In his book Separation of Church and State, law professor Philip Hamburger takes issue with what he calls “the standard history of separation [which] has some of the qualities of myth.”[1] This so-called mythological account of the separation of church and state lionizes Thomas Jefferson, whose allegedly prescient ideas “gave currency and constitutional significance to the phrase about separation,”[2] ideas which were eventually institutionalized in 1947 by Justice Hugo Black in the Everson decision. Though Hamburger’s contention that separation is more or less a nineteenth-century invention has been the subject of much criticism, his historical research and insight have nevertheless been praised by some of those same critics as important contributions to our understanding of the forces at work in church-state relations, particularly in the post-bellum period of American history. One noted insight is Hamburger’s argument that the late nineteenth-century rise of specialization helped fuel a growing advocacy by many Americans for a more expansive conception of the separation of church and state than that envisioned by previous generations.
Irrespective of whether a cause and effect relationship can conclusively be shown to exist between specialization and separation,[3] Hamburger’s account lacks any clear explanation of what intellectual currents helped give rise to this age of specialization. This essay, accordingly, will explore those currents, arguing that the age of specialization was a significant consequence of an epistemological shift from Scottish realism to Kantian idealism that took place during the course of the nineteenth century as the academy’s response to Hume’s skepticism. Though the seeds that enabled the ascendancy of German idealism in the American academy were sown in the early 1800s, the arrival of Darwinian naturalism provided a more specific occasion for the conclusive methodological takeover that was accomplished by the end of the century. Furthermore, notwithstanding the vigorous opposition to the takeover by men like Charles Hodge, the rational foundations for the Christian faith were seriously undermined, and as a result it became increasingly popular, even to many Christians, to further privatize religion. Such a relegation of religion to the private, subjective realm helped to mute the voice of traditional Christianity in the public square, which gave way to a secular orthodoxy that would come to dominate the first half of the twentieth century. Thus, a connection between specialization and separation may be plausibly explained by reviewing the epistemological changes of the nineteenth century coupled with the failure of the traditional Christian worldview to satisfactorily provide for an increasingly secular academy a rational unity for the sciences.
The overall point that Philip Hamburger seeks to prove in his book is that a broadly individualistic and anti-clerical transformation of religious liberty, coupled with a strong anti-Catholic bias particularly on the part of nativist Protestants, all led to a radicalized view of separationism in the late nineteenth century that far surpassed the more conservative notion of disestablishment found in the eighteenth century.[4] Columbia University law professor Kent Greenawalt captures Hamburger’s main argument well:
Hamburger’s underlying thesis is that a robust concept of separation is historically distinct from the more constitutionally legitimate ideal of disestablishment. The ideology of anti-Catholicism particularly, and of anti-clericalism more generally, has driven historical understanding of separation and has grossly distorted historical reality.[5]
Of greater concern for this paper, however, is Hamburger’s supporting argument that “the separation of church and state had particular appeal in an age of specialization. Separation often attracted individuals who – whether in fact or in their minds – divided their lives into distinct activities and sought to maintain their freedom within each such activity by restricting the demands of the others.”[6] Hamburger traces elements of this view to “Roger Williams, who sought [in 1644] to separate church from the world, also separated religion from worldly endeavors that required professional or other specialized knowledge.”[7] According to Hamburger, a similar idea of specialization was advanced a century and a half later by Thomas Jefferson: “More directly, in 1815 Jefferson recognized that the separation of clergymen from politics was part of the broader specialization of professional knowledge that has subsequently come to be associated with modernity.”[8] Specifically, Hamburger argues that for Jefferson, “ministers were specialists in religion, hired for their expertise, and had no business instructing their congregants on other matters.”[9] As to how this fits into his larger thesis, Hamburger writes: “Not least, in opposition to the clergy whose authority sustained such a society, Jefferson and his fellow Republicans attempted to separate religion from politics and church from state.”[10] As a consequence, along with the sage of Monticello, “many subsequent Americans attempted, on occasion, to limit religion to a private, personal, or nonpolitical realm so that it would not intrude too much . . . on various other aspects of their lives. . . . Accordingly, increasing numbers of Americans attempted to escape these constraining demands of churches by welcoming various separations between organized religion and other facets of their lives, particularly a separation between church and state.”[11] Though not entirely sympathetic to Hamburger’s view of the development of the separationist doctrine, law professor John Witte nevertheless expresses admiration for the book’s insight into Jefferson’s theory of religious liberty:
