Beeson Podcast, Episode #555 Dr. Mark Noll June 29, 2021 >>Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University. Now your hosts, Doug Sweeney and Kristen Padilla. >>Doug Sweeney: Welcome to the Beeson Podcast. I’m Doug Sweeney, co-host of the Beeson Podcast. We hope you are enjoying this journey back into our podcast archives. We’re looking forward to being back with you with fresh content the first week in August. Until then, we continue our greatest hit series. This week playing an episode featuring my friend and long time mentor, Mark Noll. he was on the show in 2015, Episode 224, talking to our former host, Dr. Timothy George about his memoir, “From Every Tribe and Nation: A Historian’s Discovery of the Global Christian Story.” Which released in 2014. We think you will enjoy hearing about his personal journey into academia, his scholarship and his heart for God’s mission in the world. Let’s listen now, to Mark Noll on this week’s episode of the Beeson Podcast. >>Timothy George: Welcome to today’s Beeson Podcast. I have the honor today of speaking to Dr. Mark Noll. He is the Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. And a long time friend of mine. Welcome to the Beeson Podcast, Mark. >>Mark Noll: Timothy, thank you, it’s good to be with you. >>Timothy George: Now, we could talk about so many things, and we may end up doing so, but I particularly wanted to focus on your recent book, which is a kind of memoir, “From Every Tribe and Nation: A Historian’s Discovery of the Global Christian Story.” So, tell us a little bit about why a historian would write a memoir and why you would write this one. >>Mark Noll: Well, it’s actually a simple story and a complicated story at the same time. The simple side of the story is that when you have friends, like Joel Carpenter, who is the editor of the series from Baker Books, and Robert Hosak, a long time friend who is an editor of Baker Books, and they come to you and twist your arm and say you have to take part - you take part. That’s the simple side. The complicated side is the subject matter. The Christian faith today is spread around the world in a way that it has never taken place before. I was trained. You, I think, were trained in the history of Christianity and what we call church history that was primarily western history for westerners. And that history obviously remains very important. But the situation in the world today is way more active Christians in the continent of Africa than in North America, for example. Perhaps as many people Sunday by Sunday in church in the Communist People’s Republic of China as in all of so-called Christian Europe. So, it’s a very different situation. And the book is an explanation for how, as a historian, trying to be responsible to the students I began to integrate a little bit and then tried to integrate more of the world Christian story in the courses that I taught. >>Timothy George: Of course, some of your writing has touched on this, your book, “The New Shape of World Christianity” already shows, I think, an awareness that this is a changing reality for us to be aware of. >>Mark Noll: That’s right. That book and the book of sketches that my friend, Carol [inaudible 00:03:52], and I did on Christian believers not from the western world came directly out of these teaching obligations, teaching experiences that opened up to me the door for fascinating, complicated, chaotic sometimes but fascinating recent world history of Christianity. >>Timothy George: In this book you talk a little bit about some of your early church and family background. You grew up in a Christian family and a very missions centered family and church. But in spite of this, why do you think your early awareness was primarily western rather than global – even though there was a strong emphasis on missions? >>Mark Noll: Yeah, that probably requires a more complicated answer than I can give shortly, but certainly the mission emphasis of the Calvary Baptist Church in Cedar Rapids, Iowa must have had a long term effect. My wife helped me know where to start the book because she said when she visited our home the first time when we were dating she saw this big map on the wall of our home with little pins in it and she wondered what it was. Of course it was my parents keeping track of their missionary friends around the world. What I did not experience, as a person growing up, it may have been there, it may be my fault, was consideration of Christian faith as a cultural, social, and intellectual, as well as a religious movement. I’m sure that if I’d asked the right kind of questions to some of the mostly Baptist missionaries that came through, conservative Baptist missionaries, they could have responded to questions having to do with society, culture, politics, the intellectual life – but the focus in our church was, at least on the surface, was about the simple ... studying the gospel, church formation, and almost nothing else. I realize now much more clearly that those are absolutely foundational elements. But I was, I think, more interested in the cultural and the political, historical side of Christianity and that I didn’t find probably again for my fault, and it was maybe 25 years later that I realized that some of these things had actually come