We can celebrate the coming of Jesus, because in him alone we find the light that frees us from the darkness of sin. We find the light that breaks into the darkness of our lives and hearts, changing and drawing us out of darkness into a relationship with the Light Giver. 

The Christmas season is a time when we often celebrate family, friends, joy, life, and all the good things we have. There is much for which to be thankful, and appreciation and enjoyment of these things is good. Yet, it is also easy to forget that Jesus came into the world without many of these things.
Jesus was not born into a festive family home ablaze with lights, the aromas of good food, and the joyful sounds of music and festivities. The buildup to his birth didn’t include lights, caroling, or cookie parties. Rather, Jesus came into the world where animals were kept. His earthly father was a carpenter; his mother was a young girl—one who was suspected of having sexual relations before marriage, and not with her husband to be. His first visitors were lowly shepherds and Eastern wise men. And yet, despite the differences, here are three reasons why it is perfectly fitting for us to celebrate Jesus’ birth joyously with overflowing hearts of gratitude:
1. Jesus takes our place before God’s judgment seat.
We all hate being judged by others, especially when our faults, sins, and transgressions are pointed out and we will suffer some hard consequence. Imagine a courtroom setting where God as the judge is passing just judgement on your sins. God is perfectly righteous, good, and just—and we are not. In fact, sin pervades even the nicest things we try to do.
Because God is just he must judge sinners. For our sin we must suffer eternal separation from the goodness of God and only experience his wrath against sin. This is our just condemnation if we try to stand alone and on our own merits before God.
Yet, God is also good, merciful, loving, and kind, and he promised a Savior who would willingly suffer for us in our stead. The righteous Judge sent his only begotten Son to take the punishment that we deserved, so that we could have forgiveness of our sins and a righteous standing before the good Judge.
Jesus willingly undertook this sacrifice because of his love for his Father and his love for us. Thus, we should rejoice exceedingly because the birth of Jesus was a major step toward God’s fulfillment of his promise to send a Savior who would take our place of judgment and give us the righteousness we need to stand blameless before the God of the universe.
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In my view, chapter 5, where Baxter illuminates Dante’s influence on Lewis, is Baxter at his best. Baxter compellingly shows that in Dante Lewis found a model poet who is able to furnish our imagination with images that enable us to love God and his kingdom as we should. Dante’s images of core Christian teachings kindle the fire of our loves, which often wanes when only taught in abstract and purely didactic ways. Moreover, Dante taught Lewis how to communicate these truths in palpable imagery: “decapitated troubadours, sinners who scream at God, blind beggars leaning on one another’s shoulders for support, or the souls on Saturn buzzing around like tops to express their joyful zeal” (91). This chapter sings and is exactly what I would have guessed the book was about. 

Grove City, PA. Most of us first encounter C. S. Lewis’s works in one of two forms: the imaginative or the apologetic. As children, we wander into The Silver Chair or as young adults we wrestle with Mere Christianity. We immediately come to delight in Lewis’s ability to enchant and instruct, to explain and defend Christianity through simple prose and astounding images, and to weave tales that usher us into profound truths. Jason Baxter’s The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind aims to show that, in addition to these two better known “Lewises” – the imaginative and apologetic (or devotional) – there is a “third” Lewis: Lewis the medieval scholar, a role that provided the inspiration for his imaginative and apologetic works. That is, Baxter contends that this third Lewis is not related to the other two as a mere addition but rather as a source or foundation. Baxter explains, “The purpose of this book is to explore how this third Lewis is just beneath the surface even in his more appreciated imaginative and devotional writings. We will see that the great medievalist was not a successful modernizer of Christianity and writer of fiction despite the fact that he spent so much time studying old, dusty books, but because of them” (6).
As the reader will observe, there are two central aspects of the third Lewis. First, he is a “a great medievalist.” Second, his studying of ancient works is part of what makes his apologetic and fictional works so great. Let’s consider these claims in turn. While at times the third Lewis seems simply to be the scholar at Oxford and later Cambridge, it becomes clear that Baxter is really interested in Lewis’s scholarship connected to the medieval period, and so gaining clarity on this third Lewis requires us to grasp exactly what the medieval period covers. Here we find a rather odd feature of Baxter’s book. Where exactly we draw the boundaries of the medieval period will be a disputed question in part because it depends on the distinctive concerns of various scholarly communities. Lewis himself noted that the distinction between Medieval and Renaissance literature had for too long been “exaggerated.” Thus, one could understand that Baxter might endorse a definition of the medieval period that others would dispute. But, as far as I can tell, Baxter’s definition of the medieval period, or what he calls “the Long Middle Ages,” (9) is all his own. It extends from Plato (4th century B.C.) to Samuel Johnson (17th century A.D.) and “sometimes even to Wordsworth” (11). I can’t say I have ever heard of a scholar who suggested that Plato was medieval.
