Thirty years ago this month, Christian historian Mark Noll wrote an instant classic that launched an infamous accusation against the evangelical movement at the time: “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”
Noll was addressing the growing lack of depth in modern Protestant Christianity—spawned by the problem of an anti-intellectual, overly emotive, and pragmatic wave that led Christians to stick with what works and what feels good. His book quickly became a clarion call for evangelicals to prioritize investing in the mind in high culture, scholarship, and academia.
This thesis was also formative for me as a young person. Growing up, the shallowness of contemporary Christianity concerned me. In a church context that seemed to function on good feelings and the right vibes, I welcomed a renewed emphasis on thoughtfulness and theological depth. In fact, part of the reason I pursued higher degrees was this very longing for a more substantial faith.
To borrow a term from Andy Crouch, the past evangelical emphasis on intellect was a fine “gesture”—and by gesture, I mean an occasional response or action. The initial gesture says that the problem is intellectual, and we need more scholarship, good thinking, and deeper theology to change people’s minds. We’ve grown shallow and need to grow deep.
But this gesture can also turn into a posture of defense that is mobilized by rightness versus wrongness. This, in turn, can lead to a penchant for crushing our ideological opponents with winning arguments. In short, it can produce a prideful Christianity that knows it’s right.
Politically, this looks like redness or blueness defining our orthodoxy. Theologically, being Arminian or Calvinist becomes a badge of inclusion or exclusion. Gone is any spirit of mystery or corresponding human charity. God is on our side because our tribe knows what’s right.
Maybe the greatest scandal of the evangelical mind was assuming that the mind is or was our deepest scandal. I would argue that the bigger scandal, especially today, is not an inadequate mind but a disordered heart.
In other words, it’s not that we don’t know enough but that we love the wrong things—or perhaps we love the right things in the wrong ways. Our affections, in short, have gone awry. We desire power, so we fight and jockey for position. We want to be right, so we view others as opponents to be conquered. We fear the world, so we sequester into silos. Like a Grinch-sized heart, two sizes two small, the evangelical heart has grown cold and loveless.
Michael Luo picks up Noll’s argument in The New Yorker. In his suggested solution for erring evangelical minds is a vital recovery of worshiping God. If I could change his language slightly, I may phrase the solution as a vital recovery of love.
As Augustine once wrote that whoever “thinks that he understands the Holy Scriptures” in such a way that “does not tend to build up this twofold love of God and our neighbour” doesn’t understand the Scriptures at all.
As Christians, love is the Great Commandment of our lives—but this doesn’t amount to social niceties or sentimentality. It means that we are meant to become people of character and depth committed to the good of our neighbors. It means our hearts become shaped into a posture of love for God and people.
In this suggestion, I do not want to say less than Noll. I’m not against reason, but I am for wholeness. The focus on love is not a reduction from Noll but an expansion. In this diagnosis, our intellect is equally implicated, but the scandal lies far deeper—as does the solution.
And what, indeed, is the solution?
I believe such a reordering of love requires we reimagine our modes of spiritual formation and education in a way that takes affection seriously. Our methods for discipleship must cultivate in us a deeper sense of belonging, train us in tangible habits and practices that shape our seeing and being, and help us develop a richer aesthetic framework.
First, in our modern quest for meaning, we’ve lost sight of the fact that our ultimate purpose is found in belonging. If you prioritize your independence, you’ll always feel adrift and alone. But if you belong somewhere, your meaning and purpose will follow. Belonging cultivates affection, and affection is particular—because you can’t love people in the abstract.
Over time, my individual life matters less as I find myself caught up with life in my community. Even if or when my job lacks fulfillment, my communal life upholds me. What I do becomes less important than who I am doing it with and who I am doing it for.
The agrarian writer Wendell Berry distinguishes between “boomers” (an attitude, not the generation) and “stickers.” Boomers are motivated by greed. They exploit and think momentarily, looking around and always wanting more. Stickers are motivated by affection. They seek to repair and think long-term; they embrace their own lives and want no others.
Our modern world encourages us to always run toward something else or buy something new. It’s no wonder our faith has grown loveless when we are always on the go and always on the move. And if we are going to resist this impulse, we ought to forsake the race for bigger and better and settle into our given lives. Wherever we end up and whatever church we attend, God is ready to meet us in and through the people he has placed around us. More than that, we must think long-term—what will be good for my great-grandkids rather than what serves me now.
Staying in place seems boring, dull, mundane. I hear the refrain from my college students often: “I want to travel!” Yet this desire for newness, novelty, difference, may be a source of our ills. Eugene Peterson characterizes the modern age as having a tourist mentality. It’s easy to sell and package the gospel with this mindset: Come hear this new person; travel to this cool retreat; this novel thing will make you happy. You don’t want to miss it!