together. >>Timothy George: Well, you know, there is a whole, really, a body of literature I think we could say going back to the ‘70s and ‘80s probably. I’m thinking about people like Andrew Walls, for example, whom you encountered I believe when you were at Wheaton and had a great impact on you. Say a little bit about Andy Walls and kind of what his impact has been. >>Mark Noll: Andrew Walls was actually recruited to come to Wheaton College for academic programs having mostly to do with western Christianity. But when he came, I think at three different occasions, he presented marvelous essays ... Some off the cuff I think, but marvelous, well considered essays on how dramatically world Christianity had changed. And then particularly on the great impact that evangelical movements in the west had had in pushing westerners toward the rest of the world. And then in some cases planting the seed of Christianity in parts of the world that had not known about the Christian faith. Andrew Walls, in my view, is the most stimulating historian/theologian whose writings I have ever read. Because he ties his vast and encyclopedic knowledge of missionary history, the history of Christianity outside the western world, to a very secure basis and an understanding of the incarnation of Christ as an act of translation from infinity to temporality, from divine perfection to worldly difficulties, from God to humanity. And on that basis, then, Walls makes the striking case that this history of Christianity must be a history of translation, of transmission of the gospel, because that’s where Christianity begins. >>Timothy George: In a way the very core doctrine of the incarnation seems to cry out for that interpretation, doesn’t it? >>Mark Noll: It does. Certainly. >>Timothy George: I was just going to say, John 1:14,”The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” Isn’t that the prime example of translation? >>Mark Noll: Indeed it is. But I do think it took the circumstances of the 20th century to jar people into seeing the implications of that text and others exactly, as you’ve just stated it. This, I don’t think, should be a matter of self flagellation because we see in scripture and we certainly see in the history of Christianity many times when it takes new circumstances to send people back to scriptures with new questions and then to receive new insights on the scriptures. >>Timothy George: Let me bring up another figure whom I think you know and who has been here at Beeson: Lamin Sanneh, from Yale. Also somewhat maybe in the train of Andrew Walls scholarship, emphasized translation. Talk about Lamin Sanneh and how his work has interfaced with your own? >>Mark Noll: I’ve encountered Lamin’s book on translation shortly after hearing Andrew walls and may in fact been put onto Lamin Sanneh’s work by Andrew Walls. I find Lamin an immensely important figure. He is a black African who stands up against those who caricaturize Christian missionary work as exclusively imperialist and colonizing. Lamin is a good historian and he knows that there was a great deal of wayward imperialism in much of the western missionary movement, but he also is aware that for people in his native situation they were able, actually, to discriminate between what was useful and what was not useful that came from outside. Whether the outside was Christian, or in his case also Muslim. His story, which is now a very fine autobiographical account, his story of growing up a Muslim, learning the Koran in Arabic, coming into contact with Christian Africans and Christian missionaries, and then going on to a lifetime of very fruitful study – is a remarkable story. And one that I’ve very much enjoyed reading about and then on occasions I’ve heard him lecture. It’s also significant, I think, that he has now a position in the history department and the divinity school at Yale University that gives publicity to the potential for serious study of worldwide Christian faith. >>Timothy George: Yeah, he brings together this deep ... You mentioned he’s an historian and a well trained one. But also very deeply a person of faith. These don’t seem to be ... I know there’s tension, but they don’t seem to be colliding in his own presentation of his material. They come together as a holistic unit. >>Mark Noll: Lamin is, I think, descendant from a family of African chieftains or near chieftains and I think has the self confidence to say what he wants to say when he wants to say it. (laughs) And what he says is very much along the lines as you’ve just described. >>Timothy George: Mark, tell us about some of your forays particularly travel. We live, we say, in a global village when travel is easy despite the great obstacles we face in terms of the age of terror in which we live, but you traveled yourself into eastern Europe, into Romania when it was under the power of the tyrant Ceaușescu. Say a little bit about those travels and how that may have emboldened your own vision? >>Mark Noll: I was fortunate at Wheaton College to be helped and influenced by a track coach, Donald Church, who encouraged Wheaton College faculty to take trips, to move outside the box. Don was not an aspiring intellectual but he probably had a more positive impact on anyone at Wheaton alongside maybe the philosopher, Arthur