In Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind, historian Mark Noll laments that "far too many of us" evangelical Christians "still make the intellectually suicidal mistake of promoting 'creation science' as the best way to resist naturalistic philosophies of science."[1] Bradley J. Gundlach's study of the leading scientists, theologians, and philosophers in the Princeton Seminary and Princeton College community of the 19th and early 20th century suggests that they would have likely endorsed Noll's complaint. To be sure, as Gundlach convincingly demonstrates in Process and Providence: The Evolution Question at Princeton, 1845-1929, the orthodox Protestants of Princeton categorically rejected Darwinism because of its atheism. But they did not embrace antievolutionism. Instead, Gundlach's study reveals that the Princetonians affirmed developmentalism as quite compatible with their Reformed theology.

Rather than anachronistically recasting the history of science and theology at Princeton during this period into neat evolutionist and creationist parties, Gundlach explores how Princetonians themselves actually saw the evolution question. By giving them voice, he offers a fresh perspective on the major questions involved in evolutionary thinking during this critical period. In the first three chapters, Gundlach examines their assessment of evolutionary thinking starting with their response to Robert Chambers' Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, the immediate forerunner of Charles Darwin's work. While rejecting Chambers' proposal on both metaphysical and epistemological grounds, everyone on both the college and seminary faculty who addressed these questions, Gundlach proves, rejected materialistic evolutionism but embraced some form of non-Darwinian developmentalism of the natural world. Gundlach also explains the Princetonians' Battle Plan, as he labels it, for defending the faith. This plan rested upon two closely related convictions: the unity of truth and the division of labor. As the theologian Charles Hodge put it, "It is the weakness of our faith in the infallibility of the Scriptures, which makes us afraid of science, or unwilling that scientific men should pursue their investigations according to their own methods. If we firmly believe that the Bible cannot err, we should be satisfied that the well authenticated facts of science can never contradict its teachings." Instead of retreating behind the Bible and demeaning science, they sought to storm the enemy arsenal, seize and master its weapons, and turn them to their proper use in fortifying the citadel of faith.

In the next three chapters, Gundlach investigates the Princetonians' encounter with the evolution question in the far more forceful form which Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and Thomas Huxley gave to it. Gundlach's careful analysis of the points of agreement and disagreement within the Princeton community is especially insightful. He corrects the misleading impression perpetuated by some historians who have pitted Princeton College president James McCosh over against the seminary's Charles Hodge. According to this caricature, McCosh embraced evolution while Hodge rejected it as atheism. According to Gundlach's more nuanced study, McCosh selectively embraced natural selection as an example of secondary causation carrying out the will of God, the great First Cause. Darwin's theory of the mechanism of evolution threatened religion no more than Isaac Newton's theory of gravitation did. Although it might have removed some of the mystery of the cosmos, it also revealed to humanity the beautiful intricacies of the natural world whose order, beneficence, and purposefulness glorified God. Darwin, of course, rejected this providentialist interpretation of his theory. On this point, McCosh agreed with Hodge's assessment: Darwinism's interpretation of natural selection as random inevitably led to atheism because it precluded, as both McCosh and Hodge insisted, divine intervention, most notably in the creation of the human soul.

Gundlach devotes the subsequent two chapters to surveying the relationship between progressionism in evolutionary biology and progressionism in orthodox Calvinist theology among the generation of Princeton scholars who succeeded McCosh and Hodge. Gundlach's examination of the views of the theologian B. B. Warfield might surprise contemporary readers who assume that Warfield's commitment to biblical inerrancy inevitably led him to reject evolution. Well-known for co-authoring an 1881 article with A. A. Hodge that articulated the Princetonian understanding of inerrancy, Warfield, like numerous Princetonians before him, criticized atheistic naturalism. Yet Warfield, who embraced evolution even more than McCosh, went so far as to consider the possibility that an immaterial aspect of animal life served as a precursor to the human soul, constituting a second and essentially separate evolution alongside the physical one.

