Protestantism, the Arts, and the Natural Sciences

Protestantism, the Arts, and the Natural Sciences

An ominous cloud of suspicion hovers over the issues to be discussed in this chapter, casting a shadow over its themes. It is impossible to ignore the brute historical fact that, virtually from the inception of the movement, certain sections of Protestantism unleashed a wave of destruction of religious art. How can we even begin to explore the relationship of Protestantism to the arts in the light of such a violent and destructive past? Was not the Welsh poet R. S. Thomas right when he castigated Protestantism as “the adroit castrator of art”? And what of sport, widely regarded by its supporters as an art form, which was so famously detested by the Puritans?

The situation seems just as troubling in relation to the natural sciences. Surely the infamous Scopes “monkey” trial of 1925 made clear Protestantism’s outright hostility to the entire scientific enterprise, especially when this seemed to pose even the slightest challenge to the literal reading of the Bible? And what about Calvin’s outright opposition to Copernicus when he lambasted the Polish astronomer for daring to place his own authority over that of the Holy Spirit? Did not the Bible declare that “God has established the world; it shall never be moved” (Psalm 93:1)?

These concerns are entirely understandable, and reflect the deep ambivalence within certain sections of Protestantism in relation to both the arts and sciences. Nevertheless, the situation is much more complex and nuanced, not to mention more interesting, than prevalent stereotypes suggest. This chapter explores the origins and emergence of Protestant attitudes to the arts and sciences, attempting to document and account for a wide variety of viewpoints. There is no single, definitive “Protestant” attitude toward any of these matters; instead, we find a surprisingly wide range of approaches, each of which is consistent with the specific vision of Protestantism that underlies it. As there are many such visions, it is only to be expected that a correspondingly broad range of attitudes have emerged.

In his famous Rede Lecture at Cambridge University entitled “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” C. P. Snow (1905–80) lamented the growing divide he discerned within Western culture between what he called “the literary intellectuals” and “the scientists.” These two groups, he remarked, had “a curiously distorted image of each other” and were separated by a “gulf of mutual incomprehension.” It may seem inappropriate to include two such variegated domains in a single chapter. However, since the object here is to explore the interaction of Protestantism with modern intellectual culture, it is both convenient and imperative to treat them together. We begin by considering the relationship between Christianity and the arts.

PAINTING: PROTESTANTISM AND ICONOCLASM

Ordinary people encountered the medieval Catholic church not so much in the form of its abstract ideas but through its practices and images. The liturgy of the church, especially the mass, enacted the theology of the church, setting out dramatically a visual “grand narrative” of human history and experience. The church’s ritual observances and symbolic gestures shaped the congregation’s perception of the world and their own location within it. It offered spectacle and instruction, theater and dogma, in a form that reaffirmed the medieval worldview and the necessary place of the institutional church as an instrument and vehicle of salvation.¹ Outside that church, there was no salvation.

The drama of the liturgy was supplemented by images, often images of gospel scenes—painted on church walls, illustrating gospel scenes for the benefit of those who could not read—or images of saints, especially Mary, whose intercessory powers were affirmed and proclaimed by the church. Saints were mediators of divine grace who would hear and mediate the prayers of ordinary people.² In churches throughout western Europe, the cult of the saints was represented iconically—through paintings, altarpieces, and statues.³ These images expressed and transmitted a theology, but one that Protestantism regarded as fundamentally misguided.

The rise of Protestantism represented a break with the past. The nature and extent of that rupture was understood in different ways within the movement. For radical reformers, a Promethean reconstruction of the church from ground zero was required; for Luther and Calvin, the church was capable of being reformed and purged of its defects. Yet in every case a break with the past was presupposed. So how could that rupture be defended and explained?

Protestants moved swiftly to neutralize the imaginative power of the Catholic church by abolishing the mass and destroying its images. The theological break with the past necessitated an imaginative counterpart in order to bring home to ordinary people—Luther talked about “Herr Omnes,” or “everyman”—that something radical had taken place. The old actions and images would disappear and be replaced by their Protestant alternatives. Statues of saints were smashed, relics destroyed, altars overturned, paintings defaced or eventually whitewashed, and clerical vestments ripped apart.

The early Protestant hostility toward religious imagery around the year 1500 is thus to be understood primarily—but not exclusively—as a reaction against the theology that this imagery mediated. For deep within the Protestant psyche, a deeper sense of anxiety had emerged—that the new importance attached to the Ten Commandments negated the use of images altogether. Whereas Luther believed that one could identify the principle of the Old Testament prohibition against the use of “graven images” (Exodus 20:4; Deuteronomy 5:8), and retain the practice with appropriate safeguards, Zwingli and Calvin believed this was a compromise. Images had to be abolished altogether. Underlying the Reformation reaction against images was a new theology that demanded the resignification of the sacred.⁴

This led to a fundamental iconic divergence between Lutheranism and the versions of Protestantism associated with Zwingli and Calvin—usually referred to as “Reformed.” Lutheranism chose to retain religious imagery while redirecting its subject. Recognizing the imaginative and pedagogical power of images, Lutheranism used them extensively in churches, as noted earlier. Reformed churches were notable for the absence of any form of imagery in them. One entered the building and walked into a whitewashed space where daylight entered un-modulated through clear rather than stained glass. The imagery was that of illumination, simplicity, and purification. (“The unfolding of your words gives light”; Psalm 119:130.)

Some have argued that this hostility toward the visual image is not to be seen as a Protestant distinction, still less as an affectation. Until recently, it was a commonplace to suggest that Christianity itself was opposed to the use of images in sacred contexts, particularly worship.⁵

Yet the view that early Christianity represented “a fundamentally and irrevocably aniconic form of religiosity” rests on a superficial engagement with primary sources, and can no longer be defended. In any case, the iconoclastic elements within early Protestantism did not undertake detailed research into primary Christian sources in developing their views. These emerged immediately, from a reading of the Ten Commandments and an inspection of what they regarded as idolatrous material in the churches of their day. The remedy, it seemed to them, was straightforward and thoroughly practical. And so the destruction of the images began.

One fundamental question emerges from this historical analysis: was this hostility toward images specific to this era tactical rather than strategic? Once the break with the past had been made, physically and iconically, would a different attitude emerge as medieval Catholicism became a memory, not a living threat? On the basis of the evidence available, the best answer that can be given is that, within Reformed Protestantism—but not in other forms of the movement—this hostility was ultimately seen as grounded in theology, not the contingencies of a specific historical moment.

Lutheranism and Anglicanism went on to make extensive use of religious imagery, particularly as they moved away from their historical origins and the needs of the moment became of more pressing importance. Images had power—indeed, images might even, in some situations, have greater power than words.⁶ The simple fact was that no Protestant writer could ignore the power of images. Images simplified and reified: they expressed complex ideas in simple, memorable ways, and they represented complex, abstract principles in concrete, personalized form. In 1545 Luther sponsored the production of a crude and vivid series of ten woodcuts entitled The True Depiction of the Papacy.⁷ The first of these depicted the “Pope-Ass,” an image created in 1520 by Lukas Cranach the Elder, which represented the pope as a monstrous ass in human form.

The complex issues of the emergence of Protestantism were here drastically reduced to a simplistic struggle—freedom rather than oppression, good rather than evil, and God rather than Satan. Luther’s own theological works do not legitimate such simplistic reductions, yet the propaganda issued on his behalf went far beyond his cautious statements, apparently representing a gross distortion rather than a popular simplification of his ideas. Was the use of such crude imagery a tacit admission that theology had failed to deliver? That its complex, abstract ideas had not been grasped? That images were needed where arguments had failed?

Although Reformed Protestantism would not allow images in church, it had no doubt of their power. We have already noted the importance of the Geneva Bible (1560), which added marginal notes to help its readers understand what it euphemistically termed “the hard places.” Yet this Bible went even further by adding illustrations to help the reader make more visual sense of some difficult passages (such as the vision of Ezekiel) or to depict scenes from biblical narratives (such as the “garments of the high priest,” described in Exodus 28). Those who created the Geneva Bible had clearly absorbed Calvin’s famous theological principle of divine accommodation. If God “accommodated himself to human capacity” in communicating with humanity—for example, by using visual images, such as “God as shepherd”—why should not the Bible follow this excellent precedent?

