Forty years ago, Arthur Rouner wrote about the Congregational tradition, that ministers "must come from the churches [and].. A man comes to be a minister also from being called by God... There is yet another way too, that a man comes to be a minister in the churches of our Way: He is educated. This is not always true in every denomination. In some churches the call is enough. Not so in the Congregational Way. The call is important -- yea, it is the very touch of the divine upon any man's work. But education is needed."¹

To say we have an educated clergy is in addition to our saying that we are persons - and churches - of Faith, Freedom, and Fellowship. And we do have an educated clergy, but that education constantly needs re-evaluation and up-dating. I wish to ask, how up-to-date are our ministers' educations in science?

First, I shall point out that the Congregational ideals of Faith, Freedom, and Fellowship, are also the requirements for science.

Our Faith is in Jesus Christ as our Teacher, our Lord, our God - the same yesterday, today, and forever, and in our own covenants with Him.

Our Freedom is to govern ourselves in our Churches, free from all `central' earthly authority.

Our Fellowship is within our Churches and among fellow Churches, a fellowship which helps us to maintain both our Faith and our Freedom.

Scientists too are persons of Faith, Freedom, and Fellowship. Scientists must have Faith in the regularities of nature - in the daily round of our spinning planet, in the yearly round of the Earth about the Sun and the regular procession of the planets. Scientists must have Faith in the replicability of their experiments and observations, which form the bases for everything from modern medicine to automobile design.

And scientists must have Freedom, to design their own experiments and to believe their own results and to trust their observations. Scientists in the early Scientific Revolution rejected the authority of Aristotle and other `Ancients' over their science, just as early Congregationalists in England and in her American colonies rejected central authority over their Church governance and their interpretations of the Bible as to that governance.

Both Christians and scientists even today must sometimes fight for their freedom. Christians right now are being persecuted in many areas of Asia. In Stalinist Russia geneticists lost their freedom to believe in their own experimental results, as Lysenko ruled under Stalin and Khrushchev that according to Soviet Socialist agriculture, genes do not exist, that instead characteristics of plants and animals acquired from the environment could be transmitted to offspring, that good fertilizer and faithful toil would lead to heritable improvements in crops. And there are those even in Europe and in the United States today who would undermine scientists' faith in their discoveries and the faith of the rest of us in science.

Finally, science can succeed only in an atmosphere of Fellowship. A scientist working in isolation is likened to a Frankenstein, or to H.G. Wells' Dr. Moreau. Scientists must have opportunities to share their ideas, the results of their experiments, and their observations of nature. They need to converse with one another. And they need to publish their results so that other scientists can check them out, and then proceed to the next step.

It is time, as one historian of science has written, that we ought "to revise the popular belief that science and religion are inevitably at odds." ² They are not; they cannot be at odds, unless one or both of them is in error, and we cannot solve the problem by ignoring science and hoping it will go away, by going to live in the country, or in a "1900s House," without electricity, running water, or gas.

Science and Christianity have not always been at odds; in fact, modern science owes it existence to Christianity. It has often been asked, "Why was science as we think of it today first practiced in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Europe and England?"  One answer is that the scientific enterprise was closely bound up with the spirit of Puritanism. A large proportion of Puritans and Separatists were involved with scientific pursuits. The emphasis on the antiauthoritarian doctrine of the `priesthood of all believers' spilled over to the scientific sphere, and led to a rejection of the scholarly authority of the `Ancients' when it conflicted with scientific experience.

Seventeenth century Congregationalists were contemporaries of William Harvey, who discovered the circulation of the blood, of Robert Boyle, who experimented with air and discovered the `laws' governing gas volume and pressure, of Galileo, who insisted that the Church could not decree that the Sun moved around the Earth, and of Francis Bacon who urged that ordinary persons could be trusted to make scientific observations.