But the Christian life, Peterson argues, is more like the slow, plodding way of the pilgrim, who takes one step after another. We are moving, but our movement primarily takes the form of seeking and drawing nearer to a Person we know. And all along the way, God wants to meet us in the slow, mundane, boring parts of life—in the form of our habits and rituals.
As James K. A. Smith has argued, we can’t merely think our way to God. Humans are desiring creatures, not just brains-on-a-stick. Jesus’ first words recorded in the Gospel of John are “What do you want?” (1:38), not “What do you know?” or “What do you believe?” Desires play a central role in our inward lives, and our desires are shaped through practice. In other words, our practices shape our pursuit, and our habits shape our affections.
If that’s true, Christian formation must consider how our habits order and disorder us—how we shape our aspirational desires rather than cater to our basest desires. We need an embodied faith that practices its way toward loving what we ought to love. Growth requires the pain of challenge, and challenge means changing the way we live.
There are no quick fixes for any sickness of the human soul. Without a steady, habitual, slow formation over time, we’ll be tossed to and fro by the winds and waves of new doctrine or life circumstances (Eph. 4:14). We’ll always stay tourists and never complete our pilgrimage.
The other weakness of a purely modern and rationalistic way of looking at the world is that it creates a Christianity that can be explained—robbing it of its supernatural awe and wonder. Jesus becomes a concept to grasp and defend, not a person to love and share. We could be believing and saying true things with good motivations, but our imagination is fundamentally diseased.
I love the way the novelist Flannery O’Connor describes the connection between our beliefs and our vision. What she argues for the fiction writer is also true of us: “Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.”
In other words, our beliefs dictate how we see, but they are not what we look at. She goes on to say that belief or faith is something which “can’t be learned only in the head; it has to be learned in the habits. It has to become a way that you habitually look at things.”
Formation is a way of seeing before it is a way of knowing—and our vision is ultimately shaped through our habits. But the shift from relying on our intellect to engaging our heart requires a renewed imagination.
“Imagination entails much more than our individual fancies and visions, and its hold on us reaches far beyond the limits of our own minds,” Karen Swallow Prior explains. “The imagination shapes us and our world more than any other human power or ability. Communities, societies, movements, and, yes, religions are formed and fueled by the power of the imagination.”
Our imagination colors the way we see the world around us and affects how we view the neighbors and strangers Jesus has called us to love with empathy and compassion. But more than that, it impacts the eyes of our faith—without which it is impossible to please God (Heb. 11:6).
“This is characteristic of imagination: To see what is unseen,” Walter Cabal writes in Ekstasis. As such, he goes on to suggest, “The healthy imagination has equal—or dare I say—more potential for bringing life into the world than facts.”
One vital way we can train our imagination is through the arts—an aesthetic orientation opens our inward contemplation to the “moreness” of life and its meaning.
The arts help us pay attention in particular ways. Attention, as Simone Weil reminds us, is another term for prayer. The psalmist proclaims, “One thing I ask from the Lord … that I may … gaze on the beauty of the Lord” (Ps. 27:4). Beauty compels us to the Beautiful One—and it invites us to become what we behold.
Through the arts, we can reimagine the world through God’s eyes—which, despite its darkness and suffering, is a place exploding with his abundant beauty, creativity, meaning, and grace.
It’s not that there wasn’t or isn’t a problem with the way we think but that the scandal of our mind was too small a thing to aim at. It’s not merely that we haven’t thought deeply or been intellectually formed—though that’s true enough. The problem is that our formation has been fragmented and cheapened.
Our evangelical hearts need healing. When we are whole, we will be healthy, and when we are healthy, we can love rightly. Christianity is about living into human wholeness—not being reduced to certain aspects but living into the fullness of humanity. Christianity offers not just another belief system but an alternative way to live and love—which is tied to place and community, habitual and slow, with an eye toward the beauty of God.
Not only do we have the mind of Christ but he also dwells in our heart through faith, rooting and grounding us in his love (Eph. 3:17). Let us pray, then, for the power to comprehend this love which “surpasses knowledge” (v. 19)—one that overflows our lives and pours itself into the world around us.
Alex Sosler is an Associate Professor of Bible and Ministry at Montreat College and an Assisting Priest at Redeemer Anglican Church in Asheville. He is the author of A Short Guide to Spiritual Formation and Learning to Love, as well as co-author of The Artistic Vision and editor of Theology and the Avett Brothers.
