O man of Shuruppak, son of Ubartutu:
Tear down the house and build a boat!
Abandon wealth and seek living beings!
Spurn possessions and keep alive living beings!
Make all living beings go up into the boat.
The boat which you are to build.
—EPIC OF GILGAMESH1
It’s a familiar story: a man is divinely created from the soil. He lives naked and innocent among the animals, all friendly save for a mysterious talking serpent going on about immortality. Things go well until he meets a woman who proves to be a temptress. He takes food from the woman, and disaster ensues. Suddenly his nakedness is a problem and he fashions some clothes to cover himself. He is expelled from his paradise.
This familiar story is not from the Bible, but rather from the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of our earliest surviving works of literature, possibly dating as far back as 1150 BCE, approximately two-hundred-fifty years before the book of Genesis was written. It was discovered in 1853. The story in the epic or an older story from which it derived was well known to the Hebrew writers. The author of the book of Daniel seems to have drawn inspiration from it and portions of Ecclesiastes were based on it as well.2
In similar fashion the book of Ezra references a King Atrahasis, whose name means “exceedingly wise.” The wise Atrahasis was a celebrated hero in the ancient world who has his own legend told elsewhere, in the Epic of Atrahasis, another text outside the Hebrew tradition. Fragments of this epic were discovered in the mid-nineteenth century, shortly before Darwin published On the Origin of Species. Over the next century more fragments were assembled and we now have a remarkable story.
The story tells of the creation of protohumans, fashioned from clay mixed with divine blood. These creatures, male and female, are instructed to marry and raise families, which they do. But they misbehave and anger their creators, who punish them. Unfazed by the divinely ordained droughts and famine, they continue to irritate the gods who become so annoyed they decide to drown them in a great flood—all except Atrahasis, who is warned to build a boat to save himself and other creatures. After the flood, Atrahasis and his fellow survivors are tolerated by the gods, who turn them into normal humans, with normal life spans, and we are now their descendants.
Two characters in this story should sound familiar: a first man made from clay who annoyed his creators and had his life made harder by the gods, and a wise boat builder who saved his race from extinction by drowning. Were these men Adam and Noah by other names?
In 1849 fragments of yet another creation myth, the Babylonian Enuma Elish, were discovered. Believed to date from the eighteenth to sixteenth centuries BCE, the Enuma Elish describes the creation of the world in terms similar to those used in Genesis, a point made in 1876 by George Smith (1840–1876), who first published the story.3 The cosmology matches that of Genesis, with creation started by separating water above and below a firmament.
The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Epic of Atrahasis, the Enuma Elish, and other literature from the ancient Near East came to light for new Western audiences in the late nineteenth century. These tales overlapped with the Genesis creation stories in many ways. What did this mean?
The most natural explanation was that these ancient stories, including the ones in Genesis, had a common literary ancestor. Perhaps they were all based on, say, the Epic of Gilgamesh. Or maybe they all draw on an even older common cosmology, with the newer ones—like Genesis—making more explicit use of the others.4 The term pan-Babylonianism appeared in the late nineteenth century to refer to the emerging conviction that the Genesis creation story comes from much older Mesopotamian (Babylonian) mythology. As a common framework defining the worldview of the ancient Near East, it shows up in variant forms, adapted to local religious contexts.
Pan-Babylonianism raised serious questions. How could the biblical Adam be the starting point for the genealogies of so many different tribes? Assuming that Adam is the shadowy first man at the heart of all these stories, when and where could he have lived to accommodate all the histories that included him?
As Christians wrestled with a literature that had too many Adams, a new origins narrative with no Adam emerged.
That narrative was launched in 1859 with Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. In England, where secularism was finally triumphing over religion, the challenges to the traditional story of Adam were met with a resigned capitulation from many traditionalists and joyous enthusiasm from secularists and liberals eager to break with orthodoxy. If the anemic British Christianity survived at all, it would do so without Adam.
American Christians, however, were far more enthusiastic about their faith, and even convinced that the new sciences would strengthen that faith. Adam, in their eyes, needed no defense. In retrospect, however, one can see the divide appearing between traditionalists defending Adam and modernists learning to live without an Adam.
