the professor fell to his knees near tears, imploring us all to believe the gospel, and allow whatever we found in Nietzsche’s writing that was not true to wound us toward Christ…. This class explored the idea that beauty is measured on a totally different scale than that of suffering and pain, and even if we experienced only one moment of beauty in a lifetime, it would be worth living that life again and again for the sake of the beautiful thing, because it is God who gave it to us.

I hope that description show that this kind of contemplative education, grounded in prayer and devotional practice, is anything but uncritical or naïve. Nor is it a rarity at Wheaton, as other students have detailed. In fact, if you’re an “evangelical elite” professor who hates the church or is panning for the fool’s gold of academic success, chances are that at Wheaton you just aren’t going to last.

Finally, I should conclude by asserting that I think Mark Noll has known this all along, which is why any Oedipal rage against him (thankfully absent from Walker’s piece) is so misplaced. As John Wilson never tires of reminding us, the “scandal” of the evangelical mind that Noll wrote about was and remains a twofold scandal. Both the scandal that comes when Christians don’t think deeply enough (which remains a huge problem), and the scandal that comes when they do think deeply while refusing to give up on the scandal of the Cross (I Cor. 1:18).

This is why Noll, resisting the Inner Ring of purely secular scholarship, followed up his book with a sequel that insists that Christ specifically, not just a generic divine blueprint, is at the heart of the study of all things; this is why Noll himself called out the “Fundamentalists of the left as well as the right [who] stalk the land seeking curious minds to devour… [as] Colleges and universities are blow about by tornadoes of artificial tenderness.” This is why The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind ended not with the false promise of elite acceptance but with the words of Scripture: “Christians who pursue intellectual activity should never wander far from the words of the prophet Jeremiah: ‘Let not the wise boast in [their] wisdom…. Let [them] who boast about this: that [they] understand and know me.’”

At least for now, by God’s grace the scandal of that kind of teaching and learning is alive and well where I teach, and it remains our birthright. Meanwhile, embrace by elite sectors from either side of the political spectrum remains a comparative mess of pottage.