77 about respectability and tends to criticize those who hold to inerrancy as guilty of bibliolatry. Their “keen preoccupation with the doctrine of biblical inerrancy,” he argued, will have to be left behind so that “the life of the mind may have a chance.”11 The end result, according to Noll and Marsden, is that Christians find it hard to gain acceptance in the academy because they are seen as being anti-intellectual. Neither Marsden nor Noll deny the legitimacy of the Christian faith or its grounding in the Word of God, but their arguments result in a dichotomy between faith and the academic enterprise. This is particularly ironic given that both are considered leaders in the field in the area of the integration of faith and history. Marsden suggests that in order to gain a seat at the academic table, Christian historians ought to argue for their “interpretations on the same sorts of publicly accessible grounds that are widely accepted in the academy.”12 An example of this “publicly accessible” or technical history is found in Harry Stout’s book on George Whitfield titledThe Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism. Stout’s research led him to the conclusion that Whitfield’s success as an evangelist was largely due to his dramatic flair and his ability to appeal to an increasingly consumer-driven economy. His charisma as a speaker resulted in many people responding to his preaching. This interpretation is one that could have been espoused by a non-Christian historian as easily as it was by the Christian author who wrote it. For someone who does know the Lord Jesus Christ, however, and understands the conversion process, it seems as though room needs to be left for the possibility that the Holy Spirit actually did work in the First Great Awakening, convicted the hearts of people of their sin, and provided the faith for them to come to Christ. Now, it would be unfair to suggest that Stout leaves no room for the supernatural, but his presentation of Whitefield as a self-serving dramatist did elicit quite a bit of concern from Christian readers that he had given a very natural or secular explanation of the Great Awakening. In fact, it would not be too much of a stretch to read his thesis as suggesting that the socalled “conversions” of the First Great Awakening were little more than emotional responses to a charismatic speaker. So, the works of Marshall and Manuel and of Stout represent two examples of “Christian” approaches to history. Both examples represent 11 Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1994, 243–44. 12 George M. Marsden, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship. Oxford University Press, 1997, 52.
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