When I first encountered this puzzling periodization, I was inclined to think the best way to gloss Baxter was that he is really interested in Lewis the premodern. This hypothesis seemed justified insofar as so many of Baxter’s chapters focus on the way the books of the Long Middle Ages formed Lewis’s aversions to many aspects of modernity and populated his imagination with ancient, more grounded ways of being. From the fact that Lewis denies knowing such modern thinkers as Tillich and Brunner while being on intimate terms with St. Augustine, Dante, Thomas à Kempis, Edmund Spenser, Richard Hooker, George Herbert, John Milton, Thomas Traherne, and William Law, Baxter concludes, “In sum, this was C. S. Lewis the medievalist” (4). While such a list hardly justifies the conclusion that Lewis was a medievalist, all these works might reasonably be considered premodern.
A second hypothesis that occurred to me was that Baxter was especially concerned with those authors who contributed to or expounded on the Medieval Model of Reality, the great synthesis of pagan and Christian learning developed over a thousand years, which aimed at explaining everything from the nature of God and the heavens to the nature of plants and rocks, and which began to be widely abandoned in the late 17th century. Lewis describes this model of reality in his masterful The Discarded Image. Plato contributed to it, and Spenser was deeply informed by it, and so perhaps that is the best way to understand Baxter. And yet even this does not seem quite right, as some 20th century figures, such Rudolf Otto and Martin Buber, figure significantly in Baxter’s discussion of works that influenced Lewis (in chapters 6 and 7 respectively). In the end, the works discussed by Baxter as significant influences on Lewis belie any simple taxonomy.
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Written by Benjamin L. Mabry |
Wednesday, March 15, 2023
What must not be forgotten, however, is the use to which this book has been put toward for the last few decades.  Those who used this text to promote a syncretism of Christianity with secular ideological agendas have done untold damage to the cause of the Christian faith and are directly responsible for the divisions that rock the Christian world today.  The Evangelical community is in immediate, mortal danger of following in the footsteps of the Mainline Churches, and of sacrificing their Christian distinctiveness in order to be accepted as one of the tame, docile, neutered “comprehensive belief systems” within the approved list of those permitted by the secular regime.

Why bother to review a book that is nearly thirty years in print and has been subject to no end of commentary and discussion at every level of Evangelical scholarship?  Mark Noll’s most famous monograph, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, has become a household name in Evangelical intellectual circles and a byword for the problems facing that community.  The career of Francis Collins was considered by many in the Evangelical community to be an example of Noll’s arguments in action.  He was among the highest profile of a number of high-profile Evangelical scholars to be appointed to prestigious positions in the U.S. Federal Bureaucracy.  However, many of the recent criticisms of Collins’s decisions, which can be found summarized in The Federalist, created shockwaves across the Christian academic community.  It seemed that Collins, and many other prominent Evangelicals like him, had been co-opted by the secular regime and culture which increasingly appears to be the antithesis of Christianity.  In fact, however, Collins’s actions don’t represent a betrayal of the Evangelical community, but merely the all-too-common, predictable actions of Evangelical elites desperate for the approval of secular authorities.  These and other recent events should cause Christians to knock the cob-webs off of Evangelical thinking about Evangelical thinking and question whether the positions advocated in The Scandal actually led to Christ-centered scholarship.
A Flawed Narrative
At first glance, the most striking element of this text is the failure to adequately define what is Evangelical about this tradition, without which one cannot diagnose the Evangelical Mind.  Noll’s narrative encompasses parts of the Protestant Tradition but doesn’t seem to follow any clear standard of inclusion, which ultimately confounds any attempt to seek an authentically Evangelical way of thinking.  Luther and Calvin are considered intellectual precursors to Evangelical Protestants, and the Lutheran or Presbyterian intellectual giants of the 19th Century are included, but modern-day Lutherans and Presbyterians fall outside of the Evangelical category.  Some Unitarians and Anglicans are treated as Evangelicals during the 18th and 19th Centuries while their modern-day descendants hang rainbow flags and deny the divinity of Christ.  Fundamentalism results in “virtually no insights” into intellectual matters, and yet arch-fundamentalist J. G. Machen gets citation and praise.  Christianity Today is described as an Evangelical publication, albeit mixed with public affairs reporting, and yet in practice its reporting is heavily criticized by Evangelical leaders like John Grano and Richard Land as out of touch, elitist, and speaking to “fewer evangelicals with each passing year.”  The result is that his historical narrative feels overfit to the model he establishes in Chapter 1, and that the criteria of inclusion remains obscure.