On the Origin of Species arrived in America in 1860 to a complex reception, both scientifically and theologically. Several of Darwin’s key ideas—most significant, natural selection—received limited support from the scientific community, complicating the discussion. Evolution thus had a variety of definitions, only one of which was Darwin’s, so it is difficult to determine whether someone affirming evolution is necessarily supporting Darwin’s theory. Darwin’s theory taken at face value was full of holes, some of them literal. His theory implied that the fossil record should be packed with transitional forms documenting the history of life. The record should provide evidence for how reptiles evolved into birds, birds into mammals, and simple mammals into primates like us. It did almost none of these things.
Natural selection was another large hole. How, exactly, did natural selection work? Darwin speculated that organisms competing to survive and reproduce in nature would struggle and nature would select those most fit—smarter, faster, taller. This was trivially obvious, but it was also trivial. Of course speed would be important to cheetahs chasing gazelles. But where did cheetahs come from in the first place? It was one thing to imagine natural selection improving the species by pruning the less fit, like the familiar dog breeders had done for centuries. It was quite another to imagine natural selection producing eyes from sightless creatures, legs from the legless, and ears from the earless. Natural selection was just an editor. How did the novelties originate in the first place? Darwin, unaware of genes and their capacity to generate novelty, simply assumed some amazing wellspring of hidden creativity. But endowing nature with such capacities strained the imagination. Most thinking people, including his fellow naturalists, thought natural selection far too feeble to lift a slug out of the mud and onto the pulpit of Westminster Abbey.5
Evolution was hardly new in 1860. In one form or another it had been on the edge of the scientific radar for decades. And the idea of an ancient earth with a dynamic history was widely accepted, even by traditional Christians. The smart money, however, was elsewhere.
The geologist Charles Lyell (1797–1875), author of the influential Principles of Geology, was an important precursor to Darwin, who considered Lyell his mentor. Lyell believed the evidence indicated that God had created species at multiple locations and times.6 Harvard’s Louis Agassiz (1807–1873) believed that God had created species in large numbers, progressively repopulating the earth after extinction events like Noah’s flood. Lyell and Agassiz expressed the consensus of their scholarly communities when they argued that the great design in nature points clearly to a supernatural creation—not a slow winnowing of the unfit. In fact the design that Lyell and Agassiz saw in nature—the celebrated natural theology of the eighteenth century and the reason traditional Christians were enthusiastic about science—was Darwin’s primary target in On the Origin of Species. Darwin’s work explicated a mechanism—natural selection—by which life forms that looked ingeniously designed could be produced without a designer. But skepticism about materialistic processes producing design was already in place by 1860. The wreckage of an earlier proposal testified clearly to those sentiments.
In 1844 Robert Chambers (1802–1871), a well-known Scottish journalist, anonymously published a thoroughgoing evolutionary historical narrative titled Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. (His authorship was acknowledged in 1884 with the publication of the twelfth edition.) The book speculated that the solar system had begun as a swirling cloud of gas out of which the sun and the planets congealed—the so-called nebular hypothesis. Life arose spontaneously on the earth and evolved steadily into the diversity we see today. Humankind was simply the endpoint of these purely natural processes. Chambers’s well-written book was wildly popular and outsold Darwin’s Origin of Species into the twentieth century. Prince Albert read it to Queen Victoria; Alfred Wallace, the codiscoverer of evolution, affirmed that it inspired his work, calling it an “ingenious hypothesis” awaiting support from “more facts and the additional light which more research may throw upon the problem.”7 Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation threw a gauntlet into the face of the prevailing natural theology, with its claim that the wonders of nature arose naturally and not through the “wisdom of God.” God, for the anonymous author of Vestiges, did nothing more than endow the material world with a progressive spirit of the sort animating Victorian social reformers—who, not coincidentally, loved the book.
Many American Christians were quite put off by Vestiges’ deism—as well as its amateurish science—and rejected it. Wallace was one of the few scientists, however, who did not dismiss the oddly anonymous work out of hand. Cautions about Vestiges were soon rewarded as the scientific community turned its attention to this eccentric work of popularization. The condemnations were scathing. The Reverend Adam Sedgwick (1785–1873), who held a chair of geology at Cambridge University, wrote that he could find no value in the “foul book.” “All other scientific men,” he claimed derisively, “are indignant” about it. “If the book be true,” he stated, speaking for most educated Americans in the emerging conversation about evolution, “the labours of sober induction are in vain; religion is a lie; human law is a mass of folly, and a base injustice; morality is moonshine.”8 His eighty-five-page response, with point-by-point refutations, appeared in the July 1845 edition of the Edinburgh Review and insisted that the anonymous author was attempting to seduce his readers, writing with the “serpent coils of a false philosophy,” asking them to “stretch out their hands and pluck forbidden fruit.”9 This wily serpent, hiding behind the protective cloak of anonymity, “would have his readers believe their Bible is a fable when it teaches them that they were made in the image of God—that they are the children of apes and breeders of monsters—that he has annulled all distinction between physical and moral.”10 Few scientists were as colorful in their condemnations as Sedgwick, but virtually all of them shared his dim view of the science in Vestiges. Sales, however, were brisk.