Holmes, as anyone during my stay. He had organized trips of Wheaton faculty to Baptist churches in the north of Romania that carried out more or less underground theological education for many years. I took part in 1989, the last summer of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s rule in Romania, going with Jerry and Claudia [inaudible 00:12:19] from Wheaton who were wonderful traveling companions. It was a real revelation to try to give a very brief, abbreviated world history of Christianity in a two week period. Lectures that were being translated into Romanian. But whatever the students there got, we as visitors got much more. Because we got to see an expression of the Christian faith with integrity in a situation with real difficulty and not with a whole lot of connections to the western world. The Romanian Baptists really were much more in dialogue with, of course, Communism, but then also with the Orthodox Church of Romania. The Greek Orthodox Church that was also strong in that area. So, it was an eye opening experience and one of the things I was glad to have had personal opportunity to experience when eventually I started teaching these courses. >>Timothy George: I had an experience myself in Romania around that same era. I’ll never forget visiting there. I was a guest of the Baptist Churches but they arranged to have a trial log on radio Transylvania. I represented the Protestant world. There was an Orthodox and a Greek Catholic. And we were all three talking about these things. Back in an era where that was not so popular, maybe as it’s become. But that leads me to ask you about another area of your writing and your interests that I think has connection to this whole question of the global Christian story. And that is your interest in the Evangelical/Catholic interaction. A few years ago, you and Carolyn Eastrom wrote this book, “Is The Reformation Over?: An Evangelical Assessment of Contemporary Roman Catholicism.” If you don’t mind, talk a little bit about your interest in this whole interface that continues, I think, to be really important for the shaping of the future of the Christian movement. >>Mark Noll: Certainly. My interest, of course, was sparked as a historian of Protestantism with the Reformation. And as I try to explain in the memoir it was my discovery of Martin Luther’s interpretation of the Christian gospel and then other figures from the 16th century Protestant Reformation that did a great deal to stabilize my own faith as a young adult. So, I’ve always been interested in the Reformation. I was privileged to teach at Wheaton College for a number of years, the general course in the Reformation. More recently, however, and as a product I think of the Second Vatican Council, which I see as one of the two or three greatest events in Christian history of our time, there have been more opportunities for face to face dialogue, face to face learning, face to face experience between Catholics and Evangelical Protestants. Here at Notre Dame it’s a real treat to have firsthand contact with people like Father Paul Kollman who is an expert on East African Catholic Missions. We’ve actually taught a course together, as I try to explain the book. The long history of Catholic evangelization is quite different in many ways from the history of Protestant evangelization. But both have a central place for Christ. Both have a central place for the transformation of life under the call of the gospel. So, it’s been, I think, very helpful for my own Protestant convictions to learn more about Catholics and Catholic traditions. There are opportunities to be self critical. There’s also opportunities gently to point out ways in which Catholics maybe could learn from Evangelicals. One of those that I keep thinking about is the priesthood of all believers, which Catholics now with the Second Vatican Council have moved closer to in doctrine. But not necessarily in practice. Of course, we Protestants sometimes carry the priesthood of all believers to excess and create a bunch of little churches of our own. But I’m convinced that the denominations need each other because together with their best feet forward we come close to what the fullness of the gospel actually means. >>Timothy George: You know, the whole question of the spread of Christianity into the world, Evangelicals and Catholics in a way are at the forefront, as you say, doing evangelization perhaps in different traditions, but with a focus, when it’s at its best anyway, on Jesus Christ and on the gospel of salvation through faith in him. And there does seem to be a pattern here. I remember being at the Synod of Rome, the synod for the new evangelization in Rome in 2012. And it was particularly the bishops and the cardinals from Africa and Latin America who seemed to resonate most fully with a kind of evangelistic effort and zeal. The Pope was trying to push, at the time it was Benedict the XVI, but not with entire acceptance by the curia. Now, of course, we have another Pope, a new pope, Francis whose from that world. And it does seem to be that an opportunity for cooperation, collaboration, working together presents itself in an almost unique way in the history of the Church. >>Mark Noll: Yes. Timothy, I think, as you know, having made