18 Quotes by Mark A. Noll

The great truth of the Incarnation is that the Son of God became flesh and dwelt among us. In this foundational truth we may emphasize the nature of the Son of Man himself, or we may emphasize his taking on flesh and dwelling among us. The condemning scandal for evangelicals is that they have neglected this second emphasis and all that it implies about the possibility of thinking about this realm of flesh. Their redeeming scandal is that they have not yet forgotten the first.

Republicanism was easier to evolve than to define.

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

The Book that made the nation was destroying the nation.

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

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.

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

But in their defense of the supernatural, fundamentalists and their evangelical heirs resemble some cancer patients. In facing a drastic disease, they are willing to undertake a drastic remedy. The treatment of fundamentalism may be said to have succeeded; the patient survived. But at least for the life of the mind, what survived was a patient horribly disfigured by the cure itself.

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