Watching Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation crash and burn confirmed the theological instincts of American Christians skeptical of the creative power of mindless processes. Their faith was true, science was trustworthy, and the former had nothing to fear from the latter.
On the Origin of Species thus arrived in America as an echo to Vestiges, itself an echo of earlier speculations about evolution that had fared even worse. Darwin offered yet another hypothetical outline of natural history at odds with the Bible, incompatible with natural theology, and only weakly rooted in empirical observations. And, sure enough, the response from the scientific community was negative. America’s leading biologist, Louis Agassiz of Harvard, was especially critical of the naturalism of evolution, arguing that science, properly practiced, should lead the seeker to “recognition of the existence of God . . . from the study of His works” and “the importance of the study of the animal kingdom with reference to its manifestation of the power, wisdom, and goodness of God, is very great.”11 Darwin’s speculation that natural selection acting on small variations could produce the grandeur of the natural world was pernicious nonsense.
Agassiz concluded his influential review in the Atlantic Monthly in 1860 with a description of Darwinian evolution as “a scientific mistake, untrue in facts, unscientific in its methods, and mischievous in its tendency.”12 Such critique from a leading authority—Agassiz was “a charming, brilliant lecturer and the most popular scientist in the land”13—provided Christians with genuine scientific reasons to reject both aspects of evolution, the claim that all life had descended from a common ancestor and natural selection as the mechanism of change. Darwin simply got it wrong. This worked well until around 1875 when the scientific community began to accept Darwin’s claim that all life had evolved from a common ancestor,14 but they thought Darwin was still wrong about natural selection. Common ancestry, however, threatened the uniqueness of Adam, so theologians engaged and began to grapple with the implications for Christian doctrine. It is significant that scientific arguments were used ahead of theological ones, reflecting the high view of science held by most educated Christians in America.
The conversation became complex and remained so for decades: the historical reality of evolution—understood as change over time accomplished by God—as an account of past history was becoming accepted by many if not most Christians; negative voices were on the margins, and widespread rejection of any form of evolution was years in the future. Few Christians, in particular, objected to claims that the earth was far older than six thousand years. Nor were they necessarily put off by the idea that life had evolved—progressed would be a better word—over long periods of time from a common ancestor. The idea that life had a history—either continuous or punctuated—leading to human beings was a conclusion finding increasing scientific support: fossils indicated that life at least jumped in complexity, if not changed smoothly, through history; the geographical distribution and comparative anatomies of life forms also suggested that species of today had evolved from common ancestors of yesterday. But how did this change occur?
Various mechanisms, all with meaningful support from at least a few scientists, competed to explain how species evolved. Life on earth had clearly progressed over time in the direction of humans, and the only explanation that made sense was that God guided the process, or at least set it up. One could thus claim—as late as a half century after Darwin—to believe in evolution without accepting the claim that purposeless processes were the engine of change.
One possible evolutionary mechanism was the “inheritance of acquired characteristics,” in which a parent could pass to his or her offspring traits developed during his or her life—muscles, speed, a longer neck. Developed by the French naturalist Jean Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), the idea resonated so well with nineteenth-century intuitions that hard work produced progress that it would be a century before biologists had fully expunged its heresy.
The idea seemed like common sense: organisms develop useful adaptations. A blacksmith, for example, develops large muscles, which aid him in his work. And, as everyone could see, the blacksmith’s young son working at his side was also muscular. Lamarck proposed that father’s muscles were passed on to his son. Similarly, if an industrious mother giraffe stretched her neck to reach food at inconvenient heights, her offspring, when mature, would have longer necks. In this way, species experienced genuine progress as they made their way toward humanity.
