Mark A. Noll Quotes

#1. Evangelicals have been distinctive in featuring the crisis conversion. But what is essential to Christianity is the whole life committed to God, from the beginning of faith until death.

Mark A. Noll

#2. An older, Puritan approach to Scripture tended to prevail in the American South, where the Bible was regarded as a set of definite, positive laws

Mark A. Noll

#3. It was no coincidence that the biblical defense of slavery remained strongest in the United States, a place where democratic, antitraditional, and individualistic religion was also strongest.

Mark A. Noll

#4. Thompson's message was straightforward: if God through divine revelation so clearly sanctioned slavery, and even the trade in "strangers," how could genuine Christians attack modern slavery, or even the slave trade, as an evil?

Mark A. Noll

#5. To see in the past that very godly people were able to maintain bizarre interpretations of Scripture should be a caution for us all.

Mark A. Noll

#6. The author finds any freaking, and remarkably objective, way to estimate religion's influence on American society before the Civil War. The population closely aligned with evangelical sympathies was three or four times the size of the voting population in 1860

Mark A. Noll

#7. Cultivating the mind was absolutely essential, Luther held, because people needed to understand both the word of Scripture and the nature of the world in which the word would take root.

Mark A. Noll

#8. Smith, for example, claimed that if Americans defended slavery on the basis of the Old Testament, they should also defend practices like polygamy and the complete annihilation of defeated armies that are also prescribed in the Old Testament

Mark A. Noll

#9. The Book that made the nation was destroying the nation; the nation that had taken to the Book was rescued not by the Book but by the force of arms.

Mark A. Noll

#10. The crisis created by an inability to distinguish the Bible on race from the Bible on slavery meant that when the Civil War was over and slavery was abolished, systemic racism continued unchecked as the great moral anomaly in a supposedly Christian America.

Mark A. Noll

#11. To put it most simply, the evangelical ethos is activistic, populist, pragmatic, and utilitarian. It allows little space for broader or deeper intellectual effort because it is dominated by the urgencies of the moment.

Mark A. Noll

#12. I was brought up in a Christian environment where, because God had to be given pre-eminence, nothing else was allowed to be important. I have broken through to the position that because God exists, everything has significance.360

Mark A. Noll

#13. Since the dawn of time, warring combatants have regularly reached for what support they could find to nerve their own side for battle.

Mark A. Noll

#14. Dogmatic kind of biblical literalism that gained increasing strength among evangelicals toward the end of the nineteenth century was reduced space for academic debate, intellectual experimentation, and nuanced discrimination between shades of opinion.

Mark A. Noll

#15. The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.

Mark A. Noll

#16. Americans claimed to be following a higher law, even when this higher law only turned out to be a personal preference.

Mark A. Noll

#17. In i86o the income of the nation's churches and religious voluntary societies came quite close to matching the total receipts of the federal government. Today the ratio of annual federal income to annual religion-related giving is about twenty-five to one.

Mark A. Noll

#18. Evangelicals do not, characteristically, look to the intellectual life as an arena in which to glorify God because, at least in America, our history has been pragmatic, populist, charismatic, and technological more than intellectual.

Mark A. Noll

#19. Republicanism was easier to evolve than to define.

Mark A. Noll