The intellectual intransigence of southerners towards Edwards, especially southern Presbyterians with high views on the eucharist and those opposed to the New Divinity, should not be discounted in an attempt to create a tradition wherein Edwards is primary progenitor of Calvinist thought in North America.

In the 1840s and 1850s the debates over the eucharist between Charles Hodge and John Williamson Nevin raged in the pages of The Princeton Review and The Mercersburg Review. The editors and writers of The Southern Presbyterian Review weighed in on the subject as well. Brooks Holifield noted in his Gentleman Theologians that none of the major southern Presbyterian intellectuals of the era–Robert J. Breckenridge of Danville Seminary, James Henley Thornwell of the South Carolina College, and John B. Adger of Charleston–shared “Hodge’s reservations” concerning Calvin’s and Nevin’s relatively high view of the eucharist.  Southerners also took aim at another scholar controversial in the era, Jonathan Edwards. Beginning in the mid-Eighteenth Century Princeton Seminary exported Edwardean theology throughout both Old School and New School churches in the North but a significant strand of southern Calvinism remained aloof from the New Englander.
John Bailey Adger’s defense of Nevin and the historic Calvinist doctrine of the eucharist led him to evaluate the North American Calvinism in the context of the broader historic Calvinist tradition. Adger’s public opposition elicited annoyance from older and specifically northern-trained ministers in the South who long relied on Edwards’ theology to “prove that that the will was powerless to choose the good without the special influence of divine grace but that the reprobate were yet responsible for their decision to capitulate to that sinfulness.” New England educated John Bocock boasted in The Southern Presbyterian Review that “no man would undertake to refute Edwards if he understood him,” a claim which prompted a prominent southern Methodist to state derisively that Edwards had left nothing behind but a legacy of “difficulties and confusion.”  [1]
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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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We often long for revival in our churches and in our nation. But such revival must first begin with us — a revival of cool, complacent, apathetic hearts strengthened to a renewed life in Jesus Christ by the work of the Holy Spirit in us. “I am exceedingly afflicted; Revive me, O LORD, according to Your word” (Psalm 119:107). God revives His people through the ordinary means of His word, but He also does this through the ordinary means of prayer.

What a man is alone on his knees before God, that he is — and no more. ~ Robert Murray McCheyne
One of my favorite parables of Jesus is found in Luke 18:9-14 — the Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector. Of course, the parable is a little ruined for us in our day, because Pharisees are automatically considered to be “bad guys” in our thinking (although I guess that’s also true for tax collectors). It would not necessarily have been the case in Jesus’ day, however. The Pharisees were the religious leaders in the synagogues, and they were generally considered to be morally and religiously upstanding individuals (at least until Jesus begins to highlight their hypocrisy). It’s a bit like watching the first three Star Wars movies (that is, Episodes I-III) — because we’ve seen Episodes IV-VI and we know that Anakin Skywalker is going to become Darth Vader, it’s very difficult to watch those movies without expecting him to do something bad eventually. So it is with this Pharisee — we know he’s bad, and we almost expect him to pray a bad prayer. But for Jesus’ audience, that was likely an unexpected twist.
This post has to do with prayer, and in Terry Johnson’s wonderful book on The Parables of Jesus, he cites the brief quote from Robert Murray McCheyne that I posted above: “What a man is alone on his knees before God, that he is — and no more.” Johnson goes on to elaborate:
What McCheyne meant was that the contend and manner of our prayers reveal our true convictions about God, life, and eternity. Our prayers reveal our theology lex orandi, lex credendi. According to this ancient principle, the “law” of faith is the “law” of prayer. What we (truly) believe is revealed by how we pray. Moreover, our approach to prayer reveals our approach to life. We live as we pray. Our manner of addressing God reveals the theology through which we address the whole of faith and life. We may put it this way: nothing so reveals our true convictions about life and eternity as our prayer life. … Our beliefs directly shape both our prayers and our life. We live as we pray. We pray as we believe. (Terry Johnson, The Parables of Jesus, pp. 111-113)
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