John Winthrop, Jr., kept up with advances in chemistry and medicine, was a charter member of the Royal Society of London scientists, and brought a telescope with him when he came from England, which he gave to Harvard. There was little opportunity in the colonies to pursue science, but Winthrop believed that an intellectual ought to learn what he could about the nature of things. Cotton Mather (1663-1728), Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) and other Americans read Isaac Newton's works, and attempted both experiment and theorizing about the Physical Universe and about life on Earth. Cotton Mather was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1713, collected curiosities to send to London, and devoured all the latest books he could lay his hands on, particularly those concerning `natural philosophy,' or science. He understood that the new physics dethroned Aristotle, and rejoiced both in being able to explain the laws of motion and gravity and in being unable any more than Newton to explain gravity itself - thus reserving it to the Will of the Creator.⁴ In 1721 Mather was instrumental in introducing smallpox inoculation, a technique which preceded vaccination, and which either succeeded 100% or utterly failed. He aroused great antagonism, but convinced one doctor, who attempted it successfully. Ironically, Jonathan Edwards died of that disease after being inoculated just as he was to take the Presidency of Princeton. Education in science was important to the Colonists. Many Christians regarded their engagement with the scientific enterprise as part of their "spiritual calling,"⁵ and Thomas Hollis was persuaded to endow a chair of natural philosophy at Harvard in 1723.

Newton's writings were not considered heretical; he himself regarded his work as a defense of the Christian faith.⁶ Newton practiced what is known as "natural theology," also known to natural philosophers since at least the Middle Ages as reading the "Book of Nature," and considered by some as important as reading the Bible. In contrast with revealed theology, natural theology concerns the knowledge of God that is said to be available from contempla­tion of the natural world. It rests upon the conviction that certain truths about the Creator can be deduced from evidences of his design in nature. It was most influential in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,⁷ but almost as popular in the nineteenth. The English botanist John Ray (1627-1705) was one of its early proponents, and the naturalist Gilbert White (of Selborne, 1720-93) one of the most famous.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the scientific world was set on its ear by the introduction of the idea of evolution of life. The idea actually had a very long history in the Western tradition, stretching back at least to the time of the Greeks. But in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, belief in the brief existence of the earth prevented many from seriously believing in the possibility of evolution. Geologists including Charles Lyell (1797-1875) began to dispel that disbelief in the 1830s, and the new ideas seeped into the churches. It may surprise some to learn that evangelicals who were also scientists had remarkably little difficulty in adjusting their theology to the idea of a lengthy earth history.⁸ Two examples will suffice.

Hugh Miller (1802-56), a quarryman and stone mason from the Scottish highlands, was a brilliant geologist and paleontologist, a `fierce' Presbyterian and devout evangelical. Miller collected fossils for ten years, then published his accounts in The Old Red Sandstone (1841), which went through 26 editions. Miller made discoveries on the frontiers of geological knowledge "which impressed him with a profound sense of history, of the earth stretching back eons into the mists of primeval time."⁹

In the United States, Congregationalist Edward Hitchcock (1793-1864), the professionally respected principal of Deerfield Academy, began studying for the ministry at Yale, where he was influenced by Benjamin Silliman, head of the school of science. Silliman inflamed Hitchcock's passion for both geology and theology. In 1821 he took up pastoral duties in Conway, Massachusetts, and began to inventory the geology and mineralogy of the Connecticut River. In 1825 he was offered the professorship of chemistry and natural history at Amherst College, where he stayed for the rest of his life, teaching geology and natural theology. He directed the first geological survey of Massachusetts in the 1830s, became first chairman of the Association of American Geologists, and later headed the State survey of Vermont. Hitchcock taught that we should "be satisfied with general principles, without attempting to find something in Scriptures corresponding to all the details of science."¹⁰

These and more geological reports set the stage in North America for the idea of the evolution of life. The fossil record, as Miller and others plainly showed, revealed a progression in animal and plant life in both size and complexity of life forms.

The first `modern' proponent of evolution was not Charles Darwin, but an eighteenth century French philosopher, Pierre Maupertuis (1698-1759). The notion circulated among the French salons, not making much of a stir, until in 1809 the theory of another Frenchman, Jean-Batiste Lamarck, of how evolution could occur (sort of by `wishing') reached English ears. A Scotsman named Robert Chambers took it up and wrote a small book on it, The Vestiges of Creation, published in 1844. The Vestiges became the talk of both England and America, and was widely denounced.