Images of any kind would be rigorously excluded from Reformed churches. However, the Reformed hostility to pictorial representations of God was fundamentally theological in its foundation and did not extend to other subject matters. No significant restrictions were placed upon the activities of Reformed artists outside the specific sphere of ecclesiastical ornamentation. John Calvin was perfectly clear on this matter: painting and sculpture were perfectly permissible—he even called them “gifts of God”—provided that the objects represented were “visible to our eyes.” Calvinist painters might thus well find themselves having serious theological misgivings about representing God in their paintings; they had no such difficulties with the enterprise of painting itself. After all, artists were among the earliest supporters of the Protestant Reformation in the Lowlands.⁸ Other possibilities lay wide open to them as the emerging interest in landscapes, townscapes, domestic scenes, and portraits characteristic of seventeenth-century Flemish art makes clear.

Yet alongside the absence of prohibition of such natural objects, another force of significance must be noted.⁹ Market forces were becoming increasingly important in predominantly Reformed parts of Europe by 1600.¹⁰ Protestantism turned out to have unleashed forces that it could not ultimately control. Indeed, the growing wealth of Reformed communities, not totally unconnected with their association with capitalism, led to the emergence of patterns of artistic patronage similar to those associated with the Italian Renaissance. The wealthy Calvinist burghers of Flanders appear to have been just as aware of the importance of decorating buildings and homes as their Renaissance predecessors.

As the epicenter of English Protestantism gradually shifted from Luther’s Wittenberg to Calvin’s Geneva, hostility toward images deepened. Puritanism maintained the prohibition against any visual aids to worship, while extending it to personal devotional aids. The period of the Puritan Commonwealth witnessed an outbreak of iconoclasm on a scale exceeding anything seen at the time of the Reformation. A Puritan raid on the chapel of Clare College, Cambridge, yielded more than one thousand religious “superstitious” images, including images of God the father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit “like a dove with wings.”¹¹

The same severe attitudes were characteristic of American Puritanism throughout the seventeenth century.

Yet lying alongside this uniform hostility toward religious imagery within Reformed Protestantism—and raising questions about its long-term viability—are discernible tensions, anxieties, and even inconsistencies. One is a simple fact of human psychology—the need to visualize the abstract, and above all the divine. Attention is often drawn to a fascinating feature of Emmanuel de Witte’s picture of the south aisle of the Oude Kerk (1660) in Amsterdam, which was purged of its images in 1566 when the wave of iconoclasm in the southern Netherlands swept north. At the center of the painting, Witte placed an icon of the Holy Face—a cultic representation of the face of Christ.¹² Was this an act of memory or of protest?

Puritan preachers and pastors might well be iconophobic; they were also, however, human beings who could not ignore the imaginative capacity and needs of their minds. A leading feature of Puritan spirituality was the longing ultimately to see God, when at present God could not be seen. Many Puritan sermons preached on Psalm 27:8—“Your face, Lord, do I seek!”—urged their congregations to “see” (that is, form a mental image of) the face of God, and prescribed a number of spiritual disciplines that might assist in doing so.¹³ As many recent scholarly studies of Puritan attitudes toward images have stressed, the movement found itself in the ambivalent position of both needing images and needing to deny them.¹⁴

This ambivalence remains a potent element in contemporary Reformed reflection on the arts. Many mainline Protestant leaders now have no difficulty in valuing art in itself as a human activity directed toward the praise of God and filling an invaluable role in fostering an imaginative encounter with God.¹⁵ Public worship, private devotion, and the public communication of faith are all enriched by the sensitive and judicious use of imagery. Yet within the Reformed tradition, attitudes remain ambivalent toward visual art, which is viewed as something that can mislead as much as it can serve as an aid to piety.¹⁶

POETRY: PROTESTANTISM AND VERBAL CREATIVITY

Early Protestantism developed an antipathy toward poetry that was typical of its age, rather than demonstrating any particular distinguishing theological roots. The early Christian writer Tatian (born c. 120) was skeptical concerning the merits of classic rhetoric and poetry, both of which he regarded as encouraging deception and a disregard for matters of truth. Plato’s severe censure of poetry was widely accepted within early Christian circles and percolated into the Christian tradition.

The Protestant debate about the merits of poetry began to take its distinctive form in England during the 1590s as the case for poetry began to be made seriously in the writings of Sir Philip Sidney. Aware of the religious hostility toward the notion, Sidney was obliged to combine his intellectual defense of poetry with a certain amount of political diplomacy as he sought to position himself in relation to the religious critics of this emerging art form.¹⁷ Sidney was aware of the immense influence of Stephen Gosson’s Schoole of Abuse (1579), which followed Plato in arguing that poetry and drama were morally disruptive and should therefore be banned from “a reformed commonwealth.”

The nub of Gosson’s case against poetry and drama was that they were sensuous, indulgent, flamboyant forms of art that lacked the simplicity and rigor of plain words. Using a culinary metaphor, Gosson suggested that poetry and drama were like rich, extravagant food that gave rise to pleasure—contrasting with the Protestant moral values of frugality and personal discipline.¹⁸ Drama, he argued, forced the players to be tricksters, “telling lies by counterfeiting of other personalities than their own.” These arts were out of place in a Protestant commonwealth because they propagated fiction and deceit instead of concentrating human minds upon the elegant simplicities of truth.

In responding, Sidney was obliged to take into account Gosson’s Puritan reworking of Plato’s fundamental charge that poetry was an inferior and deceptive mimesis, lacking rigor and honesty in comparison with philosophy. It was a charge that could be met by pointing to poetry’s capacity to transform, while shrewdly observing that Plato condemned the abuses of poetry, not the art form itself. However, poetry’s association with generating pleasure on the part of the reader proved much more difficult to rebut, partly because Sidney himself clearly regarded this as one of poetry’s chief virtues. In the end, Sidney was able to turn Gosson’s argument against himself by arguing that the pleasure offered by poetry was actually profit and improvement.

A close reading of Puritan critiques of poetry suggests that the basic objection lay in rooting religious discourse in what Samuel Mather termed “our own fancies and imaginations” rather than in the divine “types” revealed in scripture or in the created order of nature.¹⁹ Poetry and drama alike proceeded from the imagination and were therefore fictions. This is certainly the view that we find in the noted Puritan writer Richard Baxter, who argued that literature actively promoted a culture of falsehood that “dangerously bewitcheth and corrupteth the minds of young and empty people.”

Yet the Protestant critique of poetry began to lose its edge as more and more Protestants broke rank and wrote poetry that was well received within their communities. In Puritan America, the most conspicuous example was Anne Bradstreet (1612–72), one of the most important figures in the history of American literature, and considered by many to be the first American poet.²⁰ Her poems, written in a deceptively simple style, rest on a rigorous Puritan theological foundation, while being firmly anchored in the realities of American colonial life of that age.

In England, Anglicans served as trailblazers for religious poetry. John Donne (1572–1631) and George Herbert (1593–1633) both demonstrated the potential of the poetic genre to communicate theology through an essentially imaginative engagement. Each proved that it was possible to communicate—and commend—Protestant ideas through the poetic medium. George Herbert’s poem The Elixir represents a powerful statement of the transforming impact of Christ upon mundane human life, allowing the Protestant work ethic to be set out with a new vitality:

A servant with this clause

Makes Drudgerie divine:

Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws,

Makes that and th’ action fine.²¹

John Donne was able to use the same medium to set out the Protestant doctrine of the bondage of the will through sin that requires God to “batter down” human resistance to the transforming power of grace:

Batter my heart, three-person’d God; for you

As yet but knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend

Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.²²

The two intellectuals who played an important role in directing the course of Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan Commonwealth—Andrew Marvell (1621–78) and John Milton (1608–74)—both demonstrated that Puritans could write poetry just as good as anyone else’s, and poetry would give their ideas a way to reach new audiences.

