If you go and read Paul’s letters to Thessalonica (and other places) there is more spoken about the way their mutual love for him had encouraged him than any other thing they had done. For the Apostle there was always a desire to be physically present with the men and women of the local church. He is constantly hoping to go to places and see believers he had never met before. A kind of spiritual wanderlust motivated much of Paul’s missionary labors. It is worth asking the question about where this came from. Why did he think it so important, and needed, for his own well-being?

Of all people Christians should be the most concerned about personal piety. That word can be defined in many ways, but it simply means our interest in Jesus, and how we go about cultivating that faith. Lots of folks are involved in spiritual programs designed to make them better people. Yet, the follower of Christ’s way should look different both in the why we seek to be holy, and how we go about it. Our desire is not for an ever-changing scheme, but being grounded in the simplicity of the Christian faith. We should always be hopeful in answering any questions about what we believe, especially about why we do what we do. How we put that belief into practice in real life, not in our false conceptions of reality, but as things really are should be a straight-forward thing. However, that isn’t always the case for many. A false conception of their place in the Kingdom is belied by their lack of focus on a proper answer. That comes from a lack of interest in developing a right relationship with the Redeemer. Being a “God-fearer” is not sufficient, as James notes even the Devil is aware the Lord exists, that Jesus came to save sinners, and in that he still trembles. For a lively faith there needs to be some fruitful proof to our spiritual pudding. Nominal belief is a damnable offense against Jehovah God.
The Puritan Jonathan Dickinson says this:
Christianity consists not merely in speculation, but in practice. We must not only give our assent to the truth of the gospel, but give up our hearts to Christ. The faith which He requires is not a slight superficial belief that He is the Redeemer of mankind, but such a faith as will form us into subjection and obedience to Himself. 
In our worship and prayer help today we are going to think more deeply about our walk with Christ and how we can improve our desire to seek holiness. The reason this matters in the eyes of the Lord is that the goal of sanctification which begins in the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit is a non-negotiable in the Christian life. We are to be consistently and regularly dying to self and living to Jesus. A soul who regards the process of being made more like our Redeemer with a nonchalance gives rise to a concern that there is something seriously wrong, eternally so.
In our sermon this past Lord’s Day we heard this from Moses, “This day the Lord your God commands you to observe these statutes and judgments; therefore you shall be careful to observe them with all your heart and with all your soul.” There I highlighted that word “careful”. We’re watchful over the things that matter to us. If you are moved by this question then I have good news for you. God has granted a way to help in the fight.
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He’s worshipped and served by angels (1:6-7) — Angels have a lot of dignity, but they don’t have as much dignity and honor as Jesus. Verses 6 and 7 describe two things that angels do that make them inferior to Jesus. He quotes Psalm 97:7 and says that angels worship Jesus, and he quotes Psalm 104:4 to say that they serve Jesus. Angels may be great to us, but they’re worshipers and servants to Jesus. He is much greater than them. They are in an inferior position to Jesus. That’s why verses 8 and 9 quote Psalm 45:6-7 and apply them to Jesus. Angels serve and worship; Jesus is served and worshipped.

Big Idea: Jesus is better than angels, so if you’d pay attention to the message of angels, you’d better pay attention to the message of Jesus.
I have a beef with people who say the Old Testament is boring.
Every time I start to read the Old Testament, I’m captured by the story all over again. In the first pages, you’ve got beauty, love, tragedy, judgement, murder, more judgment, a brand new start, grace, and God’s plan to rescue the world. And that’s just the first few pages! The first twelve chapters of Genesis explain so much about the world today, and they’re anything but boring.
But that’s just the start. You’ve got family dysfunction on a major scale, conflicts between world powers, tragic heroes, deliverance, grumbling, wars, repeating cycles of judgment, and more. The Old Testament is fascinating. It’s unrivalled in all literature, and it’s God’s word.
And you have angels. Lots and lots of angels.
Angels are part of God’s creation. We don’t know when they were created — perhaps the same time as the earth, maybe even before. They’re a higher order than humans, but much lower than God. They’re created beings. They’re not omnipresent. They can only be in one place at one time. They don’t know everything. But they’re still spectacular compared to us, which is why humans tend to freak out when they encounter an angel.
They’re spirit beings. We don’t know how many angels there are, but they’re innumerable. Revelation 5:11 talks about angels “numbering myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands.” There are good angels and bad angels, and they’re involved with us.
Angels appear to humans throughout Scripture. Angels play a big role in this world and in our lives.
Angels work in the destiny of nations for the good of God’s people. Good angels withstand Satan while the word of God is being preached to the king of Persia (Zech. 3:1). They work in the protection of the righteous and encamp about them that fear the Lord (Ps. 34:7 8), and they deliver God’s people from their enemies (2 Kgs. 6:15–17). Angels deliver Peter from prison and reassure Paul in the great storm at sea (Acts 12:7; 27:23). They are given charge to keep the righteous in all their ways, and are ministering spirits to those who are heirs of salvation (Ps. 91:11; Heb. 1:14). Angels represent individuals before the throne of God (Matt. 18:10; cf. Dan. 12:1), and if heavenly angels are meant in Rev. 2–3, then they are given specific assignments to congregations of the Church. (Edward P. Myers, Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible)
This is amazing stuff.
A few years ago, I attended a study group with Tim Mackie, one of the teachers at The Bible Project. The Bible Project was about to release its video series on spiritual beings, and Tim taught a session one night on the topic. We went back to our rooms and our eyes were bulging. We don’t think enough about the reality of the spiritual world, and the ways that angels and demons interact with what’s going on in the world and our lives. It’s amazing.
The Question
So I have a question for you. If an angel appeared to you, would you listen?
Here’s what we know. You’d be terrified if you realized it was an angel. We know that because it’s the pretty consistent reaction of everyone in the Bible who saw an angel and realized it.

Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, was initially afraid when he encountered the angel Gabriel in the temple (Luke 1:11-20).
The shepherds in the fields of Bethlehem were terrified when an angel appeared to them to announce the birth of Jesus (Luke 2:8-10).
The women who went to Jesus’ tomb after his crucifixion were frightened by the presence of an angel who told them that Jesus had risen (Matthew 28:2-7).
The guards at Jesus’ tomb also experienced fear when an angel appeared and rolled away the stone from the entrance (Matthew 28:3-4).
The apostle John was filled with fear when he saw a powerful angel in a vision on the island of Patmos (Revelation 1:17).
The prophet Daniel was overwhelmed with fear when he saw a heavenly being in a vision by the Tigris River (Daniel 10:5-9).

You’d be terrified, but would you listen to an angel sent by God?
I’d like to think so, but you can find examples of people who did and didn’t listen to angels in the Bible. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, had an angel visit him twice, and he listened both times (Matthew 1:20-24, Matthew 2:13-15). In Acts we read:
Now an angel of the Lord said to Philip, “Rise and go toward the south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” This is a desert place. And he rose and went. (Acts 8:26-27)
You can see examples of that in Scripture: an angel appears and communicates a message from God, and people respond in obedience.
But you also see the opposite. Angels told Lot to flee Sodom, but they lingered (Genesis 19:15-16). Sarah laughed at a message from angels, although she may not have realized they were angels at the time (Genesis 18:12).
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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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