Mark A. Noll

Editor's Note: The following is a book excerpt from the new edited volume: From the Outrageous to the Scandalous: Re-imagining Christian Thinking and Scholarship in an Age of Tribalism and Ideological Resentment, eds. Robert H. Woods Jr. and Mark Allan Steiner. The assignment that I’ve been given is to attempt an assessment, now more than a…

Almost forty years ago Alvin Plantinga’s memorable “Advice to Christian Philosophers” set out a three-fold challenge to encourage members of his own academic tribe, but also “Christian intellectuals generally.” First, “to display . . . more independence of the rest of the philosophical world”; second, to “display more integrity in the sense of integral wholeness”;…