Yet important though these stimuli were to the development of Protestant poetics, the most significant catalyst was the rise of hymnody in the eighteenth century. Hymns were religious poems set to music and intended to edify and inform congregations. Suddenly, poetry was seen to have a thoroughly acceptable Protestant function—not the generation of aesthetic pleasure—always frowned on by the more austere forms of Protestantism—but the education and shaping of minds. Protestantism may not itself have yielded a vast poetic heritage; its function has been more to shape the minds and outlooks of poets than to produce poets.²³

DRAMA: PROTESTANTISM AND THE STAGE

In the sixteenth century, the image of the “theater” came to play a potent role in public symbolism, religious or otherwise. John Calvin famously declared that the world was a “theater of the glory of God,” in which the divine works of creation and redemption were displayed for the benefit of humanity, who were invited to become participants within, rather than mere observers of, what they saw.²⁴ This suggests that Calvin and his successors might have warmed to the theater as an art form capable of communicating the gospel in dramatic form—not unlike the highly successful medieval mystery plays. In fact, they did nothing of the sort. The early Protestant hostility toward the theater was striking.

While there are notable exceptions, such as Martin Bucer’s De ludis honestis (“On the propriety of plays,” 1551), a predominantly negative tone had set in by about 1560.²⁵ Anti-theatrical tracts poured from the presses: John Northbrooke’s A Treatise Against Dicing, Dancing, Plays, and Interludes (1577), Gosson’s Schoole of Abuse (1579), Philip Stubbes’s Anatomie of Abuses (1583), and John Rainold’s Overthrow of Stage-Players (1599) castigated the stage and its players.²⁶

Why this hostility? The answer once more lies in the Protestant anxiety about both the fictionality of drama and the implied deception on the part of actors. Drama was about fabrication, falsity, and the feigning of truth—behaviors that were clearly out of bounds for pious Protestants.²⁷ Others added to the litany of complaints: the play was a “bastard of Babylon” (William Crashawe) in that it displayed examples of evil, thus encouraging others to emulate them. In his Histrio-Mastix (1632), the Puritan moral fanatic William Prynne (1600–1669) argued that “popular stage-playes are sinfull, heathenish, lewde, ungodly spectacles, and most pernicious corruptions.” Its 1,100 pages castigated every form of drama, arguing that they represented a vile degradation of true Christian piety.²⁸ Prynne had an especial animus against women actors, whom he described as “notorious whores.” The work is perhaps notable chiefly for its length, its bilious tone, and its virtual ignorance of contemporary drama. (Prynne confesses that he was lured into attending four plays by degenerate colleagues—clearly four too many for his taste.) Interestingly, his main criticism of Shakespeare was that his works were printed on better-quality paper than most Bibles.

Yet despite this clamor of criticism, English Protestantism was not united in adopting such critical attitudes toward the stage. Might not the drama be put to religious use? Was it not a vehicle that, despite its faults, could be used to advance religious debates and agendas?²⁹ A case can certainly be made that popular theatrical performances under Elizabeth I and James I could be seen as reflecting themes of English Protestantism with an intention of shaping Protestant habits of mind.³⁰

Others have seen intra-Protestant debates surfacing in the drama of the period. Is Shakespeare’s rollicking, drunken Sir John Falstaff based on Sir John Oldcastle, a proto-Protestant martyr?³¹

Where the other major writers of his age became involved in the great religious debates of the age—Ben Jonson became a Catholic and ended up in prison, while Christopher Marlowe dabbled in a little Protestant espionage here and there—Shakespeare, Protestant England’s greatest playwright, kept his own counsel. We know little of his personal religious views, even though the subject has attracted much attention.³² Yet rumors persisted that Shakespeare was more Catholic than Protestant. Richard Davies, a Protestant, commented in the early seventeenth century that “Shakespeare dyed a papist.” This possibility must be kept open. There is much in his dramas that sits uneasily alongside Protestant doctrine.

The most debated example concerns the Ghost in Hamlet.³³ It is quite clear that Shakespeare intends us to understand that the Ghost has come from purgatory. The term is never mentioned, presumably because it would never have got past the vigilant Elizabethan censor. But it is there, unmistakably, in the imagery that Shakespeare uses (1.5.11–14). The Ghost is:

Doomed for a certain term to walk the night

And for the day confined to fast in fires,

Till the foul crimes done in days of nature

Are burnt and purged away.

The Ghost thus inhabits the vast imaginative space left empty by English Protestantism’s final banishment of purgatory in 1563. The Ghost returns from purgatory and by doing so brings purgatory back into the English public domain in a fictionalized and thereby transformed shape. Shakespeare’s Hamlet participates in a dangerous, forbidden, exotic “cult of the dead”—and enables the audience to do so as well by stepping back in time, when such beliefs were the norm.³⁴

Protestantism having taken the drama and spectacle out of religious life by abolishing Catholic ritual, England was troubled by a cultural void—a sensory vacuum that needed to be filled. In one sense, Shakespeare’s dramas moved in to occupy the space left vacant by the banishment of Catholic ritual. At several points, Shakespeare seems to echo hints of long-suppressed Catholic rituals, evoking their rich memory to highlight the aesthetic austerity of their Protestant equivalents.

An instance of this can be found in the brief final act of The Merchant of Venice. The passage is so beautifully constructed that the audience is likely to fail to notice that it is apparently irrelevant to the plot. Yet the passage contains an astonishing number of allusions to the Easter Triduum of the Catholic church—as if Shakespeare is deliberately evoking its memory and its rich symbolic allusions. As the liturgy celebrates Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection, it sets out a number of images and formulas: the Easter moon; solemn music in the open air; a single candle; the veneration of the cross; the refrain “This is the night” repeated eight times. The same elements are present in this brief final act: moonlight, a single candle dispelling the darkness, the playing of music, the phrase “in such a night” repeated eight times; kneeling at holy crosses.³⁵

Under the Puritan Commonwealth, music and drama went into decline. Even as early as 1641, a Puritan-dominated Parliament passed legislation closing down all of London’s theaters. With the restoration of Charles II in 1660, the theaters came to life again. The bawdy Restoration dramas of this era represented both a reaction against the moral censoriousness of the Puritan age and a celebration of the looser moral codes of the new monarchy.

In America, however, the Puritan influence continued to be strong, at least in the northern states. The founder of Pennsylvania, William Penn (1644–1718), had little time for the theater. He dismissed it with a rhetorical question: “How many plays did Jesus Christ and his apostles recreate themselves at? What poets, romances, comedies, and the like did the apostles and the saints make or use to pass their time withal?” The answer was obvious, and as far as Penn was concerned, that ended the discussion. Pennsylvania’s “Frame of Government” (1682) laid down that “stage-plays” and related activities were to be prevented, since they “excite the people to rudeness, cruelty, looseness and irreligion.”

Those who had hoped that the American Revolution would bring about a transformation of attitudes were doomed to disappointment. Meeting in Pennsylvania in 1774, the Continental Congress declared that it would “discourage every species of extravagance and dissipation, especially all horse-racing, and all kinds of gaming, cock fighting, exhibition of shews, plays, and other expensive diversions and entertainments.” Four years later, Congress tightened up its hostility to the performance of plays still further by laying down that “any person holding an office under the United States, who shall act, promote, encourage, or attend such plays, shall be unworthy to hold such office, and shall be accordingly dismissed.”

FICTION: PROTESTANTISM AND THE NOVEL

As we have seen, early Protestants disliked both drama and opera, seeing these as extravagant, fictional, illusory art forms devoted to amusement rather than education. Protestantism’s similarly hostile attitudes toward the literary category of the novel reflect this pervasive, characteristic distrust of fiction as a form of cultured deceit.³⁶ For Puritan writers, ample literary satisfaction was to be had from the literary genre of “conversion narratives.”³⁷ Why read fiction when real life was more interesting, instructive, and inspirational?

