Mark Noll Quotes

#1. 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

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

Mark A. Noll

#3. Early America does not deserve to be considered uniquely, distinctly or even predominantly Christian ... There is no lost Golden Age to which American Christians may return.

Mark Noll

#4. In order for peace to reign, one must speak the truth, and that is why I have spoken of a political abduction, ... Far from my own country, but in deep communion with all Haitians, including Haitians abroad, I continue to launch an appeal for peaceful resistance.

Jean-Bertrand Aristide

#5. He gives me good advice ... People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves.

Oscar Wilde

#6. Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial? Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever? What agreement has the temple of God with idols?

Anonymous

#7. By silencing the mind, we can experience real peace. As long as various kinds of thoughts agitate the brain, we don't experience 100 percent peace.

Henepola Gunaratana

#8. 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

#9. 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

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

Mark A. Noll

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

Mark A. Noll

#12. 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

#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. 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

#15. 90% of everything is crap.

Theodore Sturgeon

#16. 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

#17. In 1963 ... The Vatican condemned Dr. No as a 'dangerous mixture of violence, vulgarity, sadism and sex.' Ka-ching!

Manohla Dargis

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. Come in! come in !' he sobbed.
'Cathy, do come. Oh do -once more! Oh! my heart's darling! hear me this time - Catherine, at last!

Emily Bronte

#23. There is nothing in the universe but matter.

Ken Wilber

#24. 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

#25. What happens when we get back? I don't know. I guess we try and forget. I don't want to forget.

Suzanne Collins

#26. 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

#27. I have never collected an object or figure from Africa or Oceania because of anything curious about it or because of its utility or historic interest. Everything has been chosen entirely because of its aesthetic significance; its form, feeling, structure, and plastic values.

Frank Crowninshield

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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