presentations in Rome recently, when the current Pope was selected there was not a universal, but a substantial applause from Evangelicals in Argentina who prayed with him, studied the scriptures with him, tried to be active in the right sort of way on social responsibilities in Argentina, and that really is an historical first. The last time that Protestants cheered when a Pope was elected was never. (laughs) I think many Evangelicals have come to see the virtues in John Paul II and Benedict the XVI, and actually in some of the earlier Popes as well. But the light that came from a few parts of the Evangelical world at the inauguration of Pope Francis really is a unique occurrence. >>Timothy George: You spoke a moment ago about how the awareness and study of the wider Church has deepened in some ways your own convictions as a Protestant Christian. Why is that the case? Why haven’t you become a Catholic? As much as you’re open and love Catholics, and you love the history of the Church, and you see the benefits. Why are you still a Protestant? >>Mark Noll: I think the main reason is a sense of calling. My life has been in Protestant circles. I do see at Notre Dame some of the very best aspects of Catholicism, which if you compare them to the worst aspects of Evangelical Christianity you’d wonder why anybody stayed Evangelical. But by the same token, as a historian and as an observer of the world I realize that the Catholic Church has many serious problems. They’re oftentimes different problems than we Evangelicals have. My own sense is that there are real strengths in the Evangelical tradition like [inaudible 00:19:37] in the priesthood of believers, like the formulation of justification by faith, by grace through faith, like the missiological history of the last couple of centuries is exemplified in someone like Andrew Walls, and I would add people like Dana Robert, a wonderful also contemporary historian of world Christianity. It does seem to me that we’re at a place where believing Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox can cooperate with each other and bring into common understanding and hopefully common practice insights and strengths from our various traditions. Some people will, maybe quite properly, move from one tradition to another. But when the Lord has placed you in a certain tradition and given you opportunities to see it at its best and at its worst, my sense is that without extreme changes of circumstances it’s simply good to stay where you are. >>Timothy George: One more question, Mark. This is slightly different, but you are a historian of American Religious History. You have a PhD from Vanderbilt to prove it. And many, many books and writings that have helped us all understand. How has your study of global Christianity improved or at least informed your work as specifically a historian of American religious history? >>Mark Noll: I do try to explain in the book that the steps that went in that direction came first by looking at Canadian history of Christianity and realizing that this story is very similar to the US in many ways, but strikingly different. Canadians, for example, just don’t get hung up over the separation of Church and State. That’s a minor matter, but having studied that I was able to bring some very new perspectives on American religious history where separation of Church and State is a very big deal. I think more importantly in world Christianity I’m challenged, for example, by the spread of Pentecostalism. I’m not a Pentecostal. My understanding of the Holy Spirit is pretty quiet, pretty tame, pretty reserved. But I see that throughout the world those who have a much more active sense of the Holy Spirit’s presence have proclaimed the gospel, have done good works in Christ’s name. Even in more recent years approached structural, social activity in a very positive way. So, I don’t necessarily change my opinions or beliefs, convictions, and examining the huge variety of Christian faith that exists in the world. But I do think I’ve come to appreciate different varieties, different traditions that aren’t my own more. And once that’s done overseas it’s also easier to do that at home as well. I hope I have a more capacious and more charitable, a calmer approach to the study of Christianity in North America from learning a little bit about Christianity around the world. >>Timothy George: My guest today on the Beeson Podcast has been Dr. Mark Noll. He is the Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. We’ve been talking about his recent book, his memoir, titled, “From Every Tribe and Nation: A Historian’s Discovery of the Global Christian Story.” Mark, thank you for this wonderful conversation and for all the things you do to advance the cause of Christ and scholarship in our time. >>Mark Noll: Well, you’re most welcome, Timothy. It’s a privilege to be on the program with you. >>Kristen Padilla: You’ve been listening to the Beeson podcast. Our theme music is written and performed by Advent Birmingham of the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham, Alabama. Our engineer is Rob Willis. Our announcer is Mike Pasquarello. Our co-hosts are Doug Sweeney and, myself, Kristen Padilla. Please subscribe to the Beeson podcast at www.BeesonDivinity.com/podcast or on iTunes.