Awakening the Evangelical Mind: An Intellectual History of the Neo-Evangelical Movement

by Owen Strachan

broke with the separationist, preeminently defensive program of fundamentalism. These three figures, and many of their peers, whom we will meet in pages to come, were dyed-in-the-wool theological conservatives who lived and moved and had their being among the sprawling fundamentalist and evangelical worlds of the early and mid-twentieth century. In chapters 1 and 2, we meet Harold John Ockenga, the premier institution-builder of the period. The well-heeled Boston pastor promoted a doctrinally orthodox yet culturally aware Christianity through such institutions as the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE, founded in 1942), the aforementioned Fuller Seminary (ca. 1947), and Christianity Today (ca. 1956, with Henry as editor-in-chief).7 Ockenga was the first president of the NAE, Fuller, and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and he was the founding chairman of the board of Christianity

The mid-century attempt to reengage the life of the mind represents the most significant intellectual development among American Christians since the institutional heyday of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when countless American colleges and universities were founded.