Many Christians were attracted to the moral dimensions of Lamarck’s theory, inferring that “the virtue of one generation is the gain of the next.”15 Such progress was good in every way—the reward for diligence and hard work, whether it be a blacksmith working at his anvil, a finch pecking for seeds on the Galapagos, or a capitalist growing his business. Humanity was “a slowly rising race, with a native tendency to outgrow faults.”16 Conversely—and perversely—the inheritance of acquired characteristics also accounted for the universality of sin. Humans had perverted their natures long ago with evil moral choices and their descendants inherited their “predispositions to the wrong.”17 Given that man had “fallen,” wrote the well-educated nineteenth-century clergyman William Rupp, “the doctrine of evolution in its law of heredity . . . shows how the sinful tendency of nature could become persistent in the race: and hence to explain the fact of original or hereditary sin, the theologian need no longer to have recourse to any artificial notion of federal headship or to the monstrous doctrine of an arbitrary imputation of sin.”18 Lamarck’s explanation, especially in the decades before the genetic basis for inheritance was understood, was deeply intuitive, and most naturalists, including Darwin, accepted it. And many assumed—quite correctly—that it could be applied more broadly to culture and society. Lamarck’s idea seemed exactly like the sort of plan God would put in place.
Another alternative to natural selection was orthogenesis, which literally means “evolution in a straight line” and refers to the idea that species evolve along a predetermined path, according to God’s plan.
Orthogenesis drew on the analogy between evolution and human development. Human beings, for example, begin as fertilized eggs and grow in complexity, first in the womb and then outside. They reach adulthood, enter a period of stability, then deteriorate and finally die, following a plan laid out at conception. With evolution, species come from simpler ancestors, increase steadily in complexity until they reach a period of stasis, and then go extinct. The similarities were provocative.
Lamarckism, orthogenesis, and other non-Darwinian mechanisms provided alternatives to natural selection, especially for audiences obsessed with progress. Such ideas were compatible with religion, viewed from the right angle. The blueprints guiding orthogenesis originated somewhere, and God was the obvious answer. The progress of organisms under Lamarckism could be viewed as moral imperatives, with every creature investing in its own purposeful advance for the good of its offspring, which was how God might do it.
Historian Peter Bowler examined the evolutionary options at play in the decades after Darwin published his theory. He concludes that the popularity of the alternatives to natural selection “originated in a long-standing tradition that organic development must be an orderly process controlled by laws inherent in life itself.” Understanding these laws would make biology rigorous and mathematical. Darwin’s emphasis on blind, purposeless natural selection was “moribund and incapable of furthering biological research.”19
The non-Darwinian mechanisms resonated with both the scientific and the religious communities. The former considered Newtonian mechanics the model for science and sought to cast all other sciences in its image; the latter had a strong tradition of discerning theologically friendly designs in the insights of science. Adam and Eve had been intentionally fashioned by God, crafted over time rather than all at once.
Such nuances precluded unanimity in the response to evolution. The scientific community, of course, was most strongly proevolution and the religious community most likely to reject the theory, but the many exceptions make this little more than a caricature. The greatest scientific foe of evolution was the Unitarian Louis Agassiz. The greatest supporter of evolution was Agassiz’s Harvard colleague Asa Gray, an evangelical Christian and friend of Darwin.
In the early twentieth century three Christian responses to evolution can be discerned, all growing into movements that are still alive and well. For modernists, evolution and biblical scholarship had undermined tradition, motivating the need for a new post-Enlightenment Christianity. In complete and self-conscious contrast, fundamentalists circled their wagons around Christian “fundamentals”—miracles, Adam and the Fall, the resurrection—and rejected any scholarship that challenged those fundamentals. A middle group, which I call traditionalists for reasons explained below, emerged out of fundamentalism, trying their best to embrace science, making modest theological adjustments, while avoiding the modernist slide into a liberalism that many considered not merely post-Enlightenment but post-Christian.
The quietest response was that of modernism, which came to understand the Bible as a purely human book, not divinely inspired and certainly not inerrant. Convinced that Christianity’s essential truth was “Love your neighbor,” the modernists rejected scientifically impossible claims of miracles, like the virgin birth and resurrection. The Genesis story about the first man, created in the image of God, was viewed as just a bit of mythology, a morality tale at best.
Modernism was driven partly by the science and biblical scholarship discussed above but also by aesthetics. Modernist Christians stripped their faith of its bloody and judgmental aspects. They wanted a God that would not be so inscrutably unfair as to punish every living creature for one person’s sin. Nor would their preferred deity save people via a bloody crucifixion. The Bible for modernists was a book from the Bronze Age, filled with myths and miracle stories, mangers and angelic choirs like other religious documents from that time. A Christianity that tried to bring such ancient notions into the modern world would surely die of implausibility.