Darwin had by then written a statement of his own ideas on how evolutionary change in living beings might take place - namely, via natural selection - and had hidden it under the stairs in his house. Thirteen years later [1857], he wrote a letter expounding his theory to an American, the Harvard botanist Asa Gray, and in 1858 made it public - with the identical theory framed by Alfred Russel Wallace - at a meeting of the Linnaean Society, then published it to the world a year later in The Origin of Species. Wallace was pursuing his science in the Far East, and had communicated his idea by mail. So although Darwin did not invent the concept of evolution by natural selection, he was at hand in England, and is often blamed - or credited - for it. This is because many persons, although they did not necessarily reject evolution, resisted the concept of natural selection. It was a logical theory, but its implications for the role of chance were unacceptable to many, and no educated person could avoid the controversy over the idea after 1859.

Four of the most prominent scientists in the United States in the nineteenth century were Congregationalists, and evangelical Christians, and did not avoid the controversy. All four supported belief in evolution, and Darwin's theory of natural selection as the explanation of how evolution works. They were Asa Gray (1810-1888), botanist at Harvard, James Dwight Dana (1813-1895), mineralogist, geologist and zoologist at Yale, George Frederick Wright (1838-1921), minister and geologist at Oberlin, and John Thomas Gulick (1832-1923), missionary and zoologist in Hawaii and Japan.

Asa Gray (1810-1888), who championed Darwin's cause in America, took on one of the most influential naturalists in America at the time - Louis Agassiz, a Harvard colleague who vitriolic ally scorned Darwin's theory.¹¹ Agassiz, raised in Switzerland, came to Harvard in 1848 to teach zoology. He "infused German idealism with religious sentiment," But "both philosophically and scientifically, Agassiz was quite unprepared for Darwin's thunderbolt in 1859. The idea of the transmutation of species was totally contrary to his tenacious belief in the fixity of species." He became "the leading opponent of Darwin not just in America but in the world." He believed that every race of mankind had been specifically created by God for particular geographical zones, and used his belief as a `scientific' defense of slavery.¹² In 1860, Gray held a series of debates with Agassiz on evolution.

Harvard professor of botany Asa Gray was the leading American botanist in the late 1850s, and enjoyed a worldwide reputation. He began a career in medicine, but abandoned it for botany in 1831. Gray, at first a Presbyterian, was dissatisfied with "harshly predestinarian versions of the Reformed tradition," and suspicious of German idealism and Transcendentalism. He was attracted not to the Unitarianism at Harvard, but to Congrega­tion­alism, and joined Park Street Church in Boston. Like Darwin, whom Gray met through Joseph Hooker at Kew gardens in London, Gray maintained a thorough empiricist approach to science.

Gray held that since the Bible was not a scientific textbook, there was no need for "reconciliation." But he saw a moral value in Darwin's book, which upheld the single origin of all humans, and supported Gray's opposition to slavery.

Gray was disturbed by Darwin's seeming atheism in The Origin of Species. Darwin said to Gray that he never intended to write "atheistically," but he was so profoundly disturbed by the misery in the world, he could not see evidence of design in the details, only in the general laws of nature.¹³

George Frederick Wright, a Congregationalist who was both evangelical and intellectually sophisticated, attended Oberlin College in 1850s, where he was impressed by the Oberlin emphases on personal faith, humanitarianism, and abolitionism. After graduating in 1859, Wright entered the seminary at Oberlin. On graduation from seminary he married, took his bride to his first pastor ship in Vermont, where he read Darwin and Lyell, and wrote his first scholarly article defending the inductive method of reasoning. Wright spent his spare time geologizing near the Green Mountains, where he became interested in glaciations.

In 1871 he accepted a call to the First Christian Church in Andover; at Andover he read Asa Gray's papers on Darwinism.

