Science and the Doctrine of Creation: The Approaches of Ten Modern Theologians

By Alister E. McGrath

Can Christians take seriously the claims of modern science without compromising their theological integrity? Can theology contribute to our understanding of the natural world without reducing the doctrine of creation to a few flashpoint issues? While there is no shortage of works that treat the intersection between science and religion, little attention has been paid to the theological reception of developments of modern science. Yet a deeper look at the history of Christian thought offers a wealth of insight from theological giants for navigating this complex terrain.
Science and the Doctrine of Creation examines how influential modern theologians—from the turn of the nineteenth century through the present—have engaged the scientific developments of their times in light of the doctrine of creation. In each chapter a leading Christian thinker introduces readers to the unique contributions of a key theologian in responding to the assumptions, claims, and methods of science. Chapters include

- Kevin J. Vanhoozer on T. F. Torrance
- Katherine Sonderegger on Karl Barth
- Craig G. Bartholomew on Abraham Kuyper
- Christoph Schwöbel on Wolfhart PannenbergEdited by Geoffrey Fulkerson and Joel Chopp of the Carl F. H. Henry Center for Theological Understanding, this book grows out of the Henry Center's Creation Project, which promotes biblically faithful and scientifically engaged dialogue around the doctrine of creation. From Warfield's critical appraisal of Darwinian evolution to Pannenberg's pneumatological reflections on field theory, these studies explore how Christians can think more carefully about the issues at stake using the theological resources of their traditions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Release date: Mar 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9780830826759

Alister E. McGrath

Alister E. McGrath is a historian, biochemist, and Christian theologian born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. McGrath, a longtime professor at Oxford University, now holds the Chair in Science and Religion at Oxford. He is the author of several books on theology and apologetics, including Christianity's Dangerous Idea and Mere Apologetics. He lives in Oxford, England and lectures regularly in the United States.

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Cover: GEOFFREY H. FULKERSON, AND JOEL THOMAS CHOPP, SCIENCE AND THE DOCTRINE OF CREATION (THE APPROACHES OF TEN MODERN THEOLOGIANS)

SCIENCE

AND THE

DOCTRINE OF

CREATION

Illustration

THE APPROACHES OF TEN

MODERN THEOLOGIANS

EDITED BY

GEOFFREY H. FULKERSON

AND JOEL THOMAS CHOPP

AFTERWORD BY ALISTER E. MCGRATH

Illustration

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction by Geoffrey H. Fulkerson and Joel Thomas Chopp

1 WILLIAM BURT POPE (1822–1903)

Primary and Secondary Creation by Fred Sanders

2 ABRAHAM KUYPER (1837–1920)

Enlightenment, Science, Worldview, and the Christian Mind by Craig Bartholomew

3 B. B. WARFIELD (1851–1921)

Evolution, Human Origins, and the Development of Theology by Bradley J. Gundlach

4 RUDOLF BULTMANN (1884–1976)

Myth, Science, and Hermeneutics by Joshua W. Jipp

5 KARL BARTH (1886–1968)

The Doctrine of Creation and the World of Science by Katherine Sonderegger

6 T. F. TORRANCE (1913–2007)

Christ the Key to Creation and Theological Science by Kevin J. Vanhoozer

7 JÜRGEN MOLTMANN (1926–)

The Environment of Science and Theology by Stephen N. Williams

8 WOLFHART PANNENBERG (1928–2014)

Nature, Contingency, and the Spirit by Christoph Schwöbel

9 ROBERT JENSON (1930–2017)

History’s God by Stephen John Wright

10 COLIN E. GUNTON (1941–2003)

The Triune God, Scientific Endeavor, and God’s Creation Project by Murray A. Rae

Afterword by Alister E. McGrath

CONTRIBUTORS

NOTES

GENERAL INDEX

SCRIPTURE INDEX

PRAISE FOR SCIENCE AND THE DOCTRINE OF CREATION

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

MORE TITLES FROM INTERVARSITY PRESS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The contents of this book have their origin in a multivenue event called A Modern Creature: Science and the Doctrine of Creation in Modern Theology, which was primarily a two-day conference hosted by the Carl F. H. Henry Center for Theological Understanding at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. The Henry Center also published a series of shorter reflections in tandem with the conference hosted on Sapientia, our digital periodical. All of this was made possible through the generous support of a grant from the Templeton Religion Trust.

