Mark Noll

We need to stop with this menace of mindless Christianity that has, um, clobbered us for the last century in evangelical Christianity.

Uh, Mark Noll wrote a book about 30 years ago called The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, and the scandal-

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm

... was that there isn't much of an evangelical mind, and that's kind of how we've allowed this stuff to creep in.

Here's a quotation from Mark Noll, most well-known evangelical historian.

He says, this may be surprising, "...the rise of monasticism was, after Christ's commission to his disciples, the most important and in many ways the most beneficial institutional event in the history of Christianity." For over a millennium, in the centuries between the reign of Constantine and the Protestant Reformation, almost everything in the church that approached the highest, noblest, and truest ideals of the gospel were done either by those who had chosen the monastic way of life or by those who had been inspired in their Christian life by the monks.

As Christians, we have a 2,000-year history filled with stories to tell and lessons to learn.

And in order to do that, he wants a uniform rule and a uniform obedience.

And so he sets in the process that the Benedictine rule would become the uniform rule for monastic orders.

How then should we evaluate the history and influence of monasticism and in particular as it was shaped by Benedict's rule? Here's a quotation from Mark Noll, most well-known evangelical historian.

He says, this may be surprising, the rise of monasticism was, after Christ's commission to his disciples, the most important and in many ways the most beneficial institutional event in the history of Christianity.

For over a millennium, in the centuries between the reign of Constantine and the Protestant Reformation, almost everything in the church that approached the highest, noblest, and truest ideals of the gospel were done either by those who had chosen the monastic way of life or by those who had been inspired in their Christian life by the monks.

Yes, we have to have faith leaders stepping into the proverbial Jordan, so to speak, saying, "Yes, we're leading our congregations into the booth because we're pastoring them into greener pastures." Yes, absolutely, and I don't think there's any greater time than now.

Uh, Mark Noll wrote a book called The Civil War as a Theological Crisis.

Hmm.

And what he did is he looked at, uh, writings and newspaper articles and correspondences from the times from various denominations on the issues of slavery.