Re-enchanting the Universe: Evangelicals and the Rise of Science

Speaker(s): Bruce Hindmarsh, Amanda Russell-Jones
Date: Fall 2018
Length: 1h26m
Product ID: RGDL4802AZ

Purchase Options:

MP3 Download - $5.00

Description

This is a Interface Lecture Series talk given during the fall of 2018.

The popular idea that Christianity and Science have always been fundamentally in conflict dissolves upon closer historical examination. This is true even for popular Protestant spirituality. The significant evangelical spiritual awakening in the North Atlantic that appeared in the eighteenth century took place among those who were the first generation to accept the basic postulates of Isaac Newton and to embrace the new science. The world of nature was now neither possessed of a transcendent spiritual form (Plato) nor an immanent spiritual form (Aristotle), so how was one to understand the relation of things spiritual and things material? A number of the early evangelicals engaged with this question in a sophisticated way. Jonathan Edwards was a young undergraduate at Yale when Newton's Principia and Opticks were first taken out of their wooden crates and added to the college library collection, and he studied these works exhaustively. So also John Wesley produced one of the most comprehensive compendia of the period of the latest findings of science. To these can be added a number of other figures over the course of the century: devout poets, artists, practicing scientists, and theologians who responded to the rise of science with "wonder, love, and praise."

The lecture was followed by response from Amanda Russell-Jones, a Sessional Lecturer in History and Interdisciplinary Studies at Regent College. She holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Birmingham for a thesis entitled The Voice of the Outcast: Josephine Butler's Biblical Interpretation and Public Theology. Dr. Russell-Jones' courses include "Women, Church, and State," "Slavery and Slavery's Children," and "Technology, Wilderness, and Creation."

Interface offers lectures, articles and other resources that probe and preserve the relationship between theology and scienceu2014working toward healing the breach between these disciplines as they have taken shape in our late modern age.

The John Templeton Foundation

Interface has been made possible through the John Templeton Foundation. The Foundation aims to advance human well-being by supporting research on the Big Questions, and by promoting character development, individual freedom, and free markets. The Foundation takes its vision from its founding benefactor, the late Sir John Templeton, who sought to stimulate what he described as 'spiritual progress.'

See All Audio by Bruce Hindmarsh Amanda Russell-Jones

Bruce Hindmarsh is the James M. Houston Professor of Spiritual Theology at Regent College. He also serves as the President of the American Society of Church History. He is author of John Newton and the English Evangelical Tradition: Between the Conversion of Wesley and Wilberforce and The Evangelical Conversion Narrative, and his articles have appeared in Church History and the Journal of Ecclesiastical History.

Amanda Russell-Jones is a scholar focusing on Victorian society, as well as on the issues of slavery and women's relationship to the church in our contemporary world. She is an independent scholar, has been a trustee of an arts training centre, and has preached and spoken at a variety of Christian conferences.

Related Audio

Details / Buy

"Environment" or "Creation": A Scientific and Biblical Framework for Caring for the Earth

Speaker: Loren Wilkinson

Details / Buy

"Jesus Is Lord" - A Global Confession

Speaker: Iwan Russell-Jones

Details / Buy

"LIBERTY" HAS BEEN PRECIOUS FOR CANADIANS AND AMERICANS, BUT HAVE THEY MEANT THE SAME THING?

Speaker: Mark Noll

Details / Buy

"Lookit the Train!": A Two-Person Drama Solving Some of Life's Theological Challenges

Speaker: Jeff Barker, Karen Barker

Details / Buy

"Ours the Cross, the Grave, the Skies" Evangelical Devotion in Classical Hymns

Speaker: Bruce Hindmarsh

Details / Buy

"Raising Cain"

Speaker: Mark Buchanan

Details / Buy

"The Cat's Fugue": Art as a Redemptive Act

Speaker: Luci Shaw

Details / Buy

19th Century Evangelicalism: Social Conscience and Global Vision

Speaker: Don Lewis

Details / Buy

2009 RCSA Academic Symposium

Speaker: RCSA Student Council

Details / Buy

A Call to Christian Leadership

Speaker: John Stott

Details / Buy

A Christian in an Industrial Society

Speaker: Fred Catherwood

Details / Buy

A Critical Examination of Two Myths That Drive Culture: The Axial Age and Dark Green Religion