We are grateful to all our authors, not only for their original contributions but also their revised and expanded versions published here. We are also thankful to Matt Wiley for his extensive editorial assistance, TaeJung Eric Kim for his careful reading and systematic development of the index, and Peter Highley for his insightful comments on a draft of the manuscript. Tom McCall, previous director of the Henry Center, both supported us in this project and encouraged us along in our various academic endeavors. And finally, this project would not have been possible without the support and editorial guidance of Jon Boyd, whose patience and encouragement played no small role in ensuring that it would see the light of day. Warm thanks are also due to the entire team at IVP for their excellent work in bringing this volume to print.

INTRODUCTION

GEOFFREY H. FULKERSON AND JOEL THOMAS CHOPP

Science and the Doctrine of Creation examines the reception of the natural sciences among Protestant theologians in the modern era, particularly with respect to the doctrine of creation. While there is no shortage of handbooks, introductions, and the like on the relation between science and religion in the abstract, comparatively little research is available on how leading theologians actually engaged particular theories or developments in the natural sciences. This volume is not primarily a constructive work in dogmatic theology, giving a normative account of how Christians should engage scientific developments, nor is it focused on any particular set of scientific questions and challenges. Rather, it is a study in the history of Christian thought intended to introduce the unique contributions of Protestant theologians working in an age increasingly shaped by the assumptions, claims, and methods of the natural sciences.

While much of the contemporary discussion at the intersection of science and theology focuses on the doctrine of creation, it also tends to prioritize questions related to human and universal origins, which traditionally have been only one facet of the doctrine. Drawing on a broad stream of Christian reflection, John Webster identified three topics traditionally treated within the doctrine of creation: the identity of the Creator, the act of creating, and the natures and ends of created things. ¹ When one of these elements receives attention to the neglect of the others, the doctrine itself suffers from atrophy and disorder. For example, the Christian affirmation of the primordial goodness of the created order is understood to be grounded in the nature of God, not merely an optional description tacked on to the end of God’s act of creation in the Genesis narrative. Even the classical doctrine of creation ex nihilo, which figures in several of the following chapters, is about both the original act of creation and God’s radical perfection that conditions the nature of God’s relation to what is other than himself.

When creation moves from that which is created (an original act) to that which is a creature, which remains stable and open to continuing divine interaction, the world itself begins to appear as a stable structure and reliable object of inquiry, however much we take it for granted. Scripture often makes this point by invoking the pillars and foundations on which God created the earth. Far from a naive cosmology, this is a transparent architectural metaphor, tied to the strength and stability of God’s creation. God made the earth, and God alone sustains it (or shakes it). Moreover, these foundations refer not only to material things like trees and animals but also to forces (e.g., gravity) as well as the structure of intelligibility—its unity, meaning, and purpose—such that we can invoke ideas like world and history.

With this third sense of creation, we also touch on what is variously called natural theology or a theology of nature. Our categories refer intelligibly to things because God made it so, which is why even those without Scripture can live in and think truthfully about the world. But it also raises a question: How are we to think rightly about the world that God created? We tend to raise this question either in relation to issues in the natural sciences, such as evolution, genetics, and chance, or in the human sciences with categories like power, ideology, and identity. However different the questions and categories, this is one facet of the age-old question of the relationship between philosophy and theology. In this sense, Darwin’s reflections on adaption or Marx’s reflections on ideology are not fundamentally different from Aristotle’s reflections on substance, nor is the challenge that each presents to the church: whether we should plunder the Egyptians and, if so, how we might do so without turning their gold into new idols. This raises fundamental questions about the nature of reality (ontology, cosmology) and our access to it (epistemology), which are shared by theology, metaphysics, science, and the humanities alike. It also raises questions about the conceptual schemes that we employ and how they relate to our theological understanding.