What Hamburger shows is that Jefferson’s theory of knowledge also sought to compartmentalize religion, leaving the department of politics and law free from clerical influence or interference. This is not only an intriguing new epistemology of separation. It is also an anticipation of the positivist philosophy of knowledge made famous two decades later by French philosopher Auguste Comte that sought to differentiate all of human knowledge into a series of separate disciplines and specialties.[12]
Witte cites a key ideological connection here between the Jeffersonian version of specialization and the more fully developed version that, to the detriment of the traditional Christian worldview, would dominate the academy only a couple generations later. But whereas Hamburger clearly recognizes the historical connection of one era of specialization to another, his book lacks any coverage of the development of the ideology itself.[13] However, an examination of the intellectual trends that accompany the historical particularities that Hamburger treats would seem to be an important contribution to sustaining the view that he proposes for our consideration. Thus, the remainder of this essay will be devoted to tracing, at least in broad strokes, the epistemological transition that propelled the positivist philosophy to its dominant position in the late nineteenth century. This sketch will include the impact of some of the major intellectuals involved, a discussion of the factors that helped to fuel the transition, and suggestions for understanding how the growth of this anti-metaphysical ideology factored in the diminished epistemic status of religious truth claims, thereby restricting the authority of the proponents of the traditional Christian worldview.
The epicenter for the changes that took place between the age of Jefferson and the age of Comte[14] was the university, where in America the Protestant model of education had been the chosen formula from the colonial days. As formidable as the Protestant model was, however, it also contained an inherent tension in that while Protestants, particularly Calvinists, stressed the unity of sacred and secular knowledge, the church itself retained less control over the academy than it had enjoyed in the pre-Reformation, Catholic university.[15] Not unlike the Catholic model, ministerial duties within Protestantism were closely associated with a high regard for scholarship. As historian George Marsden explains: “Very early in the Reformation, Zwingli and Luther began wearing the scholar’s gown for preaching and, although not all Protestant clergy had university training, “the scholar’s gown was the garment of the Protestant minister.”[16] A significant consequence of the Reformation, however, was that ministers were increasingly trained in universities that, instead of being given degree-granting rights from an ecclesiastical superior such as the pope, were “one step more secular in the sense of being less directly under church control.”[17] This secularization, however, was mitigated by the seemingly impregnable belief that the truths of special revelation (Scripture) could not contradict the truths gathered from general revelation (nature). Marsden explains the impact of this epistemology on the early American academy:
Puritanism was congenial to the study of the natural order. The Reformed emphasis that the creation could be known through reason, combined with the broader Protestant ideal that one could serve and glorify God in the mundane as well in special spiritual vocations, stimulated scientific study. Certainly there was no intimation of a warfare between science and religion in New England. Rather the Puritans assumed that natural philosophy (natural science) would serve the interests of religion and point toward the glories of God in creation.[18]
The foundation for this unity of knowledge in the American academy was located in the fusion of Francis Bacon’s inductive method with Thomas Reid’s common sense realism. So heavily invested was common sense realism in the Baconian inductive method that, as E. Brooks Holifield puts it, the Scottish philosophy was essentially labeled “Baconian.”[19] Francis Bacon (1561-1626) is credited with formulating the modern inductive method of inquiry which would become synonymous with scientific research for nearly three centuries. As historian Bruce Kuklick explains, the “natural philosopher” using the Baconian method simply “observed the world around him systematically and from his observations induced generalizations (theories) about the world that gained the status of laws of nature, if they were sustained and acceptable.”[20] Sociologist Eva Marie Garroutte elaborates:
The primary goal of Baconian science was to accumulate facts through refined observation. In this, it asked would-be scientists to employ a methodology different from everyday action only in being somewhat more self-conscious and disciplined. They should observe closely and honestly, taking care not to speculate about what was not actually observable, and to avoid preconceived notions about what they would find. Such speculations and preconceptions Baconians condemned roundly with their world pejorative: “hypotheses.”[21]
The Baconian method fit well with America’s democratic ideals “since it implied that any rational, intelligent person could contribute to scientific inquiry.”[22] At the same time, the Baconian view[23] tended toward a complacency that it derived from the Scottish philosophy. Garroutte observes that the “Baconian view troubled itself little with the possibility that the products of its method of inquiry might be inaccurate – that observations might be false or distorted. . . . [From Scottish philosophy] Baconians had derived the argument that God willed them to know the truths of nature because, in so doing, they would be inspired to reverence for its creator. Perceptual error could only derive from careless observation, and the single necessary precaution against this was greater meticulousness.”[24]
Common sense realism was most famously championed by Thomas Reid (1710-1796), who developed his philosophy as a response to the skepticism of David Hume (1711-1776). At the heart of Hume’s skepticism was an epistemology of re-presentationalism, or the notion that the mind does not directly know the external object as it is “presented,” but rather as it is “re-presented” in the form of the “idea.” Drawing from the “idea-ism” of John Locke, Hume’s re-presentationalism naturally ended in skepticism inasmuch as the mind did not directly know the object in reality, but only the idea that the mind had of the object in reality.[25] Reid observed of Hume’s epistemology “that nothing is perceived but what is in the mind which perceives it: That we do not really perceive things that are external, but only certain images and pictures of them imprinted upon the mind, which are called impressions and ideas.”[26] Reid offered this reductio ad absurdum rebuttal to Hume’s re-presentational premise:
If this be true, supposing certain impressions and ideas to exist in my mind, I cannot, from their existence, infer the existence of anything else: my impressions and ideas are the only existences of which I can have any knowledge or conception; and they are such fleeting and transitory beings, that they can have no existence at all, any longer than I am conscious of them. So that, upon this hypothesis, the whole universe about me, bodies and spirits, sun, moon, stars, and earth, friends and relations, all things without exception, which I imagined to have a permanent existence, whether I thought of them or not, vanish at once.[27]
The “common sense” part of Reid’s response to Hume follows:
Let us, therefore, lay down this as a fundamental principle in our inquiries into the structure of the mind and its operations – that no regard is due to the conjectures or hypotheses of philosophers, however ancient, however generally received. Let us accustom ourselves to try every opinion by the touchstone of fact and experience. What can fairly be deduced from facts duly observed or sufficiently attested, is genuine and pure; it is the voice of God, and no fiction of human imagination.[28]
For Reid and his followers, then, it is necessary that we accept the apparently self-evident notion that our senses are a reliable witness to the world as it really is. So even though Bishop George Berkeley (1685-1753) attempted a response to Hume with his own peculiar idealist philosophy,[29] Kuklick explains that contemporaries in America like “[John] Witherspoon and his followers feared that Berkeley would lead to skepticism. . . . Princeton replaced these ruminations by ideas borrowed from the Scots led by Thomas Reid. The Scottish position . . . was the first competent British attempt to refute Hume.”[30] Thus, as authors Mark Noll and David Livingstone observe: “Against the skepticism of philosophers like David Hume, commonsense philosophy featured trust in ordinary human intuitions. . . . With such support, Americans easily turned aside doubts about the reality of the self and of basic cause-and-effect connections. Especially in America, the philosophy of common sense was joined with a trust in scientific induction (the Baconian method) as a way of adjudicating issues in philosophy and theology as well as the study of nature.”[31] Earlier in American history, this fusion was epitomized in the Revolutionary-era educator Witherspoon who, according to Kuklick, “secured at Princeton, and indeed in America, a commanding position for Scottish philosophy, beginning a tradition that would last for over one hundred years.”[32]
