Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 42:166 (Apr 1885)
Article: Science Not Supreme, But Subordinate
Author: Heman Lincoln

BSac 42:166 (April 1885) p. 225

Science Not Supreme, But Subordinate

Heman Lincoln

Professor in Newton Theological Seminary

Christian theology has no controversy with science or with metaphysics. She accepts their teachings, approves their methods, and appropriates their results. A broad theology enriches and completes and buttresses itself with the spoils gathered by scientists and metaphysicians from the realms of matter and of mind.

Theology is not only on friendly terms with metaphysics and science, her life is correlated with theirs: her truths vanish like dreams, or turn into falsehoods, if their truths prove to be unreal. If the universe be only an illusion, its forms and forces but ideal shapes projected from the mind, as Fichte would persuade us; or if the universe be self-existent, unfolding in endless evolution from the simple to the complex, by the necessity of its being,— in either case, God, as Creator and Moral Governor, disappears, and religion becomes impossible. Or if man, as a personal, immortal, and responsible agent, drop out of the universe by absorption in some stupendous scheme of pantheistic development, as with Spinoza or Hegel; or by resolving mental and moral actions into functions of brain and nerve, with Bain and Maudsley; or by turning conscience into a process of association, with Mill; or a process of evolution, with Spencer,— in either case religion is impossible, and theology turns to a jugglery of words. Mr. Mill hopes, indeed, to bridge a more terrible chasm. He says, “We venture to think that a religion may exist without a belief in God; and that religion without a God may be, even to Christians, an

BSac 42:166 (April 1885) p. 226

instructive and profitable object of contemplation.” But a religion without God as the foundation of morals and worship, and without immortal beings conscious of responsibility, to govern, would be a phantom without a genesis or history, having a more shadowy existence than the “forms” of Plato, or the “species” of the Realist schoolmen, for which Mill cherished a profound contempt.

Theology requires, as its fundamental postulates, a personal God; a material universe, created by God but distinct from him; and man, with twofold nature, material, binding him to the universe, and spiritual, linking him to the Creator. Neither of these facts can be omitted from a true system of theology. The completeness of any system is conditioned by its exhaustive analysis of these facts and of their mutual relations.

Theology requires a careful study of the phenomena and laws of nature; for it sees in the phenomena the thoughts of God expressed in material forms, and in the laws the will of God acting by intelligible plan through living for...