The chapters that follow engage creation at all three levels. The overall picture that emerges from the volume illustrates the complex way that creation is what John Webster has called a distributed doctrine. Rather than being a topic that we can expound by isolation and abstraction, the doctrine of creation appears throughout the dogmatic corpus, from theology proper to anthropology and eschatology. While creation might appear in these other doctrines, as Webster helps us see, it is equally true that these other doctrines appear in our exposition of the doctrine of creation. It is the distributed nature of the doctrine that especially interests us in this volume. What ancillary doctrine do theologians juxtapose alongside their doctrine of creation, how does this inform their overall picture of creation, and what insights might it provide in our engagement with the various questions and concerns that confront the church, particularly in relation to the natural sciences?

STRUCTURE OF THE VOLUME

We address these questions by examining the approaches of ten modern theologians. For those unfamiliar with these figures, we have provided a few aids. Each chapter begins with a brief biography of the theologian to situate them within their historical context and concludes with a list of recommended works for further reading. These theologians do not represent anything like a uniform approach to theological engagement with the sciences. Indeed, in many cases they might disagree with one another or even use the same words in significantly equivocal ways. Because of this, we have deliberately left some of the key concepts undefined. Our rationale for doing so is partly of necessity—what counts as science is a territory with variegated terrain and a notoriously porous boundary—but also partly heuristic in nature. When the chapters are read as a whole and placed in dialogue with one another, a conversation among Protestant theologians can be seen to emerge, despite the disparate nature of the scientific and theological issues being addressed. By wrestling across the chapters, readers will (we hope) find themselves grappling with wider tensions that remain inherent in the current discussions at the intersection of theology and science.

As for the content of the ten chapters, we begin with theologians from two Protestant traditions that shaped nineteenth-century North America, Methodist theologian William Burt Pope (Fred Sanders), and the Reformed Princetonian, B. B. Warfield (Bradley Gundlach), and one influential European, Abraham Kuyper (Craig Bartholomew). Fred Sanders opens our collection with an account of William Burt Pope’s doctrine of creation, focusing on his three-volume Compendium of Christian Theology. Pope’s doctrine of creation programmatically distinguishes between the divine act of primary creation (God calling all things into existence) and the divine work of secondary creation (the formation of an ordered universe). The former is the realm of metaphysical inquiry and apologetic argumentation; Scripture chooses to say little about it, and science can say nothing in principle. Secondary creation, on the other hand, is the domain addressed by both the biblical account and also scientific investigation. Along the way Sanders considers Pope’s exegesis of the creation narrative in Genesis and how the distinction between primary and secondary creation operates in his judgments regarding evolution and human origins. Sanders’s chapter introduces Pope’s overall theological project and then examines how he deploys the distinction between primary and secondary creation in order to clarify and conserve the main lines of Christian dogmatics. The chapter concludes with a rich consideration of the usefulness of Pope’s distinction for a Christian doctrine of creation today.

Craig Bartholomew’s account of Abraham Kuyper and Bradley Gundlach’s chapter on B. B. Warfield provides an interesting juxtaposition with one another. Kuyper and Warfield were contemporaries and indeed friends. Kuyper’s most substantive work on science and especially evolution appears in his Princeton Stone Lectures (later published as Lectures on Calvinism), which Warfield invited him to present. While Kuyper and Warfield share similar material positions, both regarding science and theology, they also have quite different intuitions about how theology was to interact with the science of their day and, correspondingly, quite different accounts of the relationship not only between science and theology but also between each of these and the wider culture. ²

In Bartholomew’s chapter on Kuyper, two important threads rise to the surface that are, in fact, in tension with one another. On the one hand, creation, common grace, and the image of God all point to the shared yet independent nature of science(s). On the other hand, the fact that reality is ultimately grounded in God and that corrupt humanity cannot properly approach God means that all nonregenerate thinking is ultimately flawed. Moreover, when combined at the level of cultural analysis, these twin themes helped Kuyper develop his approach to worldview analysis. The theologian’s task is not to respond to this or that discrete issue or body of scientific analysis but rather to attend to the various claims made at the comprehensive level. After laying out this Kuyperian account of science, Bartholomew shows how Kuyper applied it to his careful reflections on the many faces of evolutionary theory as it appeared all around him.

