Noll's book is the third volume in the series Turning South: Christian Scholars in an Age of World Christianity, edited for Baker Academic by Joel Carpenter. The point of each volume is to record and explore the work of Evangelical scholars on the historical and current growth of Christianity in the Global South. Until recently the Evangelical historians, Noll among them, had been working almost exclusively on Anglo-American evangelicalism. This is no longer the case.
If you are curious about how a Christian historian grows intellectually, this is your book. Noll is a leading figure in a wave of American historians of evangelicalism that gathered momentum over the past half century in Christian colleges and then broke upon the secular academy, and to this day shows no sign of receding. By the nineties Evangelical students were populating Catholic doctoral programs in historical theology and in several of those universities outnumbered the Catholics. They brimmed with curiosity about early and medieval theology and church, and not only about the Reformation and Anglo-American evangelicalism.
At first sight this book is concerned with the huge growth of Christianity in the Southern Hemisphere and Noll's own gradual focusing of his interest on that global expansion. Noll is a historian of himself as well as of evangelicalism, a man who is acutely conscious of his own consciousness. He tells us here the tale of the spread of the gospel and in doing so recounts the dynamic changes in his own intellectual horizon, and how and when and by what agents this change has taken place: he started out as a historian of early American Protestantism and has ended as a historian of the worldwide church.
Three things strike me in the narrative as a whole. First, there is the influence of a strengthening Christian faith on Noll's vocational choices (i.e., what is he going to do with his life?). Second, there is the profound influence of a cloud of Christian witnesses, academic and otherwise, on his scholarly and spiritual development. If you ever wanted an example of the communal nature of the Christian life, practical and intellectual, you will find it here. And finally, because of the influence Bernard Lonergan has had on the reviewer's own life and mind, I find Noll's narrative fascinating as a case study in Lonergan's generalized empirical method (Insight) and the “transcendental imperatives” (Method in Theology). To live is to change, and the academic changes by raising ever broader and deeper questions.
Chapter by chapter Noll takes us on a journey from his Baptist family and church, where he learned at the feet of missionaries who graced his family table and congregation, through his education (especially at Wheaton College, where he later taught history), his gradual drifting into the study of Protestantism, and his decision to join the Dutch Reformed Church and his marriage to a daughter of that highly theologically minded community. Luther confirmed his understanding of the Christian gospel. Noll finished his doctorate with a dissertation on early American Protestantism, taught at Wheaton for decades, wrote and published torrentially, and completed his academic career in an endowed chair at the University of Notre Dame previously held by George Marsden, who had been a significant influence on Noll throughout his academic career.
If you were to draw up a bibliography of important figures who moved Noll toward the study of global Christianity, from the Canadian George Rawlyk to Lamin Sanneh of Yale University, you would have the markers of the movement of Evangelicals from church history of an older sort to the history of the church in a postmodern world. Noll himself is a model of Christian intellect in that world.