In the final chapter, Gundlach analyzes the demise of the consensus about theology and evolution at Princeton. After World War I, the origins debate entered a new phase when William Jennings Bryan led a national antievolution crusade that culminated in the 1925 Scopes trial. The discussion over evolution, Gundlach observes, shifted from persuasion to coercion, from a contest between debating "experts" (scientists and ministers) to an attempt to employ the coercive power of the state to enforce certain views about religion and science in the public schools. This newly politicized landscape produced a division between McCosh's heirs at the university and seminary. Princeton University biologist Edward Grant Conklin and director of the American Museum of Natural History Henry Fairfield Osborne, for instance, led the opposition to Bryan's antievolution crusade. Meanwhile at the seminary, some refused to be drawn into the debate over creation. New Testament scholar J. Gresham Machen, for example, declined Bryan's invitation to serve as a prosecution witness at the Scopes trial. Others, however, backed away from Princeton's longstanding selective embrace of evolution. For instance, Old Testament professor Oswald T. Allis, editor of the Princeton Theological Review, invited the Seventh-day Adventist George McCready Price to submit an article on "flood geology." As Gundlach explains, Allis could not find a scientist who was willing to write a piece on evolution for the journal, so at the urging of a friend, he asked Price. Price penned articles that questioned fossils as age-markers in geology and challenged transmutationism on the basis of botany. Price's "flood geology" later played a highly influential role in the emergence of "scientific creationism." Thus McCosh's heirs at the seminary turned to a man with little formal scientific training who once taught geology at an obscure college in Nebraska—a man who advocated views that contradicted nearly every Princetonian since the 1840s.

Gundlach's study is a model of careful historical analysis. Drawing upon a wide range of primary sources, including personal papers and published material, this lucid account provides a fascinating window into one of the leading citadels of theology and science in American higher education. By explaining the arguments of Princeton's philosophers, scientists, and theologians regarding evolution in their historical context, Gundlach's study helps to set the historical record straight.

Gundlach's study also offers several startling insights. Besides demonstrating the Princetonians' eagerness to embrace selectively some modified forms of evolution, Gundlach explains the critical impact that the fundamentalist antievolution crusade had upon the Princeton Battle Plan. Likewise, Gundlach describes the Princetonians' remarkably robust commitment to the Reformed doctrine of divine providence. The Reformed tradition's vision of God's sovereignty over creation and the reality and efficiency of creaturely activity, from universal laws like gravity to the minutest choices of individual people, Gundlach explains, was "a distinctive teaching of Calvinist orthodoxy that enabled the Princetonians to embrace evolutionary thinking (carefully construed) not only as compatible with their theology, but even as an expression of it."

Gundlach's work also contains some implications that might give participants in today's debates about theology and evolution reasons to rethink their approaches. By pitting purely naturalistic evolution over against an allegedly literal interpretation of Genesis 1-2, both militant secular atheists and "creation scientists" usually employ reductionistic binary reasoning when it comes to issues of science and theology. Gundlach's study, however, suggests other historic alternatives are available to Christian scholars. He shows that theologians and philosophers at Princeton had a thorough knowledge of contemporary science and that many scientists were well-informed about theology. The same cannot always be said of those who engage in the debate over origins today. Moreover, Gundlach demonstrates that "creation science" is actually a modern movement with shallow roots in Christian orthodoxy. Many conservative Protestants today continue the Princeton tradition's critique of modern evolutionary theories because of the metaphysical assumptions and antisupernatural bias in purely naturalistic explanations of the origins of the universe. Ironically, however, other conservative Protestants, especially some with an affinity for Princeton's Calvinist theological tradition, categorically reject Warfield's efforts to reconcile Christian theism with non-Darwinian evolutionary views. They favor an interpretation of Genesis 1-2 that actually stands closer to Price and his intellectual heirs. The distinguished Old Testament scholar Bruce Waltke, for example, resigned his position at Reformed Theological Seminary in 2010 because of his advocacy of theistic evolution and, more important, his criticisms of "scientific creationists" for denigrating modern science. Gundlach also demonstrates why, since the Scopes trial, such views have not often been welcomed in conservative circles. Even though they affirmed inerrancy and the historicity of Adam, A. A. Hodge, Warfield, and J. Gresham Machen could not teach at some conservative seminaries today because they held that Genesis could be harmonized with a non-Darwinian view of evolution. Perhaps Gundlach's study will help conservative Christians rethink some of the missteps made in the early 20th century.

1. Mark Noll, Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 153.

P. C. Kemeny is professor of religion and humanities and assistant dean at Grove City College.

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