Gundlach’s chapter examines Warfield’s complex views on theistic evolution. Warfield has been claimed by evangelicals as a defender of theistic evolution, an opponent of evolutionary theory, and a compromiser whose views on human origins undermined the gospel. Through careful engagement with Warfield’s views as they developed throughout his career, Gundlach shows that his position defies easy categorization. More germane to the volume at hand, Warfield demonstrated a form of theological engagement that humbly, thoughtfully, and openly engaged the prevailing scientific theories of his day while also remaining grounded in Scripture and versed in the tradition. While remaining agnostic to any particular scientific theory, Warfield is in search of some theologically appropriate form of evolution. Gundlach speaks of Warfield’s pervasive developmentalism, evident not only in evolutionary theory but also many theological issues like divine revelation. Warfield’s theological engagement focused especially on theological issues like creation, providence, and supernaturalism, on the one hand, and the unity and nature of the human race, on the other.

Joshua Jipp critically examines Rudolf Bultmann’s demythologization project and how developments in the natural sciences both motivated and influenced his interpretation of Scripture. For Bultmann, myth and science are not concerned with the same tasks or concerns. Whereas mythical thinking is guided by the question of one’s own human existence in its statements about the cosmos, scientific thinking speaks of the world rationally and from a distance. As Jipp shows, Bultmann held that Christians are not called to repristinate the mythical world picture of the biblical authors in part because modern science has made such a project impossible. Rather, Christians should understand Scripture is not giving us an objective picture of the world or making ontological truth claims but instead is expressing faith in man’s present determination by God. Ultimately, however, Jipp concludes that Bultmann’s project depends on a set of unhelpful and unnecessary bifurcations.

Moving from Bultmann to Barth, we turn to another heir of the liberal Protestant theological tradition—one who also broke with it, albeit in very different ways. Nevertheless, the inclusion of Karl Barth in a volume such as this is something of a paradox. On the one hand, Barth is indisputably the most influential theologian of the twentieth century. Every figure in the final five chapters of this collection bears discernible imprints of his thought. On the other hand, Barth had little to say about the relation between theology and the natural sciences in the abstract, and even less about the relationship between particular scientific theories or developments and the Christian doctrines on which they might impinge. Katherine Sonderegger’s chapter sheds light on this curious tension. By investigating Barth’s category of pure saga, Sonderegger charts the similarities and differences between Barth’s doctrine of creation and the influential account laid out in Schleiermacher’s The Christian Faith. In contrast to Schleiermacher, Barth’s avoidance of either conversation or quarrel with the sciences is not because he construes theology as belonging to an entirely separate domain of inquiry. Barth’s doctrine of creation lays claim to the whole of reality, including the world that scientists inhabit and study. The relation between God and creature is a history, but not ordinary history in the everyday sense. Sonderegger’s chapter concludes by sketching how science, properly understood, might be a fruitful partner within Christian theology.

T. F. Torrance, recognized as the greatest British theologian of his generation, is the first of several theologians downstream of Barth. In Kevin Vanhoozer’s chapter, Torrance appears as a kataphysical theologian—that is, a thinker in search of the deep, primordial harmony between being and knowing, between the object and structure of reality and our way of apprehending it. On this basis, Torrance finds agreement among strange companions: patristic thinkers like Athanasius and Philoponus, and modern physicists like James Clerk Maxwell and Albert Einstein. The Trinity, specifically the christological teaching of homoousios, is Torrance’s key not only for theology but for understanding all of reality. It both denies any separation of the way things appear from the way they are and resists any reduction of reality to mere appearances. While this chapter gives extensive attention to what is commonly called epistemology (the study of knowledge, scientia), it will also become clear that much more is at stake than method. In the question of knowledge, for Torrance and Vanhoozer alike, we are confronted with the question of discipleship, which is to say our way of life in the world.