Thus, for the better part of the nineteenth century the American academy, following the lead of Witherspoon, refuted the radical skepticism of David Hume through a heavy reliance upon Reid’s common sense realism.[33] This philosophical commitment to Scottish realism takes on broader significance once the intellectual context of the time is taken into consideration. Hume, though never denying the principle of causality as is sometimes charged, did indeed argue that much of what to which we attribute a cause/effect relationship is really no more than a post hoc fallacy.[34] Just because the sun rises after the rooster crows does not mean that the sun rises because the rooster crows. Therefore, Hume could argue in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion that likening the origin of the world to a machine designed by a designer is no more convincing than describing it as similar to animal or vegetable generation. Though it might seem unlikely that matter in perpetual agitation could maintain a constancy in the forms it produces, that in fact is exactly the case with the present world. And such a world will obviously give the appearance of art and contrivance. Were the world any different, could it subsist? But only by an illicit reliance upon anthropomorphism can we thereby infer design, because in truth, thought (Designer) can have no influence on matter (the world) except where a reciprocal influence also obtains (i.e. World Soul). Therefore, all religions suffer insuperable difficulties, and all of their fighting and warring avails them nothing, except to prepare a complete triumph for the skeptic who wisely suspends judgment on such matters. Thus, because he argued that we cannot accurately attribute specific causes to the effects that we perceive, Hume’s skepticism had a devastating impact on natural theology, particularly the formidable design argument.[35] Twentieth-century logical positivist A. J. Ayer would later claim that as a consequence of Hume’s skepticism, “all statements of any sort concerning God are nonsense, since they cannot be true by definition or by empirical verification.”[36]
Whereas Hume’s philosophy led to a fragmentation of knowledge and a strong skepticism concerning the knowledge of God, American intellectuals in many respects remained wed to the Reformers’ view that God had given two revelations that, properly understood, together formed a unity of knowledge. Though not without significant challenges from the Enlightenment thinkers, this Reformation view continued to enjoy a strong influence in America even at the time of the Revolution. As D. H. Meyer writes: “It has been rightly said that the eighteenth-century philosophes rejected the Christian theology but not the Christian metaphysic. They still needed God to explain the universe and account for the natural order.”[37] So while deists like Jefferson “directed their scorn at the more fantastic Christian beliefs and at clerical authority,”[38] their underlying philosophy did not allow for the full-scale assault on rational theism that would later be conducted in the mid to late nineteenth century. Marsden further clarifies the philosophical climate that prevailed in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century America:
Relating faith and science was a matter of relating two approaches to universal truth within this dogmatic context. The truths learned from Scripture and those learned from nature were assumed to be complementary. Christians who had long learned from the pagans could learn even more from their own natural philosophers. And since the creator of heaven and earth was also the author of Scripture, truths learned through the methods of philosophy and those learned from biblical authority would supplement each other and harmonize in one curriculum.[39]
The scientific method, i.e., Baconian induction coupled with common sense realism, “could thus both confirm Christianity and support the moral foundations necessary to the republic. Science and religion were in no way seen as in conflict.”[40] It was on this basic model that prominent universities such as Princeton (1746), Brown (1764), Rutgers (1766), and Dartmouth (1769) were all founded.[41] Marsden observes that in such a context, “broadly Christian concerns were also worked into parts of the curriculum. The natural sciences, for instance, were typically taught ‘doxologically,’ emphasizing the design in nature for which one should praise the creator. Students typically learned ‘evidences of Christianity’ or ‘natural theology’ which reinforced this point.”[42]
By bringing together the seemingly disparate elements of Puritanism and the Enlightenment in an effort to provide intellectual and moral support for separation from England, the American Revolution also had the effect of setting the stage for a contentious battle between the Calvinists and the more liberal Christians for the post-war control of the American academy.[43] Within a scant few decades of the Revolution, “an all-out war was going on over whether American higher education would follow the Jeffersonian revolutionary model of liberal Christian leadership or be controlled by more traditional denominational interests.”[44] The telling factor in this academic struggle would again revolve around Hume. Whereas the Revolutionary-era academics responded to Hume’s skepticism via Reid’s common sense, by the 1830s American intellectuals increasingly turned to German idealism, most notably the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), for what some considered a more satisfying response to Hume.
