hermeneutical ?-literal, plain

This is a scholarly work, by a competent historian and excellent writer, the book will get nowhere near the attention and reading it deserves, perhaps explaining why it is out-of-print.

The people who need to read it the most, are perhaps the least likely to read it, the young earth creationists. The author has at least two high level motivations to write this book. The first is to demonstrate specifically how in a particular time and place, early 19thC America, a particular religious group, Old Princeton as heir of Reformation Calvinism, works to tie religion and culture together to solve societal intellectual problems. pg 174 "It may be questioned whether religious leaders at any previous point in the nation's past ahd achievd a more unabashed union of gospel and culture than this."(this referring to the Presbyterian Old School baconist interpretation of both science and religion) Secondly, he desires as a historian to cast light on the thoughts of today by tracing their roots historically and philosophically. "It is therefore feasible to suggest that the most important contemporary echo of Baconian biblicism in not to be heard within Presbyterianism as such, but within the huge party of conservative evangelicalism which has adherents within every denomination and which today perpetuates in varying degrees the essential theological tents of Fundamentalism, including biblical inerrancy." pg 173

We are used to the analogy of religion and science at war, we are less accustomed to the 19thC thinking of the two books of God; special revelation in the words of the Bible, and general revelation in the book of nature, as read by science. The two books, not warfare is the analogy that dominated American religious thought, especially the particular school represented by Princeton, until the rise of Darwinianism in 1870's. The contention that the two books, as written by the same reasonable God could not contradict each other is crucial to the theology as explained in the book. The book develops the theme that a particular way of reading both books, Baconism developed as a reaction to the French Enlightment with its accent on the unfettered by religion rise of man's Reason to explain the world.

The best part of the book is what he calls the doxological relationship of theology to science. pg 78 "More often, religious values were stated explicitly. Edward Everett, as usual, captured the full essence of current conceptions: 'the great end of all knowledge is to enlarge and purify the soul, to fill the mind with noble contemplations, to furnish a refined pleasure, and to lead our feeble reason from the works of nature up to its great Author,' Everett considered this 'as the ultimate aim of science.'" Having grown up in a world dominated by materialist science the chapter on doxological science was reason enough to have spent the time reading this book. That our forefather's in the faith, at a crucial time in the development of the relationship of modern science and theology; saw science as anawe-inspiring, devotional subject is a breath of fresh cool air on a world presently seen by science as aloof, uninterested in humankind, random, and downright unfriendly, dominated by forces of impersonality certainly not a loving God.

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