Jürgen Moltmann’s theology is one of the more revisionist of the theologians represented in this volume, especially related to his doctrine of God. The two primary foci of Williams’s essay are, on the one hand, Moltmann’s doctrine of God, which presents creation as an open system, and, on the other hand, what we might call the common environment of science and theology—which Williams is much more optimistic about. Rather than getting bogged down in the details and particular topics of this or that scientific theory, Moltmann demonstrates a form of theology that engages the broad patterns, wider picture, and deep meaning of nature. Moreover, the unity of science and theology is forged in wisdom, as they collectively attend to their shared history of this one world.

Perhaps more than any other theologian surveyed in this volume, Wolfhart Pannenberg embodies the spirit of engagement that inspires this book. According to Christoph Schwöbel, his work presents the most sustained attempt by any systematic theologian of the twentieth and twenty-first century so far to integrate the engagement with the natural sciences in his overall theological enterprise and to show the creativity with which theology can relate . . . to the theory formation in the sciences. Schwöbel situates Pannenberg in the midst of the science-theology discussions in Göttingen. Pannenberg’s primary scientific interlocutors are physicists: Newton and Descartes serve as critical foils, and Faraday and his idea of a field of force is a constructive theological alternative. His motivating concern is, on the one hand, an account of the natural world that has no room for God and theology (i.e., mechanistic accounts of nature, principle of inertia) and, on the other hand, an account of theology that operates independently of science and nature (e.g., gaps, mere revelation, experience). Against both, Pannenberg sets forth a theology of nature, the exposition of which is the focus of Schwöbel’s chapter.

Stephen John Wright’s chapter provides a careful exposition of Robert Jenson’s engagement with a surprising range of scientific theories. Wright shows how the characteristics that mark Jenson’s theology—the central role of the categories of narrative and history, his analogical treatment of time and eternity, his Christological orientation—provided fertile ground for engaging the sciences. Because both science and theology are dealing with the same reality, the world of creation, Jenson refused to construe the relationship between the two as either intrinsically conflictual or merely complementary. Neither is safe from the claims of the other. But with this risk, Jenson’s theology also shows that the two can assist each other with resources that would otherwise be unavailable. Science can agitate theology into productive work, Wright notes, but neither should theology attempt to merely limit itself to the constraints of the contemporary scientific narrative. Wright sketches three vignettes of Jenson’s employment of scientific theories for theological ends: Newton’s description of motion, Stephen Hawking’s distinction between imaginary time and real time, and Darwinian accounts of evolutionary adaptation. In each, Wright deftly uncovers the generative potential of Jenson’s rejection, on theological grounds, of construing science and theology as belonging to discrete epistemic realms.

It is perhaps not surprising that Gunton, the youngest theologian of the volume, exhibits a theology shaped by many of the theologians who precede him, including Barth, Torrance, Pannenberg, and, on a personal level, Jenson (for a time, Jenson was Gunton’s doctoral adviser). In Murray Rae’s presentation of Gunton’s doctrine of creation, several common threads also reappear: creation as an article of faith, the nature of knowledge, the primacy of creation ex nihilo, the intellectual implications of theology’s affirmation of contingency. Rae especially sounds a trinitarian note, and he uniquely situates science as a human cultural enterprise. Rae, following Gunton, is as much interested in science as a human endeavor as he is in any particular body of knowledge.