By his own admission, it was none other than Hume’s radical empiricism that awoke the rationalist Kant “out of his dogmatic slumbers” and compelled him to seek a synthesis of the two perennial epistemological adversaries of empiricism and rationalism. Kant’s solution was that while the senses indeed provided the content of knowledge, it was the mind, with its categorical structure, that formed the empirical data. Philosopher Stuart Hackett notes how to Kant “knowledge would be impossible on either a purely rational or a purely empirical basis.”[45] Rather, every act of knowledge presupposes both a categorical structure of the mind and experienced data: “There is, then, Kant clearly maintains, both a rational and an empirical facet to the production of knowledge: while all knowledge, as consisting of ideas in consciousness, must come from experience, experience itself is possible only because the mind comes to the world with certain pure conceptions of the understanding in terms of which the world is intelligible.”[46] But while Kant’s synthesis of empiricism and rationalism was indeed a stroke of brilliance, even more consequential was the enormous collateral damage that his epistemology incurred on the future of theology and metaphysics. Again, Hackett writes: “The lasting contribution of Kant . . . was that he discerned the element of truth in both these positions. He saw that, although the empiricists were right in maintaining that the mind has no content of knowledge at birth, no innate ideas as such, they were all wrong in failing to cede to the rationalists that the mind does come to experience, not as a wax tablet, but with a rational structure in terms of which the world must be understood.”[47] The problem, however, was that Kant’s synthesis led him to the agnostic conclusion that, because knowledge occurs only after the mind forms the stuff of sense experience, the mind knows only the phenomena (thing-as-it-appears-to-me) and not the noumena (thing-in-itself). The upshot of Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics was to pronounce metaphysical inquiries fruitless because they were an attempt to know the unknowable.[48] That is, metaphysics was seeking to know the thing-in-itself when in reality all that can be known is the world of appearances. Kant’s answer to Hume’s skepticism, therefore, was an agnosticism equally devastating to classical Christian theism.
Kuklick notes how “from the late eighteenth through the early nineteenth centuries Americans ignored German speculation. Instead they sought an answer to skeptical empiricism in the Scottish Enlightenment. The realism of the Princeton philosophers and theologians typified the initial response to the dead end of British empiricism. Kant offered another way out.”[49] Although Kant and the Scottish realists both sought to refute the nihilism that followed from Hume, the two schools of thought were worlds apart on the question of metaphysics. If the noumenal world could be known as Western philosophy had maintained up until Kant,[50] then metaphysics and theology remain secure. But if the noumenal world was impregnable to human understanding as Kant maintained, then, as Ayer rightly observed, transcendent metaphysics is condemned.[51] As long as American intellectuals answered Hume with Reid and not with Kant, metaphysics and theology remained within the spectrum of what was considered “knowledge.”
The beginning of the end for the realists, however, came about in the early 1800s as German intellectuals began to enjoy a burgeoning influence on the American university. From the early nineteenth to the early twentieth century, the vast majority of American academics at one point studied in Germany.[52] Indeed, Germany’s universities were thegraduate schools of America for much of the nineteenth century.[53] Among the first of the American intellectuals to study abroad was Henry P. Tappan (1805-1881), chancellor of the University of Michigan from 1852-1863. Tappan remained largely sympathetic to the traditional view that the conclusions of science and theology would eventually harmonize, but his strong commitment to an absolute freedom of inquiry in science helped inaugurate the rise of specialization in the American university. To Tappan, scientists should be free to conduct their inquiries apart of any a priori theological constraints. Dubbed the “John the Baptist” of the American academy, not only did Tappan help introduce into the American university Kant’s idealism as an alternative to Reid’s realism, he also helped to further the Prussian sense that the university should be controlled by the state, not the church or the theologians.[54] Thus, through Tappan and other like-minded university men, in the period covering the early to mid 1800s the Kantian methodology slowly began to gain a foothold in American intellectual circles.[55] Notably, Hamburger cites Tappan as a prime example of one of the “educators and theological liberals [who] self-consciously recognized the attractions of specialization, including a separation of church and state.”[56] By appointing professors on the basis of their academicqualifications, Tappan was making a strong statement that one’s religious views could be considered distinct from one’s professional credentials.[57] From this Hamburger concludes: “Having separated their states and state schools from particular churches and sects, Americans would now, in Tappan’s vision of professional specialization, separate almost all education, both public and private, from sectarian influence.”[58] To those who opposed Calvinist orthodoxy, this increasing separation of education from ecclesiastical influence was especially attractive as a valuable means of loosing any constraints on the individual’s freedom of belief.[59]