The breakthrough in Protestant attitudes came with a landmark work of religious allegory that contains a sustained narrative that has led many to characterize it as one of the earliest novels. John Bunyan (1626–88), perhaps one of the best-known Puritan writers of the seventeenth century, became involved with the Puritan cause during the English Civil War. With the establishment of the Puritan Commonwealth, Bunyan turned his attention to preaching and became the minister of an independent congregation in Bedford. His Puritan sympathies caused him to be out of favor when the English monarchy was restored in 1660, with the result that he spent many years inside Bedford jail. Bunyan used his time in prison to write his autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, and to begin work on his best-known work, The Pilgrim’s Progress, the first part of which appeared in 1678, and the second in 1684.

The central narrative of The Pilgrim’s Progress concerns its hero, Christian. Initially bowed down with a burden of sin upon his back, Christian flees from the City of Destruction and seeks eternal life. He thus sets out on a long and arduous pilgrimage, which eventually leads him over the bridgeless River of Death to be received in the Celestial Jerusalem. The characters Christian meets along the way—with names such as “Faithful,” “Hopeful,” and “Mr. Worldly Wiseman”—embody abstract qualities and defects, virtues and vices. These characters, who speak in the simple, lively, humorous language of ordinary people, were almost certainly modeled on the men and women Bunyan knew. Perhaps it is no surprise that the work went on to become one of the most widely read works in the English language, reaching the height of its popularity in the Victorian period.

This early novel sanitized the genre by constructing a fictional narrative that clearly embodied biblical images and reified the abstract concepts central to Christian discipleship—such as faith, doubt, and pride. Bunyan’s own credentials as a Puritan activist, imprisoned for his beliefs, helped reassure his reading public that the work was religiously sound and could be used for entertainment as much as for education.

This was followed by Robinson Crusoe, a work of fiction that gained respectability partly by being based on fact and partly by representing a version of the conversion narrative genre. Its author, Daniel Defoe (1660–1731), was a “dissenter”—that is, a Protestant outside the English religious establishment—who attended the Academy for Dissenters in Stoke Newington, now a suburb of London. There he was taught by Reverend Charles Morton, who later went on to become the first vice president of Harvard College. Although Defoe wrote at least five hundred known books, many of which were political pamphlets arguing for greater religious toleration, he is remembered today mainly for the work of fiction written in his sixtieth year and published in 1719.

Robinson Crusoe, which tells the story of a shipwrecked mariner, is loosely yet recognizably based on the true story of Alexander Selkirk. The main action of the story takes place in 1659, when Crusoe is shipwrecked on an uninhabited island. With great skill, Defoe explores how Crusoe’s intuition and skills allow him to survive in his new situation. Crusoe is portrayed as a man who had made his fortune as a trader but now finds himself in a situation in which goods and money are of no value to him. The novel’s exploration of the consequences of this “inversion of values” is widely regarded as compelling.

Alongside this, we find an exploration of Crusoe’s inner feelings, especially his attitude toward God. Defoe tells a story of a personal and inward journey that leads to spiritual renewal, paralleling the account of the self-sufficiency that allows Crusoe to survive at the physical level. The journal entries for June 16 through July 4, 1660, make it clear that a spiritual rebirth follows this inversion of values. Discovering tobacco and a Bible in an old sea chest, Crusoe begins to browse through the latter and is eventually—like Augustine of Hippo before him—brought to the point of conversion:

I threw down the Book, and with my Heart as well as my Hands lifted up to Heaven, in a Kind of Extasy of Joy, I cry’d out aloud, Jesus, thou Son of David, Jesus, thou exalted Prince and Saviour, give me Repentance!

Robinson Crusoe is a remarkable novel that can be read at several levels—as an Enlightenment account of the individual’s self-discovery and self-actualization, as a Protestant account of the awakening of the soul through the encounter with the word of God, or as a theological exploration of a radically individualist reading of the Bible, without any guidance or assistance from church or tradition. Yet its real significance was in awakening Protestant interest in the novel as a literary form with apologetic and didactic potential. It would be some time before its full potential was realized; the process of exploration and reflection, however, had unquestionably begun.

A further landmark in the growing Protestant acceptance of the novel was the publication of Charles Sheldon’s In His Steps.³⁸ Sheldon arrived as pastor of the Central Congregational Church in Topeka, Kansas, in 1888 to find depressingly small congregations on Sunday evenings. In an attempt to attract newcomers, he began reading chapters of novels he had written to his congregation. When this approach met with a positive response, he was encouraged to develop it. In October 1896, he began reading chapters from In His Steps.

The novel invites its readers to imagine the quandary faced by a clergyman and his congregation when a thirty-year-old stranger arrives in their midst, clearly in need of help. They resolve to ask themselves the fundamental question: what would Jesus do? As its central characters consider this question, they find themselves changed utterly. A newspaper editor decides not to print accounts of prize fights or local society gossip; nor will he run liquor or tobacco ads. A talented singer decides that she will use her beautiful voice for gospel singing rather than opera performances.

The work was accessible and inspirational, and it rapidly garnered a huge readership.³⁹ Nobody has the slightest idea how many copies it sold, but the figure is believed to be in excess of ten million copies. Why does nobody know? Because Sheldon sold the rights to a religious magazine, the Advance, which published it in book form. The publisher inadvertently failed to file enough copies of the book with the copyright authorities, with the result that copyright protection was not obtained. The work passed into the public domain and could be reprinted by anyone. Its continuing potency can be seen today in the sports arm-bands and bracelets bearing the letters WWJD—an abbreviation, of course, for What Would Jesus Do?

More recently, the power of the novel to convey Protestant ideas has been appreciated and developed within conservative American communities, particularly those with strongly apocalyptic views of the end times.⁴⁰ Frank Peretti’s two spiritual warfare novels This Present Darkness (1988) and Piercing the Darkness (1989) captivated their readerships, offering a vivid and dramatic account of the spiritual geography of a fallen world. The first of these follows an intrepid born-again Christian preacher and a newspaper reporter as they unearth a New Age plot to take over the local community and eventually the entire world. Described by some critics as “sanctified Stephen King,” the novels demonstrate the capacity of the genre to mediate theology and suspense in about equal measure. A similar success has been enjoyed by the apocalyptic “Left Behind” series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins.

In Britain the role of the novel in developing the Christian imagination was developed by the Anglican writer C. S. Lewis. Lewis’s own severely austere Protestant upbringing in Northern Ireland, especially when coupled with periods of solitariness following his mother’s death, led to his discovery of the power of the imagination to console and to excite, often through the creation and inhabitation of imaginary worlds. Following his conversion at Oxford in 1929, Lewis began to explore the power of fiction to communicate truth through the imagination. In doing so, he drew on the writings of the Scottish Protestant preacher and writer George MacDonald (1824–1905). The outcome was initially The Pilgrim’s Regress and eventually the series of children’s novels for which he is best known—the “Chronicles of Narnia” series.

Lewis’s exploration of the use of narrative to develop the religious potential of the imagination raised hackles in some Protestant circles. Yet the overwhelmingly positive reaction to his books has long since eclipsed such criticisms and concerns. The imaginative impoverishment of Protestantism, widely cited as a major contributing cause to the rise of secularism, appears to have been reversed through the impact of Lewis and others. Just as Iris Murdoch demonstrated the potential of the novel to explore philosophical themes, Lewis and others have firmly established the potential of the novel to engage with theology. That exploration has only just begun; its further exploration is likely to yield some fascinating outcomes and insights.

SPORT: THE ORIGINS OF “MUSCULAR CHRISTIANITY”

The emergence of a symbiotic relationship between Protestantism and sport dates to the nineteenth century. If Puritanism can be judged to be representative of the movement as a whole, early Protestantism was characterized by a virtually unrelenting hostility toward any form of sport, which was seen as a waste of time and effort and a diversion from the more serious things in life.⁴¹ Yet such a uniformly negative attitude eventually proved unsustainable as the value of sport for public health and personal development became increasingly accepted. During the nineteenth century, a new attitude toward sport began to emerge in both Britain and the United States as its potential as a tool of Christian witness and social formation came to be appreciated.⁴²

The term “muscular Christianity” appears to have first made its appearance in England during the late 1850s to describe the values embodied in two Victorian novels: Charles Kingsley’s Two Years Ago and Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days. The British popular press picked up the phrase, using it to refer to adventure novels that advocated and exemplified high moral principles and manly Christian heroes. A new paradigm of Christian existence was emerging as Protestants broke free of the somewhat sentimental attitudes toward religion that had settled in within much of Victorian church life.

