Mark A. Noll - From Every Tribe and Nation: A Historians Discovery of the Global Christian Story

2014 by Mark A. Noll

Published by Baker Academic

a division of Baker Publishing Group

P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

www . bakeracademic . com

Ebook edition created 2014

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 is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

ISBN 978-1-4412-4642-4

Unless indicated otherwise, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989, by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations labeled NIV are from the Holy Bible, New International Version. NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com

Some material in chapter 3 is taken from the following: Remembering Arthur F. Holmes (19242011) by Mark Noll, EerdWord (blog), October 17, 2011, reprinted by permission of the William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, all rights reserved; Opening a Wardrobe: Clyde Kilby (19021986) by Mark Noll, Reformed Journal , December 1986, reprinted by permission of the William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, all rights reserved; David Wells: The Stability of Grace by Mark Noll, reprinted with permission in a modified version from the February 714, 1990, issue of the Christian Century . Copyright 1990 by the Christian Century .

Some material in chapter 5 is taken from Deep and Wide: How My Mind Has Changed by Mark Noll, reprinted with permission in a modified version from the June 1, 2010, issue of the Christian Century . Copyright 2010 by the Christian Century .

Material in chapter 10 is adapted from Mark Noll, The Potential of Missiology for the Crises of History, in History and the Christian Historian , ed. Ronald Wells. Reprinted by permission of the William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Mark Noll invites us to join him on the intellectual and spiritual journey that led him to realize that Christianity from its origin onward must be understood and evaluated as both cross-cultural and global. Noll points out significant signposts along the way that encouraged him to reconsider the methodologies he employed as a historian of Christianity and to embrace an approach that combines serious historical scholarship with greater attention to broad and local contexts, empathetic interpretation, thoughtful criticism, and history as theology. As an autobiographical memoir, this engaging book gives insight into the mind of an important scholar today, but it also summons historians and scholars in other fields to assess the approaches they take in the study of Christianity.

Karen Westerfield Tucker , Boston University

Mark Noll provides a rare glimpse into the mind and heart of a historian as he reflects on the intertwining of his own professional and personal story with the story of world Christianity. The book leaves us hungry to know moremore about how the study of history can enrich our own spiritual journeys, more about the rich and unfolding story of a changing scholarly and pedagogical orientation toward world Christianity, and more about the power of the gospel as the incarnate Word both finds itself at home in and at the same time transcends the particularities of every culture of the globe. This book has the potential to kindle many productive conversations among friends and colleagues in both the church and the academy!

Shirley A. Mullen , president, Houghton College

Mark Nolls story of how he came to engage world Christianity is powerful and instructiveand a delight to read. It should be required reading for seminarians and widely discussed in churches interested in the global contours of the Christian faith. Here we witness how thinking changed, but much morehow a life was reordered and transformed.

Nathan O. Hatch , president, Wake Forest University

In Memoriam
Francis and Evelyn Noll
Donald L. Andersen

Contents

Cover

Series Page

Title Page

Copyright Page

Endorsements

Dedication

Introduction

1. Cedar Rapids

2. Rescued by the Reformation

3. First Teachers

4. Settling In

5. Moving Out I

6. Looking North: A Guide

7. Looking North: Insight

8. Moving Out II

9. Moving Out III

10. Missiology Helping History

11. Courses and Classrooms

12. Experts

13. By the Numbers

14. Looking South: A Guide

15. Looking South: Academic Insights

17. Explorations with Pen in Hand

18. Notre Dame

19. The Story So Far

Appendix: Checklist of Publications on World Christian Themes

Index

Notes

Back Cover

1
Cedar Rapids

A t Calvary Baptist Church in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where I grew up, missionaries were conspicuousboth in the flesh and as idealized exemplars of what the Christian life should be. Not only did we stage an annual weeklong missionary conference, with nightly meetings addressed by Christian workers from around the globe who spoke about and illustrated (with slide projectors and curios) their tasks in the Philippines, Brazil, Argentina, India, Pakistan, the Ivory Coast, what was then called the Belgian Congo, Alaska, and more. But other missionaries also regularly passed through, to be introduced on Sunday morning, or more commonly to address the congregation on Sunday evening or at the churchs midweek prayer meeting. My parents, Francis and Evelyn Noll, were active in all phases of life at Calvary Baptist and so did their full share of hosting, entertaining, and squiring the visiting missionaries. In later life, long after I had left the family nest, my parents took several tours to missionary sites where on the ground in Africa, Pakistan, the Philippines, and perhaps elsewhere, they reconnected with missionaries who had come through Cedar Rapids.

During the 1950s and early 1960s I was not in a great position to appreciate the mission-mindedness of our local church. But much later, a little bit of family history played its part in clearing up my vision. My father, a navy pilot in the Second World War, had flown eighty-nine missions off his carrier to support the movement of US troops westward across the Pacific. More than three decades after that serviceand because contact with missionaries had helped redirect his lifeone of these tours took my father to sites in the Philippines that he had once flown over in his Grumman TBF Avenger. I was greatly struck with what the passage of time had brought about and keen to learn more about his wartime experiences, but he seemed more impressed by the chance to meet Filipino believers and view missionary life up close.

In the late 1980s, when I began to realize how important the world as a whole actually was for the history of Christianity, I felt that these new insights had to overcome what I had experienced of missionaries when growing up. At that later time I was, for example, much impressed with books that explained the irreversibility of translationonce missionaries and their native coworkers had translated the Bible, Scripture no longer belonged to the missionaries but was put to use for purposes determined by those who spoke the target language. Thus, the missionary translators might want new converts to concentrate on the apostle Pauls account of the substitutionary atonement, but the converts themselves might view the struggle between Elijah and the prophets of Baal, or the genealogy of Matthew 1, as the key to the whole biblical story. The process of translation, my new reading revealed, was far from the uncomplicated task of bringing the good news that I remembered the missionaries describe.