It should be emphasized, however, that American academics did not immediately imbibe Kant’s anti-metaphysical conclusions. Instead, by and large through the efforts of administrators like Tappan and philosophers like Sir William Hamilton (1788-1856), the academy slowly transferred its methodology from the old Scottish realism to the new German idealism.[60] Hamilton’s significance was in providing a mediating position between Reid and Kant, agreeing with the “natural realism” of the former but also with the latter’s notion that our highest wisdom was to recognize the limits of speculative philosophy.[61] Kuklick writes that Hamilton’s “reputation lay in joining the insights of German philosophy and important aspects of the Scottish position. But in welcoming Hamilton the Americans took the first step in transforming collegiate philosophy.”[62] Hamilton was an able adjudicator between the two opposing systems of thought, but yet lacking was a catalyst that would instigate a more definitive shift from Reid to Kant. That catalyst arrived by way of the naturalism of Charles Darwin (1809-1882). Although evolutionary thought had been around for millennia, the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, especially as it was distilled through the universities in the post-Civil War period, brought to the forefront the perceived need to abandon Baconian induction and its view of a static universe for a new methodology more conducive to “hypothesizing.” To put it another way, what the scientific enterprise required in light of Darwin’s theory was a methodology that could somehow account for the unobserved and seemingly unobservable evolutionary dynamics that Darwin and others had posited. Kuklick notes how Origin, being just the most outstanding example of many similar contributions made during this time period,
postulated time-spans and processes for which there was no observable evidence. Late-nineteenth-century science demanded hypotheses and constructs. Explanations required entities unwarranted by the present or recorded past, and discarded the immediate evidence of a stable, unchanging world. The disharmony between these scientific commitments and the older religion was as important as the conflict between Scottish realism and the novel science.[63]
This disharmony between observable reality and scientific postulation was resolved by Kantian (and later Hegelian) idealism. Kantian epistemology asserted that the raw data of sense was formed by the categories of the mind. Contrary to Baconian induction, German idealism contended that the mind did not merely discover what was true through meticulous observation, it helped determine truth because it was, after all, the mind that made reality knowable. For the realist, the universe was intelligible in itself. The mind was well-suited to discovering or perceiving this inherent intelligibility. For the idealist, on the other hand, the intelligibility of the universe was a function of the human intellect. Since the mind is what makes the universe knowable, the mind thus takes an active role in forming the real.[64] Idealism was thereby far better suited for harmonizing the Darwinian hypothesis with its incongruous lack of observable phenomena.[65] An important point, therefore, was that Darwin’s theory did not just affect science, it profoundly affected the philosophy of science. Even more so, as John Dewey would later note, Darwin’s theory had a far-ranging impact on religion as well:
On the one hand, there are making many sincere and vital efforts to revise our traditional philosophic conceptions in accordance with its demands. On the other hand, there is as definitely a recrudescence of absolutistic philosophies; an assertion of a type of philosophic knowing distinct from that of the sciences, one which opens to us another kind of reality from that to which the sciences give access; an appeal through experience to something that essentially goes beyond experience. This reaction affects popular creeds and religious movements as well as technical philosophies. The very conquest of the biological sciences by the new ideas has led many to proclaim an explicit and rigid separation of philosophy from science.[66]
Another important development in this time period was the school of positivism and its subsequent contribution to the increasing disunity between religion and science. Positivism, first articulated by Auguste Comte (1798-1857), aided and abetted the growing professionalization of the academy and the sciences. To put it another way, the breakdown of “Knowledge,” the epistemological and metaphysical unity defended by the Baconian divines, led to the birth of “knowledges,” whose guardians were none other than the professionals, i.e., the positivists, that specialized in their particular fields.[67] E. Brooks Holifield has written that even as early as the 1820s there existed a developing tension in the American academy between “professionals” on the one hand and “democrats” on the other.[68] The Baconian view lent itself to the democratic view of knowledge: any reasonable, meticulous observer could contribute to the field of knowledge. The introduction of positivism, however, led to a growth in professionalization and specialization.