In part, this development reflected a growing concern that Christianity was becoming feminized. Church congregations seemed increasingly to be made up of women—an observation that led many men to wonder what role masculine values might play in the ministry and mission of the church.⁴³ Alarmed by statistics in the early 1890s suggesting that the membership of Protestant denominations was becoming increasingly female, many pastors wondered how the church could be reconnected with masculine values. For some critics, including powerful lay figures such as Theodore Roosevelt and John D. Rockefeller, the problem lay with the pastors themselves, who were seen by some as little more than “thin, vapid, affected, driveling little doodles” who found it easier to take tea with women than to encounter men on their own territory. What congregations needed, they said, were more “men whose blood coursed strong and hot through their veins, fine specimens of muscular, soldierly Christianity.”⁴⁴ Protestant clergy and lay leaders of the “muscular Christianity” movement abandoned the sentimentality and “feminine” forms of religion that had gained the upper hand in the Victorian era, opting for a new model that stressed action rather than reflection and “masculinity” rather than gentility. An active Christian presence in sport seemed to be the answer to this problem.

The origins of this perhaps surprising development—given the long-standing Puritan hostility toward sport—lay in the English love for cricket, and especially the social respect given to its heroes. In the late nineteenth century, three gentleman Victorian cricketing brothers demonstrated the potential of sport as a means of Christian outreach. The three Studd brothers were all educated at Eton and Cambridge University, which was at that time experiencing an evangelical revival, partly through the activities of the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union, founded in 1877.⁴⁵ Sir John Edward Kynaston Studd (1858–1944), George Brown Studd (1859–1945), and Charles Thomas Studd (1860–1931) were all converted in the summer of 1878 during the Moody-Sankey missionary campaign in England. All were gifted cricketers, each captaining the Cambridge University cricket team in successive seasons from 1882 to 1884.

Their importance to the history of English cricket is legendary, not least on account of Charles’s involvement in the famous Ashes test match against Australia in 1882. Yet their greater significance for our narrative is in their forging of a link between sporting excellence and evangelistic outreach in the United States, where sport increasingly became seen as a socially acceptable means of developing personal fitness and discipline and propagating the faith. The most significant developments followed in the wake of John Studd’s visit to America in 1885, when he toured various American colleges and planted the basic ideas of “muscular” Christianity. (It must be remembered that cricket was widely played in the United States at the time; its total displacement by baseball as America’s preferred team sport had yet to take place.⁴⁶) The values of muscular Christianity resonated well with the YMCA’s emphasis on physical well-being as a goal of the Christian life and helped create a more positive and accommodating attitude toward sport within conservative Protestantism and the broader American culture. The association of healthy bodies with healthy faith inevitably pointed to sport as a means of physical and spiritual enrichment.

The YMCA itself gave rise to one of America’s most popular sports—basketball. This was invented in December 1891 by James Naismith, a physical education teacher at the YMCA International Training School at Springfield College in Springfield, Massachusetts. Confronted by bored students unable to undertake sports outside in the cold weather, Naismith developed an indoor ball game suited to the limitations of a gymnasium, based on some articles he had read in a Christian missionary magazine about traditional Mesoamerican ball games.

Not content with inventing this new sport, Naismith developed the notion of coaching, which he viewed as a form of spiritual mentoring or discipling. During his time at the University of Kansas, Naismith did much to lay the intellectual and spiritual foundations of the notion of coaching. It is easy to argue that there is a direct link between the evangelical origins of basketball coaching and the values seen in the career of a Bill McCartney—the evangelical University of Colorado football coach who founded the “Promise Keepers” movement.⁴⁷

Naismith’s philosophy was based on the idea that sport was in itself an activity embodying the values of Protestantism, so that basketball could be seen as a means of transferring, actualizing, and nourishing Christian character within a masculine context. While this ethos persists, it has arguably been displaced by growing interest in using sport as a gateway into the Christian faith. Gil Dodds, one of the preeminent American runners of the 1940s, became part of Billy Graham’s outreach team and used sporting prowess as a means of commending the gospel. Similarly, Bill Glass, the former member of the Detroit Lions and the Cleveland Browns, evangelized his fellow sportsmen and saw football as an effective means to reach American youngsters.⁴⁸

So is this emphasis on sport alien to the spirit of Protestantism? Its advocates rightly point out that the New Testament frequently uses sporting illustrations and metaphors to encourage discipleship—such as running a race (1 Corinthians 9:24; Hebrews 12:1). Yet the link between Protestantism and sport has not been without its problems and dangers. Activism, after all, is not a purely male concern. The same dynamic that gave rise to the Boy Scouts also gave rise to its female equivalent. Nor is sport a purely Protestant concern: Catholicism can equally well be said to promote muscular Christianity, at least to some extent, through the athletic programs of such leading schools as the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.

There are deeper issues that should also be noted. After the First World War, American Protestant leaders such as Harry Emerson Fosdick and Sherwood Eddy blamed muscular Christianity for encouraging militarism and thus contributing to the disaster of the war. The new world order seemed to demand a more accommodating, less aggressive attitude on the part of men.⁴⁹ It has also been pointed out that during its early years in America muscular Christianity existed in a tense and often ambivalent relationship with regnant ideologies of male domination and white supremacy. Equally significant, in more recent times Protestantism’s relationship with sport has proved to be akin to riding a tiger: sport, in the view of some cultural analysts, has emerged as a religion (or at least a religious activity) in its own right, threatening to displace Protestantism in the struggle for the soul of the American male.

Conservative American attitudes toward sport can be seen as a mirror of its relationship with culture in general. While all generalizations are open to criticism, three broad phases can be discerned since 1890. In the first period, which flourished until the end of the First World War, evangelical Christians were encouraged to take part in competitive sport and to bear witness to the gospel, both through their sporting prowess and their moral integrity. The rise of fundamentalism led to a major disengagement with sport throughout the 1930s; this period of disengagement did not come to an end until the Second World War ended in 1945. Thereafter, the diminishing influence of fundamentalism and the rise of neo-evangelicalism led to the emergence of a wide range of sport-identified mission organizations (including Sports Ambassadors, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Campus Crusade for Christ, and Athletes in Action), sports chaplaincies (such as Baseball Chapel and Pro Athletes Outreach), and sports programs at evangelical mega-churches. In Britain, Christians in Sport has played a significant role in advocating a Christian presence across the spectrum of sporting activities. Protestant attitudes toward sport, as toward culture in general, seems dependent on its prevailing theological and cultural assumptions. It is therefore unsafe and unwise to predict what the future holds.

Having considered the complex and constantly changing interaction between Protestantism and the arts, we now consider its relationship with the natural sciences.

PROTESTANTISM AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE NATURAL SCIENCES

To some, the notion of any positive link between religion and science seems highly improbable from the outset. Surely science and religion have always been locked in mortal combat? Yet the stereotype of the “warfare of science and religion” is a product of the social conditions of the late nineteenth century and is now regarded as historically unacceptable.⁵⁰ The interaction of science and religion is far too complex and interesting to be represented in such a simplistic, inaccurate way. The massive advances made in the history of science now allow the early relationship of science and Protestantism to be seen in a much more persuasive light.⁵¹

It is often noted that the emergence of the natural sciences is specifically linked with the Christian intellectual environment of western Europe. Less obvious, however, is a theoretical explanation for this that is firmly anchored to the historical evidence. A good case can be made for arguing that the Christian doctrine of creation affirmed that the universe was regular and ordered and that the study of nature was an indirect way of recognizing and honoring the divine wisdom, as seen in the order of things.