Speaker: Iain Provan

Details / Buy

A Culture of the Book (CTC I)

Speaker: Iain Provan

Details / Buy

A Dialogue on Christian Sexual Ethics

Speaker: John Spong, John Stott

Details / Buy

A Dialogue on Friendship

Speaker: Luci Shaw, Madeleine L'Engle

Details / Buy

A Discussion on Brian McLaren's 'Generous Orthodoxy'

Speaker: Charles Ringma, Darrell Johnson, Stanley Grenz

Details / Buy

A Fundamental Repentance: Moses and the Beginnings of Biblical Faith

Speaker: Iain Provan

Details / Buy

A good man is hard to find: Christ in the eyes of the poets

Speaker: Roger Lundin

Details / Buy

A Life of its Own: Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison in Our Time

Speaker: Roger Lundin

Details / Buy

A Relentless Revolution of Love: Hospitality as Hopeful Resistance

Speaker: Krish Kandiah

Details / Buy

A Sexual Reformation? Marriage and Sexuality in the Contemporary Paradigm

Speaker: Sarah Williams

Details / Buy

A Soul-Enlarging Legacy: Devotional Poetry, Confessional Narrative, and Epic Vision in Post Reformation English Literature

Speaker: Maxine Hancock

Details / Buy

A Theology of Depression: A Personal Narrative on the Economy of Divine Strength Through Weakness

Speaker: Ross Hastings

Details / Buy

A Trinitarian View of the Human Person

Speaker: Vishal Mangalwadi

Details / Buy

A Woman's Bible?

Speaker: Amanda Russell-Jones

Details / Buy

Access, Assistance, Assurance: God's Full Provision for Authentic Prayer

Speaker: Darrell Johnson

Details / Buy

Accomodation to What? Univocity of Being, Pure Nature & the Anthropology of St. Irenaeus

Speaker: Hans Boersma

Details / Buy

Adam and the Genome: Rethinking the 'Historical' Adam

Speaker: Scot McKnight

Details / Buy

Adam's Ancestors: Five Centuries of Christian Thinking About Human Origins

Speaker: David Livingstone

Details / Buy

African Christianity: Its Character and Its Challenges

Speaker: Sheila Fabiano

Details / Buy

After You Have Done Everything to Stand: Recasting Ageing Within the Pilgrimage of Faith

Speaker: Maxine Hancock

Details / Buy

Agnus Victor: The Atonement as Victory and Vicarious Punishment

Speaker: Henri Blocher

Details / Buy

Agurs Heretofore Unheard Message: An Exposition of Proverbs 30

Speaker: Bruce Waltke

Details / Buy

All Things Made New: The Failure of Secular Hope and the Future of God for the World

Speaker: Richard Bauckham, Trevor Hart

Details / Buy

All Things New: God's Program of New Creation

Speaker: Douglas Moo

Details / Buy

American Literature and the Question of Belief

Speaker: Roger Lundin

Details / Buy

American Prophet: The Legacy and Challenge of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Speaker: Iwan Russell-Jones

Details / Buy

An Evening of Poetry

Speaker: Luci Shaw

Details / Buy

An Evening of Readings

Speaker: Rudy Wiebe

Details / Buy

An Evening with William Paul Young: Reflections on "The Shack"

Speaker: Iwan Russell-Jones, William Paul Young

Details / Buy

An Unexpected Music: Poetry and the Experience of Grace

Speaker: Malcolm Guite

Details / Buy

Analogy of Faith

Speaker: Archie Spencer

Details / Buy

Ancient-Future, Ekklesial, Emerging, Missional, New Monasticism? Practicing Church Theology

Speaker: Jonathan Wilson

Details / Buy

Angels With Broken Wings: What the Disabled Teach Us About Our Common Humanity

Speaker: Bernd Wannenwetsh

Details / Buy

Anger Management

Speaker: Rod Wilson

Details / Buy

Announcing and Entering the Kingdom of God

Speaker: Bob Ekblad

Details / Buy

Apocalypse and Mystagogy

Speaker: John Thompson, Lewis Ayres, Scott Hahn

Details / Buy

Approaching Roman Catholicism: An Evaluation of the Protestant-Catholic Divide

Speaker: James I Packer

Details / Buy

Aquinas on Creation and Its Implications for Modern Science-Religion Dialogues

Speaker: Yonghua Ge