Wright began writing for the journal Bibliotheca Sacra (the main organ of Congregationalist evangelism), and became its editor in 1883, a position in which he continued for nearly 40 years. He wrote articles for Bibliotheca Sacra on Calvinism and Darwinism, in which he saw parallels between predestina­tion and chance, and between the fall from grace and extinctions.¹⁴ At Andover, Wright continued his geological studies, and eventually mapped the extent of the last glacier over the northern United States.

In 1881 Wright was offered the professorship of New Testament language and literature at Oberlin. Then in 1892 he was appointed to the Oberlin chair of Harmony of Science and Revelation, where he continued to show that science had "never found a home outside the nurturing influences of Christianity."

Although a thoroughgoing Darwinist, Wright opposed the vogue of Spencerianism and other extrapolations beyond Darwin's own writings.¹⁵  He and Asa Gray learned that they were kindred spirits. For the duration of Wright's Andover Pastorate they worked together, and remained fast friends thereafter until Gray's death, Wright even editing a volume of Gray's papers on evolution.¹⁶

James Dwight Dana attended Yale's Silliman School of Science, and at age 21 wrote his System of Mineralogy, (1837, current edition still in use). He earned a post as scientist on the United States (Wilkes) expedition of 1838-1842 in the Pacific, and on returning wrote the reports on Zoophytes, Crustacea, and Geology, which established him as the United States' foremost geologist, and some said as America's foremost scientist. In 1856 Dana became Silliman professor of Natural History at Yale. Devoted to the natural theology tradition, Dana argued that science had thrown new light on the Bible, and that there could be no conflict between God's words and God's works.

When Darwin, with whom Dana had corresponded since about 1850, first told Dana his theory, Dana could not accept the idea of evolution, but eventually the scientific evidence won over his mind, and he acknowledged in the second edition of his Manual of Geology, that evolution had occurred, and from then on taught evolution in his classes at Yale.¹⁷

You are all aware of the dramatic beginnings of American Congregational foreign missionary efforts in 1806 under a haystack near Williams College.¹⁸ John Thomas Gulick (1832-1923) was a missionary and member of a Congregational missionary family on Hawaii when he embarked on his own Darwinian experimental program, studying the evolution of land snails in Hawaii. He wrote to Darwin, who praised his work and encouraged him.

Gulick was educated at Williams College and Union Theological Seminary and served as a missionary in Japan and China. His older brother, Halsey, was also a missionary who introduced John to science and natural theology; they both saw the natural world as an expression of God's will. Gulick published some of his evolutionary theory in religious periodicals, and some in a book published by Oberlin College, where he spent five years after retiring from missionary work, 1899-1905, and before returning to Hawaii to live for the remainder of his life.

Gulick wrote that the relation between man and God remains unchanged "whether his creation was carried through many successive stages of long duration, or was completed in one brief moment." He rejected Calvinistic fatalism, arguing that evolution is due to spontaneous change in organisms, which he related to the idea of free will. In 1878 and 1879 Gulick lectured on biological evolution at Doshisha University in Kyoto, a Christian school sponsored by the Congregationalist mission, where introduction to Western scientific thought was especially taught.¹⁹

There were many more scientists with evangelical leanings, including even a few Methodists and Presbyterians. The Princeton theological tradition, for instance, was one of union between natural history and natural theology, upheld by a succession of professors. One was James McCosh, Scottish Presbyterian, who left a pastorate in Scotland to occupy the chair of metaphysics at Queen's College at Belfast, and later became president of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton) in 1868, serving until 1888. McCosh defended evolution, holding that it was useless to tell young naturalists that there was no truth in the theory of evolution.²⁰

And there were Congregationalist seminarians who supported Darwinian evolution, including William G.T. Shedd, who taught at Union Theological Seminary 1869-1894, where he attempted to integrate reason and revelation, and to reinvigorate Calvinism. Shedd used evolutionary theory to interpret history, teaching the idea of progressive development of the world under the guiding hand of providence.²¹ One historian has written that while Unitarians were receptive to evolution, "Congregationalists [were] the most influential in interpreting and propagating" evolutionary theory.²² No doubt it had something to do with the education of Congregationalists.