In recent years, however, a growing body of scholarly work has emerged arguing that the decisive contribution to the emergence of the natural sciences came not from Christianity in general but from Protestantism in particular. A major factor in this argument concerns changes in how the Bible was interpreted, a process in which Protestantism played a strategic role.⁵² The fundamental change emerged in the first years of Protestantism, whose new approach to the biblical text brought about a hermeneutical revolution that led to a new approach to natural objects. This arose from the new meaning that approach lent to the old and religiously appealing “two books” metaphor: God as the author of both a “book of words” (the Bible) and a “book of works” (nature).⁵³

Early Christian writers were well aware that the “book of nature” could be “read” in various ways. The great Alexandrian theologian Origen held that the visible world is invested with symbols that, if correctly interpreted, teach the diligent observer about God. To understand these, however, the reader needed to penetrate beyond the material appearances of the creatures and discover their deeper and more profound meanings. The same attitude was adopted toward reading the Bible, which was widely held to possess a superficial “literal” or “historical” sense as well as deeper symbolic meanings accessible to discerning readers. Both the Bible and nature possessed deeper symbolic meanings.

In the Middle Ages, these symbolic meanings tended to be given the greater weight. Natural objects were understood in terms of how they fitted into a complex web of theological and spiritual symbolism, rather than being treated as “natural” objects in their own right. Similarly, the allegorical reading of the Bible was held to disclose deeper truths than might be possible by a literal reading of the text.

It is at this point that the significance of Protestantism can be appreciated. Although Luther and early Protestants were fully aware of the importance of symbolic and spiritual meanings of texts, they emphasized literal or historical readings.⁵⁴ What, they asked, was the natural sense of a biblical passage? This way of reading the book of scripture led, when transferred to reading the book of nature, to a way of engaging with the natural order that emphasized a direct, “natural” account of things. The new hermeneutical strategies promoted by the first Protestants were thus of central importance in establishing the conditions that made the emergence of modern science possible.

This literalist mentality toward the Bible was transposed into an insistent empiricism in the field of science. Both religious and scientific truth were held to arise from the immediate, literal sense of what met the human eye. No professional intermediaries, sacred or secular, were required in either case. Science and religion alike were democratized. In his History of the Royal Society (1667), Thomas Sprat perceptively remarked that, just as there were two “books,” so there were also two “reformations,” each prizing direct engagement with God’s two books without the need for scholars or priests.

This emerging tendency to see nature as “natural” was linked with the Protestant hostility toward images, which further reinforced the demise of the symbolic conceptions of the natural order. Protestant iconoclasm deeply distrusted objects that were asserted to have significance as religious symbols. The same line of thought that held that human artifacts could not mediate or symbolize the divine led to natural objects and phenomena being stripped of their symbolic associations—and hence allowed to become objects of scientific investigation.

This theme of the “desacralization” or “disenchantment” of nature has been studied in depth by scholars of the early modern period who have noted its implications for the emergence of the natural sciences—and also for secularism and atheism. Peter Berger’s analysis of the role of Protestantism in causing secularization deserves mention at this point.⁵⁵ For Berger, Protestantism can be thought of as having caused “an immense shrinkage in the scope of the sacred in reality.” Protestants did not see themselves as living in a world that was “ongoingly penetrated by sacred beings and forces.” Instead, they understood their world to be “polarized between a radically transcendent divinity and a radically ‘fallen’ humanity” that was devoid of any sacred qualities or connections. Catholicism had contained secularizing forces through its deeply symbolic understanding of the natural world and humanity’s place within it. Without realizing what it was doing, Protestantism, for Berger, opened the floodgates of the forces that would shape modernity and ultimately cause Protestantism such grief in its heartlands.

Yet Protestantism created a new motivation—or perhaps, some might argue, enhanced an existing one—for the scientific study of nature. A persistent theme throughout the works of John Calvin was that the wisdom of the invisible and intangible God might be discerned and studied through his works—such as the created order. Calvin thus commended—and even ventured to express some little jealousy of—natural scientists, who were able to experience and appreciate the beauty and wisdom of God through what God had created and molded.

This fundamental motivation for the scientific study of nature has since pervaded Protestantism. It can be seen in many confessional documents of the Reformed church in western Europe. For example, the Belgic Confession affirmed that nature is set “before our eyes as a most beautiful book, in which all creatures, great and small, are like so many characters leading us to contemplate the invisible things of God” (2). The trajectory of thought could not be clearer: reading the “book of nature” enhances our appreciation of what is known of God through the “book of scripture.”

Others have noted that the Protestant motivation for studying science was not limited to factors that emerged as significant during the sixteenth century. In 1938 the sociologist Robert Merton (1910–2003) suggested that certain types of Protestantism played a significant role in consolidating a scientific culture in seventeenth-century England. At the heart of the “Merton thesis” is a variation of Max Weber’s famous theory concerning Protestantism and the rise of the “spirit of capitalism.” The Protestant ethos—especially that found in English Puritanism and German Pietism—stimulated scientific research by giving it a religious dimension.⁵⁶

In our discussion thus far, we have emphasized that changing fashions in the interpretation of the Bible underlay, at least to some extent, the rise of the natural sciences in western Europe. This in itself is an important witness to the importance of the Protestant enterprise in that it demonstrates that the reexamination of traditional interpretations of the Bible often stimulated new ways of envisaging and investigating the natural world.

Yet there is more—considerably more—than this to the relationship between the natural sciences and Protestant approaches to biblical interpretation. In the view of a growing number of Protestant theologians and scientists, especially during the seventeenth century, the natural sciences offered a means of providing the church with the best possible system of biblical interpretation. Might the manner in which the scientist interpreted the book of nature provide a paradigm for the way in which the theologian interpreted the book of scripture?

Although it has become something of a scholarly habit to speak of the “scientific revolution” of the early modern period, this expression reflects the perspective of today’s scholars. At the time, contemporary observers often spoke of the emergence of the natural sciences as a “reformation,” and they drew an explicit parallel between the reformations in religion and science. Using the imagery of “God’s two books” of nature and the Bible, it was easy to suggest that the remarkable successes and advances made in the interpretation of the former might also assist with the cognate biblical undertaking.⁵⁷ Might the somewhat precarious enterprise of biblical interpretation be placed upon a new, rigorous intellectual foundation firmly grounded in the order of things?

It was an idea that entranced many, including Isaac Newton. Yet its appeal to the wider Protestant community soon paled as it became clear that this new method of biblical interpretation led into the byways of heterodoxy. Newton’s reformation in science-based biblical interpretation led him to reject the Trinity, although he was careful not to draw attention to this fact during his lifetime.⁵⁸ The new strategies seemed to lead to deist readings of the Bible and were treated with growing suspicion by orthodox Protestant writers.

It is thus important to note that the issue of heterodoxy makes the link between Protestantism and the scientific revolution more complex.⁵⁹ Earlier, we noted that Protestantism is thought to have emerged in part because of the intellectual turbulence of the early sixteenth century, when new options for understanding the world of culture and nature were being eagerly explored and evaluated. Many of those Protestants who were at the forefront of the scientific movement were of questionable theological orthodoxy. Newton, for example, was associated with anti-trinitarianism and Arianism, both of which could be accommodated without difficulty to his system of natural philosophy.⁶⁰ Joseph Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen, saw scientific advance as a means of securing religious reform—including the revision of traditional theology along more rational lines.⁶¹

The history of the Protestant interaction with the emerging natural sciences is thus neither simple nor uniformly positive. To understand the complexity of the interaction, we shall consider two landmark areas of debate in which Protestantism found itself in an ambivalent relationship with the sciences—the Copernican controversies of the sixteenth century and the Darwinian controversies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

COPERNICUS: BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION AND THE SOLAR SYSTEM

One of the fundamental principles of Protestantism is its insistence that all interpretations of the Bible must be regarded as provisional, not final; part of the task of the church is continually to reexamine previous ways of interpreting scripture to ensure that they have not lapsed into uncritical, unthinking, or simply wrong ways of interpreting this foundational text. During the Middle Ages, the Bible was interpreted on the basis of a set of assumptions that were assumed to be secure and permanent. One of them was that the sun and all other heavenly bodies revolved around the earth. The outcome was inevitable: the Bible was interpreted in the light of this assumption, with the result that the Bible was held to endorse a geocentric model of the solar system.

