Mark A. Noll - The Future of Christian Learning: An Evangelical and Catholic Dialogue

The Future
of Christian Learning

The Future of Christian Learning

An Evangelical
and Catholic Dialogue

Mark A. Noll and
James Turner

Thomas Albert Howard, editor

2008 by Thomas Albert Howard

Published by Brazos Press
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.brazospress.com

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meansfor example, electronic, photocopy, recordingwithout the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Noll, Mark A., 1946
The future of Christian learning : an Evangelical and Catholic dialogue / Mark A. Noll and James Turner ; Thomas Albert Howard, editor.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-58743-213-2 (pbk.)
1. Learning and scholarshipReligious aspectsChristianity. 2. Evangelicalism RelationsCatholic Church. 3. Catholic ChurchRelationsEvangelicalism. I. Turner, James, 1946 II. Howard, Thomas A. (Thomas Albert), 1967 III. Title.
BR115.L32N65 2008
280'.042dc22
2007046986

Contents

Thomas Albert Howard

Mark A. Noll

James Turner

James Turner

Mark A. Noll

I
Introduction

By Thomas Albert Howard

T he present volume grew out of a dialogue held on the campus of Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts, on September 25, 2006. That such a dialogue on such a topic between a leading American evangelical scholar and a leading American Catholic scholar would take place at an evangelical college in the heart of New England reflects changes that have been and remain afoot.

Permit a brief reflection on place and history.

Despite the association today of Boston with things Irish and Catholic, New England, it should be remembered, was an inhospitable place for Roman Catholicism to put down roots. Even as it did, the region witnessed more than its share of Catholic-Protestant tensions. Like much else in American history, it perhaps all started in 1620 with the Mayflower, when William Brewster lugged across the Atlantic an English translation of the Venetian historian Paulo Sarpis venomous attack on the Council of Trent and the institution of the papacy.

Subsequent generations of Puritans, both in the Old World and in the New, raised denunciations of Popery into an art form. A glance at Harvards book index from the seventeenth and eighteenth century reveals titles such as The Papists detected, and the Jesuits subtill practises to ruin and subvert the nation, discovered and laid open (1678); Popery: the grand apostasie (1680); and Papists no Catholicks, and popery no Christianity (1685). For New England children, Break the Popes Neck was a popular fireside game, while the New England Primer (where the young learned their ABCs and rudimentary moral lessons) reminded its impressionable readers to Abhor that arrant whore of Rome, / and all her blasphemies.

When significant numbers of Catholic immigrants actually arrived in New England in the nineteenth century, things got more complicated and volatile; anti-Catholic invective adjusted its rhetoric accordingly. For at this time in the new nations history, not only did Catholics represent an abiding affront to true Christianity but their hierarchical organization and ties to Rome made them an enemy from within, a threat to republican values such as liberty, democracy, and independent thought. Apostate Christians, Catholics were also sorry Americans. For a period in the 1850s the virulently anti-Catholic Know-Nothing Party actually controlled the Massachusetts state legislature, which held its sessions in a city where a Protestant mob had torched an Ursuline monastery in 1834. Boston was also the site of the so-called Eliot School Rebellion, a tense stand-off between Catholics and public school officials over the compulsory daily reading of the (Protestant King James) Bible.

When Europes unwashed masses arrived in even greater numbers in the late nineteenth century, Protestants felt their longstanding proprietary stake in the region truly under siege. The Baptist minister Adoniram Judson Gordon (183695), the founder of what is now Gordon College and a man of considerable piety and virtue, was not untouched by powerful anti-immigrant currents of nativism and anti-Catholicism. Labeling the papacy a monster of blasphemy, Gordon also worried that the evil hand of the Jesuits would be felt upon the throat of our Republic if something were not done to stem Catholic immigration.

But if American Protestants of various stripes worried about superstitious masses and scheming priests infiltrating the country, Catholics on both sides of the Atlantic had long expressed puzzlement and contempt at the revivalist, populist forms of Protestantism that appeared to thrive in the context of American freedoms, frontier expansion, and the new lands capitalist ethos. For the English Catholic Hilaire Belloc, the American political experiment in general and the revivalist enthusiasms of American Protestants in particular tended to create a spiritual condition peculiar to that Continent, which produced [a] quite unique experiment in the religious field. The strictly voluntary nature of religion in America, Frenchman Achille Murat wrote, leads to a thousand and one sects which divide the people of the United States. Merely to enumerate them would be impossible, for they... evince nothing stable but their instability. While the neo-Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain had much positive to say about America, he too worried that sectarianism, biblical literalism, and unreflective cultural accommodation might undermine serious Christian intellectual life there. Such conditions can develop a cast of mind which, in the intellectual field, would mean a horror of any tradition, the denial of any lasting and supra-temporal value.

But that was then... If the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century was marked by a skeptical stand-off between American Catholic and evangelical Christians, nourished by bitter memories and entrenched habits of thought, recent decades have witnessed a warming of relations and indeed some points of truly momentous spiritual and intellectual conciliation. Elsewhere, Mark Noll has argued that a minor revolution in improved Catholic-evangelical relations has occurred since the late 1950s. One should not exaggerate the extent of the thaw, and here is not the place to narrate reasons for its occurrence. Still, the essays and responses that follow might be helpfully viewed in light of at least a few developments.

The significance of the Second Vatican Council (196265) and the historic papacy of John Paul II cannot be overstated. The Councils decrees on religious freedom (Dignitatis Humanae) and ecumenism (Unitatis Redintegratio), in particular, have helped make possible what past generations deemed unthinkable. The former decree, in my view, amounts to a forceful, theologically adroit embrace of the very principles of religious freedom that have long contributed to evangelicalisms flourishing in this country, while the latter boldly proclaims that both sides were to blame for the breach of the sixteenth century and that greater cooperation and dialogue with separated brethren is essential. The Council elaborated: We must come to understand the outlook of our separated brethren. Study is absolutely required for this, and should be pursued with fidelity to truth and in a spirit of good will.... Of great value for this purpose are meetings between the two sides, especially for discussion of theological problems, where each can deal with the other on an equal footing. The current volume might even be understood as a modest efforton the topic of Christian higher educationto give concrete expression to the Councils sentiment.