PROMINENT THEMES AND THREADS

Despite the disparate range of theological approaches and confessional commitments in the figures examined in this volume, several recurring themes can be discerned among them. Perhaps one of the more surprising commonalities is the extent to which they looked to theologians throughout earlier periods of the Christian tradition for resources to deal with distinctly modern problems raised by the natural sciences. B. B. Warfield drew on the Reformed scholastic Johannes Wollebius and his distinction between creation and mediate creation in his evaluation of evolutionary theory. Torrance appealed to Athanasius for his understanding of the relation between science and theology; both Torrance and Gunton find in the sixth-century theologian and physicist John Philoponus a compelling illustration of the generative potential of allowing theological commitments to shape scientific theorizing. Pannenberg invokes Duns Scotus’s account of contingency as a corrective to the mechanical philosophies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The majority of the figures examined here could not be charged with what C. S. Lewis called chronological snobbery. It appears that theologians of the past still have new things to teach us—even within the particular sets of questions and concerns that animate modern, scientifically engaged inquiry.

The range of scientific theories and points of contact with theology are also broader than those concerned with human and universal origins. The theological implications of Isaac Newton’s physics make appearances in chapters six through ten. Newton’s, Einstein’s, and Hawking’s theories of time are explored and put to theological use by Torrance, Pannenberg, and especially Jenson. Faraday’s concept of field of force, Descartes’s formulation of the principle of inertia, and James Clerk Maxwell’s discovery of the speed of light all make appearances. Questions related to evolution and human origins are present as well—Kuyper on Herbert Spencer’s and Ernst Haeckel’s social deployment of the theory, Warfield’s complex engagement with the theories of his time, Barth on the vexed question of the historicity of Adam, Jenson on evolution and prehuman ancestry. Why, we might wonder, did one theologian engage Newton and another Darwin? And how should we who are not physicists discern between Newton and Faraday, or we who are not biologists between Darwin and Spencer? Moreover, what imaginative judgment allowed Torrance to connect relativity with Nicene Christology—and is it warranted, either for theology or for science? Can we find any common theological judgments that exercised these theological moves, or are their motivations for various ressourcement theologies as resistant to ordered reflection and instruction as the range of topics that they addressed?

Several of the chapters also attend to the philosophical assumptions and commitments latent in modern scientific theorizing. Enlightenment figures that shaped scientific concepts such as Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant are present. The shift away from a broadly Aristotelian metaphysical framework is felt as well. In at least some cases, attention to the philosophical issues involved revealed that the apparent conflict between science and theology was grounded in prior competing (often, unexamined) metaphysical commitments. The influence of the mid-twentieth-century Personalists is also increasingly evident downstream of Barth and Michael Polanyi, with resonances in the emphasis on story, history, ethics, and cultural criticism in the final five chapters.

These philosophical interlocutors also bring us to one of the most prevalent threads throughout the chapters. In their engagement with God’s creation, both scientists and theologians share a commitment to reality. If science and theology both deal with one world, then genuine concord should be both possible and expected, but also genuine conflict. ³ With some notable exceptions, the majority of the theologians presented here model what Peter Harrison calls soft irenicism, ⁴ which emphasizes the historical contingency of both concord and conflict between science and religion. Harrison writes,

Peace is a good thing, but it occurs because at that particular time the relevant science just happens to not conflict with religion. It might be the case, for example, that evolutionary theory does not conflict with a Christian view of creation. But for advocates of the soft irenic position, this position is not derived from any overarching principle about the necessary relations between science and religion, and no generalization about science-religion relations will follow from it. It is just that examination of the relevant scientific and religious doctrines yields, in this particular case, no evidence of conflict. ⁵

Following the soft irenic position that Harrison identifies, potential concord or potential conflict between science and religion must be assessed on a case-by-case basis, based on the material claims themselves. ⁶ These chapters provide just such examinations, with an emphasis on the historically contingent reception of scientific theories and equally contingent and imaginative theological responses among a handful of influential Protestant theologians.

1

WILLIAM BURT POPE (1822–1903)

Primary and Secondary Creation

FRED SANDERS

William Burt Pope was born to devout Methodists who had recently emigrated to Nova Scotia. The family returned to England in 1826, and in 1840 William entered the Wesleyan Theological Institute at Hoxton. After twenty-five years of active ministry, in 1867 Pope took up the position of tutor in systematic theology at Didsbury College, Manchester, which he retained until his retirement in 1886. Pope’s three-volume Compendium of Christian Theology remains one of the most comprehensive articulations of Christian doctrine in the Wesleyan tradition.