Later in the century, when Darwin wanted to accumulate evidence in favor of his theory that emotions are expressed in similar ways by animals as well as humans, and by `primitive' as well as civilized men, he recruited persons living in the Pacific - in Australia, in New Zealand, in Borneo, etc., to observe facial expressions and compare aborigines with European settlers. Six of the twenty-one persons who responded to his queries were missionaries. Nine other missionaries, in Australia, New Zealand, and Hawaii, gave replies to Darwin's queries concerning various aspects of his research.

The London Missionary Society was founded in 1795 by Congregationalists, Anglicans, Presbyterians and Wesleyans to promote missions to the heathen. The first 29 missionaries sailed to Tahiti in 1796. The missionaries were free to choose whatever Church government they held right. The Society, which still carries on extensive work in Asia, the Pacific Islands, and Africa, has been maintained almost exclusively by Congregationalists.²³

Many of the early missionaries were educated at dissenting academies, which were rivals of the Universities. (Dissenters from Anglicanism were not allowed to attend Oxford or Cambridge until 1870.) The students were given academic educations, not just in religion but also in languages, history, and sciences, including geology and natural history. Once stationed in the Pacific, they made collections of fossils and natural history specimens, and published them in Missionary Sketches as well as other periodicals. Often the language used suggested acceptance of evolution, or some kind of gradual development of animal species. Nonconformist missionaries had a philosophical outlook geared to scientific change, to biblical scholarship and criticism. Their distrust of the Anglican establishment influenced them to accept Darwinism partly in opposition to the conservative Anglicans. The nonconformist clergy were receptive to the intellectual challenges of contemporary science. They saw no conflict between the earth's being millions of years old and the Mosaic history. They readily cooperated with visiting scientists in the Pacific, including Charles Darwin in 1835-6.

Missionaries themselves took the initiative in scientific collecting and publishing, in scientific journals as well as missionary magazines, and sent specimens back to England for museums at Oxford and for Kew gardens. More than 200 articles were published by British missionaries in the Pacific in scientific journals between 1868 and 1900, and more than 130 between 1901 and 1930, in addition to their scientific articles in religious periodicals. Most Protestant missionaries of all denominations who served in the Pacific were sympathetic to scientific pursuits and after publication of Darwin's Origin of Species they played key roles in extending contemporary knowledge of the natural world.

After publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, evangelicals in the Pacific continued to be in the forefront of scientific advance, in contrast to Anglicans or biblical literalists, both of whom resisted Darwin's ideas. By the late nineteenth century, when science finally began to be taught in the universities, Anglican missionaries in the Pacific who were university educated also participated in scientific studies, particularly ethnography and anthropology.

The twentieth century saw the advent of creationism, of anti-science, and of `creation science.' It began, perhaps, with The Fundamentals, a 12-volume series of articles, published 1910-1915. It was interdenominational and theologically conservative; three million copies were distributed to every pastor, missionary, theological student, YMCA & YWCA secretary in the English-speaking world. Contributors included George Frederick Wright and others who defended evolution and argued for the harmony of science and scripture, and also some relatively unknown authors who lacked scientific education and who attacked evolution.

Creationism gained ground as the Princeton Theological Review gradually became alienated from Darwinian evolution, and printed articles by persons who were not even faculty members.

Then Missouri synod Lutherans, pre-millennialism groups such as Seventh-Day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses, who preached a literal reading of biblical prophecy and the first chapter of Genesis, came on the scene. What they needed to gain attention and to promote their cause was a public spectacle, and they got it in the Scopes trial of 1925, which still reverberates with `fundamentalists.' ²⁴

And what about today? Do we today require Congregational ministers to have a thorough education in science? Do we in Congregational Churches have faith in our own observations? in what we can see with our own eyes? Two years ago at this time, Arvel Steece reminded us that we must commit our mental abilities to the love of God, and that "the intellectual pursuit may well be through science to God." He also reminded us that "we are a Biblical people open to new truth and light from out the Word" ²⁵

Finally I return to Arthur Rouner. "One of the proudest traditions of the Congregational Way in America is its tradition of an educated ministry," he writes. "There was a time in early New England when the minister was often the only educated person in the community... This is no longer true. And yet how much more important now, with college graduates, and a host of intelligent, well-read folk in our congregations, that our ministers be educated, and well-educated. 

