162 - God and the Natural World- Religion and Science in Antebellum America

God and the Natural World- Religion and Science in Antebellum America
By Walter H. Conser, Jr.
Columbia, University of South Carolina Press, 1993. 191 pp. $39.95.

This work by Walter Conser, already known to students of nineteenth century Christianity for his important Church and Confession: Conservative Theologians in Germany, England and America, 1815-1866, is especially significant on two fronts. First, it focuses on the relationship between science and religion in pre-Darwin America. Beyond the intellectual longing to insure that science and religion were compatible, neither science nor religion, Conser reminds us, were monolithic entities during that critical, antebellum period. Furthermore, tired metaphors about the "warfare" between enlightened science and benighted religion are both misleading and ill-informed.

Secondly, Conser supplements this already complicated narrative with an impressive accounting of the influence of Germany's Vermittlungstheologie (mediatorial theology) in American theological discourse during this same era. Among the American theologians engaged in dialogue with both science and this German way of doing theology were Horace Bushnell, Charles Hodge, James Marsh, Edward Robinson, Philip Schaff, W. G. T. Shedd, Henry B. Smith, and James H. Thornwell. Of particular import is Conser's research in German archives regarding one mediatorial theologian, August Tholuck, with whom many of the above American theologians studied.

In a chapter titled "The Crisis of Religious Authority," Conser, who teaches philosophy and religion at the University of North Carolina, interprets how a broad American consensus among theologians and scientists unravelled in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Four issues are addressed in detail: the emergence of "scientific" historical studies (including historical-critical methods in biblical studies) in the work of Shedd and H. B. Smith; the reaffirmation of a biblical confessional and its stout efforts to reconcile theology and science, typified by Charles Hodge; the "critical understanding of language" in James Marsh and Horace Bushnell; and the scientific study of human society, which

163 - God and the Natural World- Religion and Science in Antebellum America

encompassed early American efforts in psychology, anthropology, and sociology. In the concluding chapter, Conser argues that Darwin's Origin of the Species (1859) merely accelerated the already existing controversy between American religion and science. By the last third of the nineteenth century, the cultural consensus that reconciled science and religion in antebellum America had collapsed, or so Conser insists. In short, this revisionist work shuffles the cast of characters in nineteenth century American science and theology and realigns them in a rather unorthodox manner. Conser's book is full of insight, new data, and, not infrequently, zestful writing.

John W. Stewart
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, NJ.