In the 1540s, this fundamental assumption of the medieval era was called into question by the Polish astronomer Nicolas Copernicus. De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (“On the revolutions of the heavenly bodies”) was published after Copernicus’s death in May 1543. The work caused a minor sensation in that it set out a heliocentric model of the solar system. Copernicus argued that the best explanation of a vast body of astronomical evidence was that the planets revolve around the sun and only the moon revolves around the earth. There were some loose ends in his analysis; the final acceptance of the model would have to wait for the detailed work by Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) in the first two decades of the seventeenth century.

Early published defenses of the Copernican theory (such as G. J. Rheticus’s Treatise on Holy Scripture and the Motion of the Earth, which is widely regarded as the earliest known work to deal explicitly with the relation of the Bible and the Copernican theory) thus had to deal with two issues. First, they had to set out the observational evidence that led to the conclusion that the earth and other planets rotate around the sun. Second, they had to demonstrate that this viewpoint was consistent with the Bible, which had long been read as endorsing a geocentric view of the world.

There is no doubt that the rise of the heliocentric theory of the solar system caused both Catholic and Protestant theologians to reexamine traditional interpretations of certain biblical passages. It is still widely believed that John Calvin refused to accept the heliocentric model of the solar system because it allegedly contradicted the Bible. The source of this idea is Bertrand Russell’s hastily written History of Western Philosophy, in which he declared that Calvin “demolished Copernicus with the text: ‘The world also is stablished, that it cannot be moved’ (Psa. xciii. 1), and exclaimed: ‘Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?’”⁶² This statement has been widely cited ever since, often without acknowledgment and usually without any critical investigation.

Which is a pity. The “quotation” is a complete fabrication whose true source has yet to be identified with certainty. Calvin wrote no such words, which are in any case inconsistent with his approach to theology.⁶³ Russell appears to have borrowed the passage from Andrew Dickson White’s hopelessly inaccurate work History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896) without bothering to check White’s sources.

In fact, the Copernican controversy largely vindicated Protestantism’s theological method as developed by Calvin. Some biblical passages seem to suggest that the sun rotates about the earth. Calvin argued that these passages were “adapted” or “accommodated” to the ways of thinking of primitive people and had to be interpreted in that light. His fundamental point was that divine revelation takes place in culturally and anthropologically conditioned manners and forms, with the result that it needs to be appropriately interpreted. This approach has a long tradition of use within Judaism and subsequently within Christian theology.⁶⁴

Calvin argued that God adjusts himself to the capacities of the human mind and heart. God paints a portrait of himself that we are capable of understanding. The analogy behind Calvin’s thinking at this point is that of a human orator. A good speaker knows the limitations of his audience and adjusts how he speaks accordingly. God, in revealing himself to us, has accommodated himself to our levels of understanding and our innate preference for pictorial means of conceiving him. God reveals himself, not as he is in himself, but in forms adapted to our human capacity. Thus, scripture speaks of God having arms, a mouth, and so on—but these are just vivid and memorable metaphors, ideally suited to our intellectual abilities. The Bible might seem to speak of the sun revolving around the earth—but this is to be interpreted as an “accommodated” way of speaking, adapted to the way of thinking of long ago.

The impact of these ideas upon English scientific theorizing, especially during the seventeenth century, was considerable. For example, Edward Wright defended Copernicus’s heliocentric theory of the solar system against biblical literalists by arguing, in the first place, that scripture was not concerned with physics, and in the second, that its manner of speaking was “accommodated to the understanding and way of speech of the common people, like nurses to little children.” Both of these arguments derive directly from Calvin.

Yet although the Copernican debates led to a generally positive and helpful outcome, giving the science of Protestant biblical interpretation a much needed stimulus, a much more difficult debate over biblical interpretation lay ahead. This time the question concerned how the early chapters of the Book of Genesis were to be interpreted—a question brought into sharp focus by the Darwinian theory of evolution, to which we now turn.

DARWIN: BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION AND THE ORIGINS OF HUMANITY

One of the most vigorous debates within modern Christian thought concerns the implications of Darwinism for religious belief. It is a debate that is by no means limited to Christianity, as is evident from the generally hostile reaction to Darwinism in the Islamic world. So what is Darwinism? While the term is often used to refer specifically to the views set out by Charles Darwin in his Origin of Species, it is more widely used to refer to the theories that emerged from Darwin’s work and have since been developed and modified.

The publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) is rightly regarded as a landmark in nineteenth-century science. Darwin held that all species—including humanity—result from a long and complex process of biological evolution.⁶⁵ The religious implications of Darwin’s theory will be clear. Traditional Christian thought regarded humanity as set apart from the rest of nature, created as the height of God’s creation, and alone endowed with the “image of God.” Darwin’s theory suggested that human nature has emerged gradually over a long period of time and that no fundamental biological distinction can be drawn between human beings and animals in terms of their origins and development.⁶⁶

This idea caused considerable anxiety to many Christians at the time. In traditional Christian theology, humanity was located within the created order as a whole, but stood above it on account of its unique relationship to God, articulated in the notion of the imago Dei. Yet Darwin’s Origin of Species posed an implicit—and his Descent of Man (1871) an explicit—challenge to this view. Humanity had emerged, Darwin asserted, over a vast period of time from within the natural order. This posed a powerful challenge to popular Protestant ideas and soon led to heated controversy.

One popular Protestant account of the origin of species, widely supported by the English religious and academic establishment of the early nineteenth century, held that God somehow created everything, in all its intricacy, more or less as we now see it. The success of this view owed much to the influence of William Paley (1743–1805), Archdeacon of Carlisle, who, in promulgating this view, compared God to one of the mechanical geniuses of the industrial revolution.⁶⁷

Paley’s Natural Theology (1802) had a profound influence on popular English religious thought in the first half of the nineteenth century, and Darwin is known to have read it. Paley was deeply impressed by Newton’s discovery of the regularity of nature, which allowed the universe to be thought of as a complex mechanism operating according to regular and understandable principles. Nature consists of a series of biological structures that can be thought of as “contrived”—that is, constructed with a clear purpose in mind. Paley argued that the present organization of the world, both physical and biological, can be seen as a compelling witness to the wisdom of a creator god. Yet Paley’s argument depended on a static worldview and simply could not cope with the dynamic worldview underlying Darwinism.

It is important to note that Darwinism became most worrisome to Christians in cultures that had been particularly influenced by literal readings of the Book of Genesis. Such readings are known to have been widespread within popular Protestantism in Britain and the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century, even though more nuanced interpretative schemes had been proposed by Protestant academics in both countries. Despite these more sophisticated interpretations of the Genesis creation accounts, at the popular level it was widely assumed that a commonsense reading of the Bible led to an understanding that the world and humanity had been created in six days.

Darwinism posed a significant challenge, both to this specific reading of the Book of Genesis and to existing models of biblical interpretation in general. Were the six days of the Genesis creation account to be taken literally as periods of twenty-four hours each? Or as indefinite periods of time? And was it legitimate to suggest that vast periods of time might separate the events of that narrative? Or was the Genesis creation account to be interpreted as a historically and culturally conditioned narrative reflecting ancient Babylonian myths, which could not be taken as a scientific account of the origins of life in general and humanity in particular? The debates were many, and they continue to this day.⁶⁸

It is important to note that these challenges to existing biblical interpretations have occurred in a characteristically Protestant context: an ongoing dialogue between the community of faith and its foundational text. The history of Protestantism has been one of constantly revisiting and reevaluating existing interpretations of the Bible, a process that has been precipitated and catalyzed by many factors—including scientific advance.

