Mark A. Noll

Summary: An analysis of how C. S. Lewis’s works were received in the United States, considering Catholic, secular, and Protestant/evangelical critics evaluating his work between 1935 and 1947.

Even before the widespread interest in C.S. Lewis due to the Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis was being read in both religious and secular circles in the United States from the mid-1930’s and through the 1940’s. In this latest in the Hansen Lectureship Series at the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton show more College, American historian Mark A. Noll offers three lectures that analyzed the critical reception and growing interest in Lewis’s works of scholarship, fiction, and theology. Successively, he explores the reception Lewis received among Catholics, in the secular and mainstream media, and among both mainline Protestants and evangelicals, who were late but eventually enthusiastic adopters.

It came as a delightful surprise that Catholics in the U.S. were among his earliest and most appreciative readers. In part, Noll believes that Lewis was a fresh, yet for the most part, orthodox voice that offered a friendly path out of a certain stagnant isolation, reflecting the undercurrent of change developing in the church. Responses ranged from the early and effusive praise of The Pilgrim’s Regress by Fr. Conway, CSP in Catholic World to Philip Donnelly’s criticism of Lewis’s account of “adoptive sonship” in Beyond Personality (later part of Mere Christianity). Other critics had concerns about his doctrine of the church and his ideas about natural law put forth in The Abolition of Man. The high watermark of criticism came from Charles Brady of Canisius College, who read everything Lewis wrote, understood him as well as anyone in this era, and wrote two glowing essays for America that are reprinted at the end of this work.

With regard to secular critics, Noll considers in succession Lewis’s scholarly and imaginative works, and finally his works of Christian exposition. Lewis drew general praise for both The Allegory of Love and for his Preface to Paradise Lost. A number affirmed his argument against E. M. W. Tillyard in The Personal Heresy that in criticism of a poet’s work, the focus should be on the subject matter of the poem and not the poet. Regarding the imaginative works, Noll describes the public as responding “ecstatically.” Noll highlight’s W.H. Auden’s review of The Great Divorce in The Saturday Review combining general praise with fine-grained critique. The widest range of critical opinion was reserved for his works of Christian exposition, from the long-searching response of Charles Hartshorne to a review in the New York Herald Tribune from a young Beloit College professor, Chad Walsh, who would quickly become know as a leading exponent of his work.

Apart from a patronizing review in The Christian Century, Protestants joined their secular counterparts in their warm reception of Lewis. Substantial interest among evangelicals in Lewis first came from conservative Presbyterians in the Westminster seminary circle as well as the first substantive criticism, particularly from a young Edmund Clowney. Wheaton’s Clyde Kilby represented a much more positive response to Lewis as did Wheaton student Elizabeth Howard (Eliot). Kilby’s work led to the donation of Lewis’s letters to Wheaton, forming the core of what would become the Wade Center collection. InterVarsity’s His Magazine also contributed to the growing awareness of Lewis in evangelical circles when it published a lengthy excerpt from The Case For Christianity.

Noll concludes the work in considering Lewis in today’s much more fragmented setting and what might be learned from Lewis’s greater concern for the state of his soul as a writer than the success of his work. The work also includes responses to each lecture. I found most interesting in these Kirk Farney’s discussion of two American contemporaries of Lewis who were also intelligent spokespersons for Christianity: Walter A. Maier of The Lutheran Hour and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen of The Catholic Hour. and the wide interest from people outside the church they enjoyed, as did Lewis. I can’t help wonder if there remains a space for such folk today. I’m thinking for example of the broad impact of the late Timothy Keller and the younger voices like Esau McCaulley and writers like Tish Harrison Warren.

Noll offers an excellent resource (aided by his wife) chronicling the early reviews of Lewis’s work, which I’ve only highlighted here. I’m struck that Catholics were early adopters and evangelicals relative latecomers. I’m impressed with the theological and scholarly sophistication of the writers and the elegant style of reviewers like Brady. How different things are in the BookTok era! This is a great resource for Lewis scholars and fans and a marvelous addition to the Hansen Lectureship series on the seven authors in the Wade Collection.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review. show less

There are a couple of paragraphs in this interesting book about how African-Americans interpreted the Bible and how American Jews did, but mostly it’s about how white Americans and Europeans, Protestant and Catholic, thought about the American Civil War, slavery, and race in terms of theological debates. Was Catholicism akin to slavery because of its adherence to the Pope, or was the individual interpretation of the Bible promoted by Protestantism the foundation for chaos and sectionalism? show more Could God’s intent be seen directly, as evangelical Christianity generally claimed, or only obscurely, as Lincoln suggested in the Gettysburg Address? Did the New Testament reject slavery, or enshrine it? The whole idea of not debating with a sacred text is a bit alien to me, but I was particularly interested in the idea that things that American Christians found troubling were distinct from the things that European Christians did. Most prominently, American Christians, pro and anti-slavery, took very seriously the question of whether the Bible supported slavery, while Europeans were much more likely to see American racial, hereditary slavery as easily distinguishable from Hebrew slavery and to focus on American racism. show less

Read this to prepare for the church history portion of my ordination trials (PCA). As a general survey, it was quite helpful. I found his assessment of 18th century evangelical and pietist movements especially interesting, considering most American evangelicals today assume they’ve been corrupted by Enlightenment values from without when really, as Noll demonstrates, evangelicalism has been an Enlightenment project from the start. Unfortunately, his evaluation of Christendom is too colored show more with anabaptist sympathies that he ends up leveling the same, cliched critique against Christendom as he does the various Reformation churches of the 16th century. Apparently very few Christians since Constantine have been able to resist the lure of earthly power. show less

I agree with jstamp26's assessment: Noll is quite right in arguing that evangelicals have abandoned all meaningful intellectual pursuits (save perhaps for those involving certain aspects of Biblical studies, like philology), but he is sorely mistaken in two aspects. First, the picture he paints of evangelicals of the past in either too naive or incomplete - if there has ever been a vigorous evangelical intellectual life, it existed in spite, not because of the faith of those who practised it show more and it all went to hell (quite literally, this Catholic feels compelled to add) with the advent of dispensationalism. Secondly, and most importantly, Noll calls for something that is quite impossible: sectarian science and scholarship. He defines 'evangelical life of the mind' as 'the effort to think like a Christian ... across the whole spectrum of modern learning, including economics and political science, literary criticism, and imaginative writing, historical inquiry and philosophical studies, linguistics and the history of science.' This shows an astonishing lack of understanding of what modern learning actually is and how scientists operate. It is impossible to imagine what, say, specifically Christian linguistics - let alone specifically evangelical linguistics - supposed to look like. Do we abandon the scientific method and use quotations from the Bible to support whatever our argument is? Noll doesn't say, but every time he brings up this issue, he cites the example of many Catholic, Lutheran or Orthodox scientists and scholars, always failing to be specific. In the end, it is obvious that he does not understand that any Catholic who becomes a top-rated scientist or a scholar is first and foremost a scientist and a scholar who just happens to be a Catholic. According to Noll, the problem with evangelicals is that "they neglected sober analysis of nature and human society" when in fact they purposefully ignored it believing, the literalists that they are, that the Bible has all the answers. How do you become a scholar when you believe the are no questions to be answered?
In short, 'The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind' is a wonderful history of evangelical anti-intellectualism, but Noll's failure to recognize that this is a feature, not a bug, makes it at times an infuriating read. show less