As Marsden notes, professionalization had become evident at Yale by the 1850s and 1860s largely through the influence of German thought: “Like other Americans making the trek to the Continent, what they brought home was not so much the particulars of the German academic system as the inspiration of the ideal of the professional scholar as a cultural leader.”[69] Garroutte elaborates on this tendency toward specialization: “The intellectual conflicts of the day can be described in broad terms as struggles between two competing visions of inquiry into the natural world. One, which we might call Baconianism, imagined a fundamentally sacred science, sustained by contributions from diverse practitioners. The other, which I will call positivism, assumed a strictly secular science, nurtured and presided over by a bounded set of professionals.”[70]
Positivism, as an extreme form of empiricism that followed the Kantian synthesis, precluded religious considerations altogether as actual objects of knowledge. All that was knowable was empirically verifiable phenomena and the relations that existed between those phenomena. Unlike the pre-Kantian empiricists who up until Hume could still argue from empirical particulars to the existence of a Creator,[71] the post-Kantian positivists scoffed at the traditional theistic proofs, mocking them as “pretend science.”[72] Yet, as philosopher and historian Etienne Gilson points out, positivism’s fracturing of knowledge did not prevent its proponents, including Comte himself, from seeking an epistemological unity for the sciences:
Science, whereby [Comte] meant the body of all positive sciences from mathematics to biology and sociology, is an objective representation of what the world actually is; but if we look at it from the point of view of science, the world has no unity of its own. . . . This train of thought led Comte to the conclusion that, although all the material of the future dogma had to be borrowed from science, science alone could never produce the dogma itself. What was needed now, above and beyond positive science, was a positive philosophy – a strictly unified system of thoughts, each of which would be a scientifically demonstrated truth, and all of which, taken together, would constitute a completely rounded explanation of reality. . . . Men no longer believe in theology; they also know that metaphysics is a thing of the past; yet they need a philosophy; but the only thing that remains for them is not philosophy, but science; hence the problem: how will science give us a philosophy?[73]
As far as the late nineteenth-century was concerned, the best answer to that last question came from German idealism. Idealism, however, had a strong “subjectifying” influence on any claims that were not empirically verifiable. Thus, to take the most significant example of what a positivist would call a non-empirical specialty, religion became increasingly privatized as its claims were considered to be subjective in nature. The charge that religion was merely subjective was backed by the positivist separation of language from fact.[74] As Garroutte explains, the Baconian divines “referred to practitioners of ‘theological science’ as primarily responsible to ‘the revelation of God in the Word’ and to natural scientists as primarily responsible to the ‘revelation of God in the world.’ They rested upon the sacred language recorded in the scriptural text as the source of their authority to speak on scientific matters.”[75] In sharp contrast, the positivists undercut the authority of the Baconian theologians, claiming that “the language of the scriptural text only more or less adequately carried truths; it did not embody them.”[76] Garroutte continues: “Baconianism had entailed an assumption that God adapted the structure of nature to articulate with the structures of the human mind. . . . Positivists now suggested, by contrast, that it was revelation that was necessarily so adapted to the mind.”[77]
Thus, traditional Christian essentials such as the virgin birth, incarnation, and resurrection of Christ were not only discarded or reinterpreted, but even considered blasphemous if taken literally.[78] All of these philosophical forces had a tremendous impact on the role of religion in the intellectual world. As one book captures it: “Before 1860 the concern was with specific problems of special revelation; after that time it centered on the serious question of whether there was any revelation at all.”[79] And if the notion of an objective revelation could no longer be intelligently maintained, then religion, like any other non-cognitive human activity, could quite naturally be quarantined within the realm of subjectivity.