Evolution played only a minor role in the emergence of modernism, and Darwin was just one soldier in a battle that began long before he published his theory. Take the case of Charles Dickens as an example. Dickens wrote a biography of Jesus for his children—a work that reflected the new sanitized Christianity. Titled The Life of Our Lord, it said nothing of Jesus’s atoning sacrifice—the central theological emphasis of the historic Christian tradition. “Because he did such Good, and taught people how to love God and how to hope to go to Heaven after death,” wrote Dickens, “he was called our Saviour.”20 The theology associated with such a faith had no need of a first man. Adam evolved into a metaphor—a way to talk about the human condition but certainly not the source of that condition, and certainly not the reason why every human being is born with a sinful nature.
The fundamentalists occupied the other end of the spectrum. Their strategy would, over the course of the twentieth century, evolve into an elaborate anti-intellectual mixture containing a rejection of mainstream science, a simplistic biblical literalism, and a quixotic attempt to create an alternative “creation science.” The fundamentalists are now so reactionary that they reject anything that disagrees with their reading of the Bible, no matter how well established. I will look at this movement in the next chapter, as it remains an important voice in the American conversation.
Many Christians found themselves caught between the rock of liberalism and the hard place of fundamentalism. And just as the fundamentalists were born out of a concern to protect the truths of the Bible, so a third group, the traditionalists, emerged out of fundamentalism as it grew ever more anti-intellectual and opposed to science. Committed to keeping up with science while remaining faithful to historic Christianity, they are the true descendants of Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, La Peyrère, Miller, Buckland, even the young Charles Darwin—all those who tried to integrate new knowledge with their Christian faith. Their energy came from a commitment to protect traditional Christian beliefs without resorting to the intellectual isolationism of the fundamentalists. I call this group traditionalists because of their solidarity with the attitudes of those who went before them. Their developing story will occupy the rest of this chapter.
This three-part speciation of Christianity is an oversimplification; Christians are arrayed along a continuum from extreme fundamentalism to extreme liberalism, not clumped into three groups. And even that continuum, being one dimensional, is too simple. Other emphases like social justice, holiness, and liturgical styles are needed to properly catalog the players. But these are secondary concerns. These three groups correspond roughly to the three positions that the Gallup Poll uses to identify where people stand on origins: (1) God created humans in their present form; (2) humans evolved with God’s guiding; (3) humans evolved but God had no part.21
The traditionalist response is important for the insight it provides into the future of Christianity. I would go so far as to say that the success or failure of this response determines the long-term future of Christianity in the developed world.22 It seems unlikely that a naïve fundamentalism that rejects science can survive long term in a modern secular world, despite its surprising health in the United States and the developing world (it’s already dead in most of Europe). And liberal Christianity has long struggled, in terms of both adherents and identity, although its decline is being mitigated by people transferring from conservative traditions.23
The traditionalist conversation about the historicity of Adam exploded into prominence in 2011, appearing on the cover of Christianity Today, on NPR, and even on The Colbert Report.24 Unfortunately, this conversation is the same one that started in the nineteenth century; it shows no evidence of an emerging consensus and there is even less reason to be hopeful that one might emerge.
Traditionalists initially approached the Darwinian adventure with a multilayered confidence that contrasts dramatically with the anxious uncertainty we see today among conservative Christians wrestling with evolution. The nineteenth century had been good to American Christianity, for the most part, and there was no knee-jerk defensive reaction to new scientific ideas. The challenges created by the emerging sciences had been met with simple adjustments to the reading of Genesis. The expanded understanding of nature had provided a foundation for a secure natural theology, and Christians had become accustomed to science uncovering “the wisdom of God manifested in the wisdom of the Creation.”25 Many scientists were clergy who saw little conflict between their science and their faith (Darwin had even studied for the ministry in his younger days). Nature was widely embraced as God’s other book, and most educated Christians, while mindful that the Two Books were not always in obvious harmony, nevertheless saw science as a friend rather than an enemy.
