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  "publishedAt": "2000-01-01T00:00:00.000Z",
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  "textContent": "Sugimoto - Nation as University - JCRT 2.1 \n\nNation as University; or the School We Never Leave\n\na review of _The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind_, by Mark Noll (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996); $15.00.\n\nMike Sugimoto  \nUniversity of Puget Sound\n\n  \n\nA  recent cover article in the _Atlantic Monthly_  and numerous other articles published over the past several years dealing with the status of religious (specifically, evangelical) scholarship attest to the ongoing sensitivity of the nerve struck, perhaps most pointedly, by the 1994 publication of American historian Mark Noll's _The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind_. However, the questions that remain largely unasked concern the historical development and socio-political function of the modern university as an institution within the nation-state; that is, what needs further analysis is the connection between the formation of knowledge ' its institutional form, its theoretical content ' and the role that larger social agendas of the nation-state play in determining the legitimation of knowledge in the modern world.\n\n      \n\n       \n\n       \n\n       \n\n       \n\n  \n\nNotes\n\n  \n\n> Mike Sugimoto is an assistant professor of Japanese literature and culture at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, WA. He did his doctoral research in modern Japanese literature, aesthetics, and literary theory at Cornell University, focussing upon the relationship between Japanese nationalism and modernist poetics. He teach courses on modern literature, nationalism, film, and Asian classics. His article, \"Oliver Stone's _JFK_ and the Loss of Social Memory,\" is forthcoming in _2000 Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and TV Studies CD-ROM Annual_ (March 2001).\n\n  \n\n> \n\n  \n\n2000 Mike Sugimoto. All rights reserved.  \nUpdated 07/28/21.   \nhttp://jcrt.org/archives/02.1/sugimoto/\n\n---\n\n Alan Wolfe, \"The Opening of the American Mind,\" _Atlantic Monthly_ Volume 286 No. 4 (October 2000).\n\n Mark Noll, _The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind_ (Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdmans, 1994)\n\n\n Allan Bloom, _The Closing of the American Mind_ (New York : Simon and Schuster, 1987).\n\n\n Russell Jacoby _The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe_ (New York: Basic Books, 1987).\n\n\n Consider the common, \"democratic\" interpretation of Christ's use of parables as a marvel of teaching technique to the masses, rather than, as I believe the gospels present them, as an indication of the their resistance to truth, thus the need to speak to them in parables. Although the simplicity of the parables is often admired over the stuffy, doctrinaire approach of the religious leaders, they actually signal a split in Christ's audiences: the \"in\" group of followers who were spoken to with clarity versus the \"out\" group of the larger crowd who got the parables. In this respect, instead of illustrating the success of teaching style to the masses, the parables actually indicate a failure of learning.\n\n\n To be sure, David Wells does tackle the problem of modernity, taking up the issue of the university, in pages 117-127 and 238-245 of _NO PLACE FOR TRUTH; Or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology?_ (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1993); and a general theoretical analysis of modernity/postmodernity in _GOD IN THE WASTELAND; The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams_ (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1994). For an analysis of higher education which also considers the question of nationalism, see Gerald Graff's _Professing Literature; An Institutional History_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Benedict Anderson's _Imagined Communities_, extended edition (New York: Verso, 1991), remains a classic, linking the development of national languages and standardization of the vernacular to the rise of nation-states; the revised edition includes two additional chapters that correct some of the theoretical flaws in this early study of nationalism.\n\n\n From the 1860s on, world expositions were held almost annually as a showcase for the modern state's technological achievements, each nation displaying its wares in a separate pavillion, exhibiting a curious synthesis of industry and culture. These grand expositions eventually faded and were replaced with a new spectacle--the modern Olympic movement--and the display of a new synthesis, this time between technology and bodies (of athletes and of the masses); the older sense of athletic struggle largely transformed into a struggle against clocks and measures, displaying that consummate form of modern competition: test taking. Susan Buck-Morss, _The Dialectics of Seeing; Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project_ (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1989).\n\n\n In a sense, the battle for social plenitude in the present was waged over ancient genealogies, thus the rise in prominence for classical studies (in Hegel's case, classical philology) in the quest for cultural purity or authenticity for the nation. Hegelian Marxists in the early 1900s, rearticulated this argument in a global scale, anti-capitalist critique, later \"downsizing\" their movement into the national arena until collapsing altogether in the decades to come. This foreshadowed the theorizing of an existential Marxism compromised of its grander, metaphysical pretensions (in the work of Sartre), focusing instead on notions of subjectivity, while others (such as Heidegger) attempted a reworking of the entire Western metaphysical concept of Being, articulating a return to the original philosophic language of poetry.\n\n\n The ideological battle between national spirits and their classical antecedents not only waged in Europe between France and Germany, but in Japan, as well, curiously caught between the East and the West in a field that polarized the \"soul\" of culture against the products of civilization, another form of the art/science split. In the early 1800s, the overwhelming superiority of Western military science caused Japanese ideologues to capitalize on a \"superiority\" of culture, of art, as the focus of national identity. Thus, even today, Japan's ambivalence in its identity as an Asian or Western culture plays a mischievous role in questions regarding war guilt and responsibility for atrocities waged in Asia, which, earlier on, Japan claims to have been defending against Western imperialism.\n\n\n Even while acknowledging an overt Hegelianism, Georg Lukacs has, to my knowledge, provided the most powerful critique of Kantian antinomies, revealing the philosophic dead end of bourgeois thought as being a corollary of the reified social condition in modern capitalism. See Lukacs' influential essay on reification in _History and Class Consciousness_, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1971).\n\n\n I owe this concise articulation to Mark Anderson, fellow graduate student at Cornell University.\n\n\n It can be argued that the collapse of the political realm represented by the rise of the Third Reich was an instance of the return of the repressed, as the religious element, suppressed in the Enlightenment project of rationalizing all of life, came back with unmediated, irrational violence. Thus, rather than demonstrating the inherent danger of the religious, it was techno-science allowed to manifest in unchecked barbarism from either religious or ethical spheres.\n\n\n Originally taken from Benjamin Farrington, _Francis Bacon: Philosopher of Industrial Science_ (New York: Collier, 1961), pages 118-19; also quoted in _Scandal_, p. 204.\n\n\n Bacon's status in the book is curious, as he is commended as an example of Christian openness to scientific developments in the interpreting of scripture, yet, earlier, his methodology (or those who followed him) was regarded as reductionistic, a simpleminded notion of science which Christians should have critiqued. My point is that the latter use is equally misguided, conflating the \"doing\" of science with the \"openness\" of a book, and in both cases, suppressing the element of interpretation.\n\n\n Walter Benjamin is an excellent example because he so clearly saw the philosophic implications in the German idealist tradition, notably German Romanticism, and revealed the false classicism within modernity which completely suppressed the theological. Benjamin attempted to, in a sense, resituate the entire discussion on modernity, bringing to light Christian history (the Baroque period), which had, up until then, been suppressed in an historiography which claimed a direct lineage from classical Greece and the Renaissance. Benjamin's 1936 essay, \"The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction,\" retains its critical edge, making the connections between modern epistemology, technology and the rise of fascism. For a visual primer, Wim Wenders' fine 1987 film, _Wings of Desire_, is a tribute to Benjamin's main ideas, engaging in its own critique of modernity. Walter Benjamin, _Illuminations_, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn. (New York: Schocken Books, 1969).",
  "title": "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind"
}