William Burt Pope was rightly described by a mid-twentieth-century commentator as pre-eminently the Methodist theologian of the nineteenth century. ¹ In 1985 Alan P. F. Sell added that even today the last four words could be omitted without injustice to anyone else; that is, Pope continues to stand as the preeminent theologian in the entire Methodist tradition. Sell goes on to characterize Pope as the warmly devotional exegete, who brings from the store of scripture things new and old, and builds them into an impressive system. ² Indeed, Pope was not only the greatest doctrinal theologian ever to take up the task of teaching Christian theology from the point of view of the Wesleyan revival movement’s spiritual core, but he ranks among the finest practitioners of Christian theology from any confessional group in modern times. To explore his three-volume Compendium is to engage in serious, high-level theology with one of the master practitioners. ³

Pope excelled at stating the large, main ideas of the Christian faith, which makes it difficult to summarize what is distinctive about his theology. Thomas Langford hazarded this characterization: The central idea in Pope’s thought was that of divine grace as effected in human life by the Holy Spirit. ⁴ If that just sounds like mere Christianity rather than an identifiable school of thought, Pope would not be upset by that characterization. He was trying to fill the office of a theological teacher, passing on what the church has always taught, and he wanted his work to be judged with questions like, Is it clear and memorable? Does it lead readers into a deeper understanding of Scripture? Is it a faithful restatement of the great tradition of Christian thought? Does it spend the right amount of time or the right number of pages on the most important things, putting less important items in subordinate places?

Starting on the first page of his Compendium, Pope admonishes his readers of the dignity and sanctity of the study of theology: It is A DEO, DE DEO, IN DEUM: from God in its origin, concerning God in its substance, and it leads to God in all its issues. With a meaning far more than just etymological, Pope declares of theology, His NAME is in it. ⁵

Hence every branch of this science is sacred. It is a temple which is filled with the presence of God. From its hidden sanctuary, into which no high priest taken from among men can enter, issues a light which leaves no part dark save where it is dark with excess of glory. Therefore all fit students are worshippers as well as students. . . . The remembrance of this must exert its influence upon our spirit and temper in all our studies. Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in His holy place? He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart. ⁶

The tone is obviously homiletic, but the work throughout is conceptually rigorous, which delivers it from being naively devotional. It does not degenerate into a weakly expressed series of merely edifying thoughts. Rather, those who have immersed themselves at length in the Compendium can testify that Pope’s integration of theology and spirituality is more nearly patristic than pietistic. Pope breathes the exalted air of the great theological tradition.

Langford says there was very little in Pope’s theology that could not already be found in Wesley or the Methodist theologians Clarke and Watson. The distinctive quality of Pope’s writing lay in his style of expression, his lucidity, and his completeness. ⁷ Alan Sell adds that Pope was ever the constructive systematiser ⁸ who found a place for everything that had been scattered here and there in the Methodist tradition, and he gave great attention to the grand lines of the doctrinal system.

Why, if Pope is such a virtuoso of the grand tradition of Christian theology, has his fame declined so precipitously? Why is he neglected and left unread? It is tempting to say that he was too good a theologian for the time he was born in, and perhaps too good for the people he sought to serve. He produced a serious Methodist Christian theology at a point in history when the Methodist movement was tending in some quarters toward a less serious, and in all quarters toward a less doctrinal, profile. He also produced an irenic synthesis marked by balance and proportion at a time when there was felt need for short, sharp polemics on the frontier with Calvinism. Pope was calmly and coolly anti-Calvinist, eager to show that the main lines of the Christian tradition were on the side of the Methodists (or, to put it the other way around, that the Methodist movement was well aligned with the great Christian tradition). He took the long view and wrote with the goal of forming the