Benjamin Breckinridge (B. B.) Warfield (1851–1921) is a classic example of a traditionalist who accepted evolution, before that put one’s job in jeopardy. Warfield was professor of theology at Princeton Seminary from 1887 to 1921, at which time he developed the concept of biblical inspiration widely accepted by evangelicals today, coining the term inerrancy to describe the level of veracity of the Bible. Warfield rejected the modernist view that scripture was primarily a human product. He also rejected as anti-intellectual the emotional and highly personal approach to scripture embraced by the holiness and revivalist movements. Warfield’s view was that God worked through the individual writers of scripture so that their writings were simultaneously their own but also free from error.
During Warfield’s time at Princeton, the seminary followed the conservative Westminster Confession of Faith, drawn up in 1646 to be a confession of the Church of England. When the seminary split in 1929, the departing faction created Westminster Theological Seminary, insisting that its faculty continue to embrace the seventeenth-century confession.26 The Westminster Confession covers every area of Christian theology. Here is what it says about human origins, the Fall, and original sin:
I. Our first parents, being seduced by the subtilty [sic] and temptation of Satan, sinned, in eating the forbidden fruit. This their sin, God was pleased, according to His wise and holy counsel, to permit, having purposed to order it to His own glory.
II. By this sin they fell from their original righteousness and communion with God, and so became dead in sin, and wholly defiled in all the parts and faculties of soul and body.
III. They being the root of all mankind, the guilt of this sin was imputed; and the same death in sin, and corrupted nature, conveyed to all their posterity descending from them by ordinary generation.
IV. From this original corruption, whereby we are utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, and wholly inclined to all evil, do proceed all actual transgressions.
All this language was to be taken literally. Such statements were developed to avoid the ambiguities that made biblical interpretation so difficult. It is easy to see why evolution, polygenesis—the claim that the human race has multiple, separate origins—and the solidarity, uniqueness, and origins of the human species might be controversial.
Remarkably, however, Warfield’s embrace of the Westminster Confession did not lead him to reject evolution, although he certainly wrestled with it.27 Significantly, Warfield even lamented that evolution should not have corroded Darwin’s faith. In an 1889 review of The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, he writes, “There have been many evolutionists who have been and have remained theists and Christians.”28 Warfield also found hints of evolution in the theology of John Calvin. In a 1915 article Calvin’s Doctrine of Creation, he writes, “It should scarcely be passed without remark that Calvin’s doctrine of creation is, if we have understood it aright, for all except the souls of men, an evolutionary one.”29 Warfield notes that Calvin did not have a theory of how evolution worked, but that was an issue easily separated from a belief that evolution had occurred. Calvin, he concludes, “very naturally thought along the lines of a theistic evolutionism.”30 On many occasions Warfield presented a popular lecture on evolution at Princeton in which he stated, “I do not think that there is any general statement in the Bible or any part of the account of creation, either as given in Genesis 1 and 2 or elsewhere alluded to, that need be opposed to evolution.” Warfield found “no necessary antagonism of Christianity to evolution,” provided we allow for “the constant oversight of God . . . and his occasional supernatural interference.” With these concessions, said Warfield, we can embrace evolution and still “be Christians in the ordinary orthodox sense.”31
Warfield was scientifically informed, theologically orthodox, and widely respected as one of the great Christian scholars of his era. He was probably the most important conservative theologian at the turn of the century. It is certainly significant that he did not oppose evolution.
The other thinker I want to look it is George Frederick Wright (1838–1921), whose career ran parallel to Warfield’s. Wright was a respected amateur geologist at a time when much good science was done by amateurs. (Even Darwin was an amateur by the standards of today.) Wright’s scientific work led to significant insights into the geology of the area around Oberlin College, where he spent time as a student and then a professor of New Testament language and literature. Eventually he held the first chair in the Harmony of Science and Revelation.
Alarmed that antireligious polemicists were bashing Christianity with Darwin’s theory, Wright set out to show that Darwin’s theory was compatible with Christianity, especially the theology of John Calvin. From our perspective, after decades of nonstop culture wars and failed attempts at reconciliation between traditionalists and evolution, it’s all but impossible to appreciate that Wright found Darwin’s theory not merely compatible with Christianity but also theologically helpful. Anyone trying to make sense of America’s enduring controversy over evolution needs to understand this.