Related to this theme, Noll tries to discuss the collapse of the Protestant intellectual tradition and yet says no word at all of the mass apostasy of the Mainline Protestant denominations in the mid-to-late 20th Century.  As Robert Putnum and David Campbell so aptly describe (American Grace, pp. 83, 134), the distance between Mainline Protestantism and Evangelical Protestantism is so slight prior to the mid-20th Century that Americans freely switched between these denominations and their intellectual traditions were largely interchangeable.  Beginning in the 1960’s, however, the Protestant world underwent a collapse that reverberates to this day, yet no mention of this appears in his intellectual history of Protestantism.
Ironically, this notion might even save his flimsy definition of Evangelical.  By a recognition of the fact that most Mainline Protestant denominations apostatized from Christ, one could make a plausible argument that Evangelicals are in fact a remnant of the full Protestant Tradition, and rightly link modern Evangelicals to the great intellectual leaders of Protestantism’s past.  Yet Noll rejects this notion, leaving his argument in a limbo of bad definitions, because the result of such an analysis would indicate that his entire religious history in Chapters 3 and 4 does not apply to modern Evangelicals but to apostate Mainline Protestants.  His causative narrative doesn’t lead to the Evangelical Mind, but to the Puritan Hypothesis of modern Progressivism.  The children of Christian Republicanism, Enlightenment Christianity, and the Protestant-American synthesis are not rural, blue-collar Bible-believing Evangelicals but secular, progressive, politically-radical, gender-queer Episcopalians.
What, then, is the most generous way to take this historical narrative seriously?  Given the context and the description of the author’s intentions in the prologue, one who reads The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind should take its historical narrative as an aspirational retro-conversion of Protestant intellectual history, in order to make a persuasive case for how modern-day Evangelicals should reinterpret their past.  The question then becomes, is the narrative that Noll creates persuasive or does it fail to represent the lived, real experience of what it means to be an Evangelical today?  Are his heroes of intellectualism really our people or do they represent an alien tradition? Are the villains of Noll’s story really wrong, or do they just get in the way of Noll’s ambitions for the direction he wishes Evangelism to take?
The Concept of Gnosticism in Noll’s Diagnosis
One of the key elements of Noll’s diagnosis of the current state of Evangelical thought is his use of classical-age heresies to illustrate what he perceives are theological errors by Evangelicals in the 20th Century.  This is not an unusual approach; “gnostic” has become a commonly misused pejorative ever since William F. Buckley fished it out of Eric Voegelin’s philosophical masterpiece, The New Science of Politics.  Noll, like many others, substitutes a superficial, ontic description for a deeper understanding of what those heresies mean, describing Gnosticism without a single mention of gnosis as an attempt to impose one’s own will upon reality.  In the original context, political gnosticism is not defined by contingent dogmas but by its experiential meaning as pneumopathology, or sickness of the soul.  Dogmas are contingent articulations of emotional and spiritual deformations caused by a negative reaction to ontological experiences.
As God makes his presence known more fully throughout history, higher truths are revealed about the nature of the universe in its more fully differentiated nature.  The Apostle Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and others articulate these finely-grained ontological distinctions into notions like the Two Cities, which differentiate the contingency of mundane history from the meaning and directionality of ecclesiastical history.  Ontological differentiation prevents human beings from hiding behind sacred monarchs, political institutions, ideologies, or movements and force them to confront their personal responsibility for their Being before the Lord God.  Faced with this responsibility, stripped of the false camouflage of primitive notions like collective sin, one must respond like Isaiah before the throne of God.  This critical awareness centers Man’s unfitness to stand before the Transcendent, forces into presence the spiritual death of fallen Man, and closes all possibilities of Being other than utter dependency on the Blood of Christ.
The anxiety induced by this awareness may also lead a person to mutilate their own spiritual capacities, much like Sophocles’s Oedipus.  Incapable of enduring the vision of the Divine in one’s ontological nakedness, the heretic hides behind false meanings imposed upon mundane institutions like governments, churches, and ideologies as the bearers of intramundane salvation.  By denying the contingency of history revealed to Augustine, and imbuing the power struggles of secular regimes with divine purpose, a person can escape the full responsibility for his eternal destiny by passing the blame onto the world.  Dispersing oneself into gnostic, world-historical causes serves to divert awareness away from the guilt of one’s inadequacy before the Divine.  Noll’s shallow treatment of these deep ontological issues ensures that the examples of heresy he gives are in fact merely misunderstandings of orthodox doctrines like the Two Cities.  Recognizing that mundane politics operates on the power principle or abstaining from participation in power struggles between political factions over worldly spoils does not make one a gnostic.
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