"There is so much more one needs to know to be an intelligent man today: literature and art, world affairs and science, humanities and history. The mind can scarcely encompass the knowledge of today. By comparison, it seems little enough that ministers of Christ have four years of hard study in the liberal arts and sciences before attempting their three years of seminary." ²⁶

¹ Arthur A. Rouner, Jr., The Congregational Way of Life, Prentice Hall, 1960 pp.152-3. (Return to text)
² David N. Livingstone, Darwin's Forgotten Defenders: the Encounter between Evangelical Theology and Evolutionary Thought, Grand Rapids, MI, Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1987. p. x. (Return to text)
³ David N. Livingstone, op. cit., p.2 (Return to text)
⁴ Perry Miller, The New England Mind, from Colony to Province, 1967, Harvard University Press, pp.438-442. (Return to text)
⁵ David Livingstone, op. cit., p. 51. (Return to text)
⁶ Ahlstrom, Sidney, A Religious History of the American People, 1975, 2 vols., Doubleday & Co., Garden City, vol.1, p. 428. (Return to text)
⁷ David Livingstone, op. cit., p. 3. (Return to text)
⁸ David Livingstone, op. cit., p.27. (Return to text)
⁹ David Livingstone, op. cit., p. 9. (Return to text)
¹⁰ David Livingstone, op. cit., pp.16-19. (Return to text)
¹¹ David Livingstone, op. cit., p.xi. (Return to text)
¹² David Livingstone, op. cit., pp. 58-9.(Return to text)
¹³ David Livingstone, Op. cit., pp.60-64. (Return to text)
¹⁴ Cynthia Eagle Russett, Darwin in America: the Intellectual Response, 1865-1912, W. H. Freeman & Co., San Francisco, 1976, pp. 28-9. (Return to text)
¹⁵  Herbert Spencer coined the phrase "survival of the fittest" and promulgated his own sociiological version of evolution. (Return to text)
¹⁶ James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: a Study of the Protestant struggle to come to terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870-1900, Cambridge University Press, 1979, pp. 269-298. (Return to text)
¹⁷ David Livingstone, op. cit., pp.71-75. (Return to text)
¹⁸ Harry R. Butman, The Lord's Free People, Swannet Press, Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, 1968, pp. 49-50; Manfred W. Kohl, Congregationalism in America, the Congregational Press, Oak Creek, Wisconsin, 1977, pp. 36-37. (Return to text)
¹⁹ Ron Amundson, "John T. Gulick and the Active Organism," in MacLeod and Rehbock, eds, Darwin's Laboratory; Evolutionary Theory and Natural History in the Pacific, Honolulu, U. of Hawaii Press, 1994, pp. 110-139. (Return to text)
²⁰ David Livingstone, op. cit., pp. 109-111. (Return to text)
²¹ David Livingstone, op. cit., p. 123. (Return to text)
²² James R. Moore, op. cit., p.11. (Return to text)
²³ Niel Gunson, "British Missionaries and Their Contribution to Science in the Pacific Islands." pp. 283-316 in Roy MacLeod and Philip F. Rehbock, eds, Darwin's Laboratory; Evolutionary Theory and Natural History in the Pacific, Honolulu, U. of Hawaii Press, 1994, pp. 283-316. (Return to text)
²⁴ David Livingstone, op. cit., pp.147-159. (Return to text)
²⁵ Arvel Steece, "Towards a New Paradigm for Congregationalism" in A Past with a Future: Continuing Congregationalism into the Next Millenium, Steven A. Peay, ed., Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, The Congregational Press, 1998, pp. 11-16. (Return to text)
²⁶ Arthur A. Rouner, Jr., op. cit., p.153. (Return to text)