Although these debates were well under way within English Protestantism by the late nineteenth century, they have become of especial importance in twentieth-century American evangelicalism, especially in its fundamentalist forms. Interestingly, early fundamentalism does not appear to have had any particular difficulties with Darwinism; opposition was a later development that gained sympathy after the celebrated Scopes “monkey” trial of 1925.⁶⁹ In May 1925, John T. Scopes, a young high-school science teacher, fell afoul of a recently adopted statute that prohibited the teaching of evolution in Tennessee’s public schools. The American Civil Liberties Union moved in to support Scopes, while William Jennings Bryan served as prosecution counsel. The trial proved to be something of a public relations disaster for fundamentalism.

Bryan, who had billed the trial as a “duel to the death” between Christianity and atheism, was totally wrong-footed by the celebrated agnostic attorney Clarence Darrow. Bryan was called to the stand as a witness for the defense and interrogated concerning his views on evolution. Bryan was forced to admit that he had no knowledge of geology, comparative religions, or ancient civilizations, and he showed himself to have hopelessly naïve religious views. In the end, Bryan won the trial but lost the public relations war. Fundamentalists were easily portrayed as ignorant of both science and the problems of biblical interpretation.

So what of the issue today? Some North American evangelicals—such as those generally described as “creationists”—remain adamant that all forms of the theory of biological evolution are contrary to the teaching of the Bible. This was certainly the view taken in the nineteenth century by the highly influential conservative Protestant writer Charles Hodge, for whom Darwinism was simply a form of atheism. It must, however, be pointed out that Hodge drew a distinction between “Darwinism” and “evolution” and regarded the Darwinian viewpoint as unacceptable on account of its apparent rejection of the notion of divine design. Hodge was prepared to accept evolution, not as a random process, but as one in which the guiding hand of God could be discerned.

Nevertheless, this has not been the only view within evangelicalism on this matter, as can be seen from the writings of Benjamin B. Warfield and James I. Packer, widely regarded as the most significant evangelical writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, respectively.⁷⁰ In an 1888 essay on Darwin, Warfield set out his view that the Darwinian doctrine of natural selection could easily be accommodated by evangelicals as a natural law operating under the aegis of the general providence of God. Packer followed Warfield at this point, insisting that he could not see that anything, “in the first chapters of Genesis or elsewhere, bears on the biological theory of evolution one way or the other.”⁷¹ Again, following the lead of Warfield, Packer argued that interrogating biblical statements concerning nature in the light of scientific knowledge might help toward attaining a more precise exegesis of them. For though exegesis had to be controlled by the text itself, not shaped by extraneous considerations, the exegetical process was constantly stimulated by questioning the text.

The views of Packer and Warfield have not met with universal assent. Creationists such as Henry Morris have somewhat hastily dismissed the approach adopted by Warfield as a clear case of “pervasive theological apostasy.” However, Packer’s and Warfield’s views are illustrative of a major trend within historical evangelicalism—seeking to reconcile the biblical creation accounts with the insights of the natural sciences. Creationist writers have attempted to suppress or dismiss this prominent section of the evangelical movement, often insisting that an openly anti-evolutionary stance is an essential element of evangelical identity.⁷² The reality is otherwise.

Four major positions are now found on this matter within modern American evangelicalism; each position is linked with a specific way of interpreting the Bible, on the one hand, and of engaging with science, on the other.⁷³ Each can be further subdivided, yielding up nineteen possible Protestant interpretations of the origins of humanity. In what follows, we limit ourselves to identifying four broad categories. Readers might note that the first two are often brought together and treated under the single category of “creationism.” Because there are such great variations within this movement, it seemed appropriate to make a distinction between its “young-earth” and “old-earth” variants.

Young-Earth Creationism

Young-earth creationism represents the continuation of the “common reading” of Genesis, which was widely encountered in popular and at least some academic writing before 1800. On this view, the earth was created in its basic form between six thousand and ten thousand years ago. Young-earth creationists read the first two chapters of the Book of Genesis in a way that allows for no living creatures of any kind before Eden, and no death before the Fall. Most young-earth creationists hold that all living things were created simultaneously, within the time frame proposed by the Genesis creation accounts, with the Hebrew word yom (“day”) meaning a period of twenty-four hours. The fossil records, which point to a much longer time frame and the existence of extinct species, are understood by many young-earth creationists to date from the time of Noah’s flood. This viewpoint is often, but not universally, stated in the form of a 144-hour creation and a universal flood.

Old-Earth Creationism

Old-earth creationism, which has a long history, is probably the majority viewpoint within conservative Protestant circles. It has no particular difficulty with the vast age of the world and argues that the young-earth approach requires modification in at least two respects. First, the Hebrew word yom may need to be interpreted as an “indefinite time participle” (not unlike the English word “while”) signifying an indeterminate period of time that is given specificity by its context. In other words, the word “day” in the Genesis creation accounts is to be interpreted as a long period of time, not a specific period of twenty-four hours. Second, this view proposes that there may be a large gap between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2. In other words, the narrative is not understood to be continuous but to make way for the intervention of a substantial period of time between the primordial act of creation of the universe and the emergence of life on earth. This viewpoint is advocated by the famous Scofield Reference Bible, first published in 1909, although the ideas can be traced back to writers such as the earlier nineteenth-century Scottish divine Thomas Chalmers.

Intelligent Design

The intelligent design movement, which has gained considerable influence in the United States in recent years, argues that the biosphere is possessed of an “irreducible complexity” that makes it impossible to explain its origins and development using any other theory besides “intelligent design.”⁷⁴ Intelligent design does not deny biological evolution; its most fundamental criticism of Darwinism is teleological—that evolution has no goal. The intelligent design movement argues that standard Darwinism runs into significant explanatory difficulties that can only be adequately resolved through the intentional creation of individual species. Its critics argue that these difficulties are overstated, or that they will be resolved in due course by future theoretical advances.⁷⁵ Although the movement avoids identifying this intelligent designer directly with God (presumably for political reasons), it is clear that this assumption is intrinsic to its working methods.

Evolutionary Theism

A final approach argues that evolution is to be understood as God’s chosen method of bringing life into existence from inorganic materials and creating complexity within life. Whereas Darwinism gives a significant place to random events in the evolutionary process, evolutionary theism sees the process as divinely directed. Some evolutionary theists propose that each level of complexity is to be explained on the basis of “God working within the system,” perhaps at the quantum level. Others, such as Howard van Till, adopt a “fully-gifted creation” perspective, arguing that God built in the potential for the emergence and complexity of life in the initial act of creation, so that further acts of divine intervention are not required.

From this survey of Protestant attitudes to Darwinism, it will be clear that some of the movement’s constituent elements retain a degree of suspicion, even hostility, toward the sciences, especially in relation to questions of origins. This is traditionally interpreted as a problem for Protestantism. There is some truth in this view, provided the various constituencies within Protestantism are disentangled, and their numerical strengths and theological positions understood. But it is also a problem for the sciences. Recent polemical works from aggressively atheist scientific popularizers, such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, have created the quite false impression that study of the natural sciences necessitates an atheist worldview.⁷⁶ Many American Protestants accept the idea of intelligent design, not on a scientific basis, but because it affirms the legitimate place of God within the greater scheme of things.

As the Darwinian philosopher Michael Ruse pointed out, Dawkins and Dennett have been “absolute disasters” for the sciences in that they have predisposed many Protestants—not to mention other Christians—against the sciences, reinforcing some of the oldest and deepest prejudices of the movement against scholarly advance and new insights.⁷⁷ Some serious building of bridges and mending of fences clearly needs to be done. It is utterly pointless to alienate nearly one billion individuals from the sciences on the basis of a highly questionable, perhaps even totally spurious, interpretation of the religious implications of the sciences.⁷⁸

With this sobering reflection, we end this survey of the beliefs and cultural manifestations of classic Protestantism. We now turn to document the remarkable changes of the twentieth century, which saw the movement change beyond recognition in many regions of the world. In part 3 of this work, we shall examine the transformation of Protestantism in the twentieth century arising from the global dominance of the cultural influence of the United States of America, the astonishing rise of Pentecostalism, and the burgeoning of Protestantism in the global South.

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