Spencer’s book is based on deep historical insight and research, it is written with elegance and energy, and it achieves the rare feat of being scholarly and serious as well as accessible and engaging. It will be an important resource for anyone who wishes to understand the scientific and religious entanglements that have shaped, and continue to frame, our views of God, humanity, and the cosmos.

Reading Nicholas Spencer’s Magisteria: The Entangled Histories of Science and Religion, I was reminded of T. S. Eliot’s words: “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” For all the intense debates about how best to navigate the territories of science and religion, this is a journey that points back to its origin: the human person. As Spencer convincingly demonstrates, what we think about science and religion often says more about us—our views on what it means to be human and who gets to decide—than it does about science and religion.
The book’s title refers to the biologist Stephen Jay Gould’s model of science and religion as “non-overlapping magisteria,” or two distinct activities that need not interact. Others have variously defined the relationship in terms of conflict, dialogue, or collaboration. Spencer rejects such approaches as too simplistic. In line with the emerging scholarly consensus that there isn’t a single narrative for the history of science and religion, he offers alternative histories. After all, the two enterprises turn out to be “indistinct, sprawling, untidy, and endlessly and fascinatingly entangled.”
But Spencer’s goal isn’t just to emphasize complexity. In his telling, the histories of science and religion tend to converge on two issues: human nature (our origins, purpose, and uniqueness) and authority (who has the right to adjudicate these questions?). Perhaps this is why the topic of science and religion can be so polarizing: if Spencer is correct, we’re dealing not with sterile abstractions about “conflict” or “harmony,” but with profoundly human concerns about who we are, how we relate to each other, and what we might be.
While the story of science and religion is not so easy to track, Spencer’s own career trajectory has been heading toward an ambitious study of the subject for some time. As a senior fellow of the Christian think-tank Theos, he has already written a book about Charles Darwin’s religious beliefs, another on The Evolution of the West, and presented a BBC radio series on the relationship between science and religion. With Magisteria, he has now produced one of the most comprehensive and compelling popular accounts of the entanglements between these contested human activities.
Histories
The book’s historical scope is vast, with the first section alone tracing 1,600 years of (general) cooperation and (occasional) combat between science and religion. Spencer shows that, to a considerable degree, ancient and medieval religious believers supported, legitimized, and helped advance scientific inquiry. Augustine warned that it is “disgraceful and dangerous” for Christians to ignore facts about the physical world. Islamic scholars made original contributions to astronomy, chemistry, and medicine. Christian ideas about the order and rationality of the natural world informed the assumptions that continue to underpin science today. Medieval universities functioned primarily as scientific institutions.
Of course, the terms “science” and “religion” (as well as “science and religion”) are modern inventions, and Spencer acknowledges the risk of anachronism when using them in relation to the ancient and medieval worlds. His point is that, for large parts of human history, what we would now compartmentalize as scientific and religious outlooks were fully integrated in the lives of important figures. The twelfth-century scholastic philosopher Robert Grosseteste combined scientific work with an ecclesiastical career. The fifteenth-century philosopher Nicholas of Cusa was a Catholic cardinal as well as a mathematician and astronomer. Both men believed that God’s creation was subject to quantification and experimentation, and both engaged with ideas (such as the concept of infinity) that would sit easily with developments in twenty-first-century physics.
The book’s other three sections are framed by three major incidents in the history of science and religion, which Spencer sees as central to sustaining the popular myth of endless conflict: the Galileo affair, which seemed to pit Copernicus’s heliocentrism against the Catholic Church; the Huxley–Wilberforce debate, which seemed to pit Darwin’s new theory of evolution against Christian belief in Victorian England; and the Scopes Monkey trial, which seemed to perform a similar role in Tennessee sixty-five years later.
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If you have the Bible, you have everything you need to minister to souls. You don’t need to become an expert in African American history, critical race theory, or the American criminal justice system to talk about ethnicity today…If the Bible is sufficient, then the Bible is what you need. 