Wright believed that evolution mitigated some long-standing challenges to Christianity. These theological problems related to origins emerged long before Darwin; and in the century preceding him—before evolution was receiving much attention—they mounted steadily. Take the age of the earth, which we looked at in chapter 7. If the earth was very old with a long history prior to humans, then what was the purpose of this prior history? Why, for example, did God create dinosaurs only to have them go extinct before humans appeared? What accounted for the bad design in nature (think human knees) and the many creatures (think mosquitoes) that seemed to serve no purpose beyond making our lives less enjoyable? What about the different races of humans? If, as leading Christian biologists like Louis Agassiz claimed, God had created different races, some of which preceded Adam, where was the unity to the human race? How could Adam’s sin be universally shared if some human tribes were not descended from him? And what of slavery? Was there a non-Adamic human tribe created by God to be enslaved?
Not one of these problems was created by evolution. But Wright believed he could solve some of them with evolution. He called attention to the progressive character of evolutionary change, noting that God’s sovereign will was to be found in the grand scheme of things, not the details. As Calvin and others had long taught, God’s ultimate purposes often included short-term evils. Judas’s betrayal of Jesus was terrible, but it advanced God’s plan of salvation. Likewise the extinction of dinosaurs was terrible, but it was part of the process leading to human beings. Darwin’s theory unified natural history so that earlier events, no matter how tragic, could be understood as part of a larger divine plan. “The language of Genesis,” he wrote, “may properly be regarded as the language of theistic evolution,” noting in particular that phrases like “Let the earth bring forth,” in contrast to the more definitive “Let there be,” suggested developmental processes.32 Wright was convinced that Genesis contained scientific insights far beyond what its nominal human author could have possessed. “No unaided human intellect could, in the period when the first chapter of Genesis was written, have framed a cosmogony with which modern science could find so little fault.”33
Most significant was that Wright resolved a challenge polygenesis—to which many creationists subscribed, including Agassiz—posed for the traditional concept of sin. Wright noted that Calvin had referred to the “viciousness of human nature” as being “natural” and universally received by “hereditary law.” Wright understood Calvin to be pushing back against claims that humans were not born depraved but simply born into a depraved situation from which they acquired depraved habits.34 (Not surprisingly, a key Calvinist doctrine is known as total depravity.) Wright quotes Calvin where he sounds most like Darwin: “When Adam corrupted himself, ‘he transmitted the contagion to all his posterity.’ From the ‘corrupt root’ of our first known progenitor, ‘corrupt branches proceeding transmit their corruption to the saplings which spring from them.’ And so the ‘corruption commencing in Adam is by perpetual descent conveyed from those proceeding to those coming after them.’”35
Evolution for Wright was simply God’s method of creation, an enduring claim still found among the traditionalists. If God commanded the earth to “bring forth” life in all its abundance, then evolution was simply the description of that bringing forth. As long as evolution embodied the intentions of the creator it was not merely compatible with Christianity, it was also Calvinist theology applied to natural history. Wright and many of his generation were convinced on scientific—not theological—grounds that the evidence ruled out purely naturalistic interpretations of evolution. It was thus congenial to see it as God’s method of creating.
Wright made an important contribution to The Fundamentals, a set of essays that came to define fundamentalism, about which I will say more in a later chapter. In an essay titled “The Passing of Evolution,” he argued that attempts by scientists to remove God’s providential guidance from natural history were not only counter to Christianity but also at odds with the evidence. And, in explaining the origin of humanity, the only viable scenario is the one in Genesis:
Everything points to the unity of the human race and to the fact that, while built on the general pattern of the higher animals associated with him in the later geological ages, he differs from them in so many all important particulars, that it is necessary to suppose that he came into existence as the Bible represents, by the special creation of a single pair, from whom all the varieties of the race have sprung.36
Wright was scientifically and theologically informed. His ideas on evolution had been shaped by a long relationship with Asa Gray, America’s leading evolutionist and another conservative Christian.
A leading historian of religion has labeled Wright “the last of a species.”37 By the time he died in 1921, four years before the Scopes trial, he was a lonely voice in the scientifically barren wilderness of American fundamentalism. Scientists, for the most part, had lost interest in the theological issues raised by their work, not because they had rejected theological truth—although many had—but because it was no longer relevant to their work. Whatever their personal faith positions, their science had become secular. And their community paid less and less attention to the concerns of Christians worried that the biblical Adam might be going extinct.
In a most unfortunate irony, however, scientific investigation and biblical literalism, despite have fully diverged onto separate tracks, retained a shared agreement on one important issue deeply embedded in the larger culture: race relations. And, although they traveled completely unrelated paths to get there, they converged on the conclusion that the white race was superior to all others.