I want to briefly address two aspects of Scripture that will affect our conversations about ethnicity: illumination and sufficiency. I’ll start with illumination.
If it’s true that the Bible doesn’t privilege certain human perspectives over another, then what is Paul getting at in 1 Corinthians 2:14-16? Paul writes:
The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. “For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.
On the surface, it sounds like Paul is breaking up humanity into the haves (“spiritual”) and the have-nots (“natural”) and then asserting that the haves are the sources of authoritative truth. But read that passage again carefully because that’s not exactly what Paul is saying. The truth resides in “the things of the Spirit of God” in “the mind of Christ,” which is to say, God’s revealed Word. And in quoting Isaiah 40:13, Paul affirms that God’s comprehensive knowledge is beyond any of us, despite the revelation He has given. Nobody can pretend to know everything like God does and so claim omniscient objectivity like God can.
But Paul also labors in this passage to make it clear that not everyone has the same kind of response to God’s revelation. The “natural person” responds with a rejection of God’s Word; he “does not accept” the truths of Scripture. The word in Greek for “does not accept” has to do with welcoming in, like you would a guest to your house.[1] And the natural man won’t do that because God’s Word is “spiritually discerned”—that is, it requires the indwelling Holy Spirit to be accepted.
What is it about God’s Word that non-believers always, without exception, refuse to accept? It’s not necessarily mental assent to the facts contained in the words. Plenty of non-believers agree that Abraham existed, that David was king in Israel, and even that Jesus was a real Rabbi in ancient Palestine. So, what won’t they accept? The unbelieving, natural heart will always reject the intended application of the Word of God because by their nature, they won’t obey God (Rom. 3:10-11; Titus 3:3). As Paul puts it, “For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot” (Rom. 8:7).
So, if we put that all together, what we hear Paul saying is that non-believers who do not have the Spirit of God dwelling in them are unable to accept the truths of Scripture, meaning that they will not respond with a right application of Scripture. On the other hand, believers can and will appropriately read and apply Scripture, though to varying degrees. We “judge all things” in light of the truth of God’s Word, illumined by the Spirit, and so we have the ability to see truth rightly. Nobody can understand anything rightly unless they see its relationship to the ultimate Reality—God—and only believers have the spiritual enablement to do just that. And we live in light of that understanding given to us by God.
So, in a way, the Bible does create a group of haves and a group of have-nots. There are those who bow their knee to Jesus, rightly discerning and obeying His Word; and there are those who refuse to obey and, in so doing, completely miss the purpose of God’s Word. It’s not that unbelievers can’t do accurate exegetical work, rightly arriving at the intended meaning of the authors of Scripture. The problem for anyone outside of Christ is that they can’t respond to that meaning rightly, and they can’t respond rightly because in their sinful, rebellious hearts, they won’t. It’s a problem of the will, not the mind.
It’s worth taking the time to walk through the theological dynamic of the illumination of Scripture because it has huge implications for how we talk about ethnicity in the Church. Many voices in the conversation about ethnic division in the Church would have us lean on not just the Word of God but also on the wisdom of minority groups as a whole, regardless of their spiritual condition. And while I heartily agree with my own need for wisdom from different perspectives, I disagree that “the non-dominant perspective should be given heavier consideration due to the nature of the understanding necessary and provided by minoritized status.”[2] Being part of a minority group doesn’t supply the applicational insight to Scripture that the Church needs—the illumination of the Spirit does! Likewise, European American Christians are no more privileged in their interpretation and application of Scripture than African American Christians. We all share the same Spirit, Who gives the same life and light to all regardless of our ethnicity.
Too often, non-believers and even the enemies of Christ have been lauded within the Church as wise guides on the topic of ethnic division.[3] But “what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial? Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever?” (2 Cor. 6:14-15). I’m not saying that I can’t learn anything from the non-believing world—much of my formal education as an adult has come from secular sources, for which I am extremely thankful. But we would be foolish to think that the world will give us answers for spiritual problems or that ethnic tension in the Church can be resolved by solutions from outside the Church, like critical race theory and intersectionality. If non-believers can’t apply Scripture by the power of the Spirit, then how are they supposed to help us “maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Eph. 4:3)?
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The law requires schools to provide parents with any and all information related to their child’s well-being, to protect students who may be in harm’s way at home, and to knock it off with the sex talk until at least the fourth grade.

“Queer” activist and Florida student Zander Moricz implored CNN’s audience on Friday to immediately take it upon themselves to read the new parental rights law that has caused so much heartburn among leftists. I can only guess that he’s banking on nobody actually doing it because he went on to mischaracterize all seven pages of the thing (with of course no pushback from the anchor).
“If you haven’t read the bill, go read it right now,” he said, “because the language of the legislation makes it so obvious that despite the title, this has nothing to do with empowering parents. This is about de-empowering and harming queer children.”
Let’s call his bluff!
The full text of the law can be read here in the same amount of time it takes to say “gender dysphoria,” but here are just a few key lines on what it directs public schools to do:

“…adopt procedures for notifying a student’s parent if there is a change in the student’s services or monitoring related to the student’s mental, emotional, or physical health or well-being and the school’s ability to provide a safe and supportive learning environment for the student.”
“…not prohibit parents from accessing any of their student’s education and health records created, maintained, or used by the school district.”
“…encourage a student to discuss issues relating to his or her well-being with his or her parent or to facilitate discussion of the issue with the parent.”
“…notify parents of each healthcare service offered at their student’s school and the option to withhold consent or decline any specific service.”

In essence, the language affirms a parent’s right to control and be fully informed about the health and development of his or her child. That means if a school plans to give out hormone replacement drugs, they’re going to need parental consent (a radical concept, I know).