It is important to point out, however, that the transition of which we speak was not a simple case of militant secularists seeking to force traditional Christians out of the intellectual world and the public square. Though many anti-religious champions of modernism were indeed at the forefront of the secular revolution, they were joined by a host of liberal Christians who aided the coup d’état by their voluntary retreat to a more subjective understanding of religious truth. A case in point is Christian philosopher and theologian Borden Parker Bowne (1847-1910), of whom D. H. Meyer writes: “The inward emphasis in religion, of which Bowne’s philosophy is but an example, reflects major themes in American evangelicalism and romanticism, and also illustrates the effort of western thinkers to retain a spiritual orientation in a world that was draining the supernatural of empirical significance, hence of meaning.”[80] Such religionists who abandoned the unity of knowledge heretofore embraced by the Baconians opted instead for a unity of faith more suitable to the post-Kantian, post-Darwinian world. That is, once it was no longer intellectually tenable for an objectively apprehended metaphysic to unify such a religiously diverse nation, like the strongly theistic language of the Declaration of Independence had helped to accomplish in 1776, Americans could still nevertheless unite around a shared notion of an experiential, subjective feeling of dependence upon the Unknown Cause, to employ Bowne’s terminology.[81] In the early days of the republic, men as theologically distant as Witherspoon and Jefferson could still agree on a more or less common worldview. Though the former was a theist and the latter a deist, underlying both of their worldviews was a monotheism that was still regarded as a reasonable metaphysical presupposition. A century later, however, with that metaphysical foundation crumbling under the weight of secularity, Americans increasingly compensated for their religious diversity through experientialism instead. By the late nineteenth century, the unity of faith had supplanted the unity of knowledge as the unum for the pluribus. As D. H. Meyer explains: “The implication of all this for religious thought is evident: a secular religiosity that gains real meaning only in the individual heart and is most solemnly expressed in national rituals is singularly well-suited to withstand intellectual challenges. For one’s personal faith is ultimately justified in one’s subjective experience, despite “external” counter-evidence; and faith-in-general is a matter more of patriotic sentiment than of loyalty to some doctrinal system.”[82]
The impact of Kantian idealism on traditional Christianity was that of a double-edged sword. By cutting off metaphysical inquiry from the human sciences, Kant thereby procured for religion the impregnable realm of faith. No one could refute the claims of religion because those claims were not the stuff of objective knowledge. But at the same time and for the same reason, neither could one prove the claims of religion because such claims were by nature beyond the reaches of the human intellect. Thus, religion became a wholly subjective enterprise; religious truth claims were downgraded to something akin to sincerely-held opinions. According to Hamburger, the impact of this subjective view of religion on the public square was quite significant. The growing liberalism, with its non-cognitive take on religious claims, was a factor in the ever-increasing emphasis on individualism. Although Hamburger’s assertions about liberal Protestantism are bound up with his more ubiquitous theme concerning anti-Catholic bigotry, it seems fair to conclude that liberal Christians were opposed to theological authority whether it came from the Catholic magisterium or from fellow Protestants who still insisted on Scripture’s authority over all of life.[83] Gary Scott Smith provides a good summary of the impact that the age of specialization had on the public square: “Although religion prospered institutionally in America from 1870 to 1915 . . . opponents increasingly pressed theists to surrender influence over the public dimension of life – politics, economics, education, and social relationships – and to limit their role to private aspects of individual morality, family customs, and leisure.”[84]
Andrew Dickson White wrote in his celebrated History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom that “Darwin’s Origin of Species had come into the theological world like a plough into an ant-hill. Everywhere those thus rudely awakened from their old comfort and repose had swarmed forth angry and confused. Reviews, sermons, books light and heavy, came flying at the new thinker from all sides.”[85] White continued:
Among the myriad attacks on the Darwinian theory by Protestants and Catholics two should be especially mentioned. The first of these was by Dr. Noah Porter, President of Yale College, an excellent scholar, an interesting writer, a noble man, broadly tolerant, combining in his thinking a curious mixture of radicalism and conservatism. . . . But a far more determined opponent was the Rev. Dr. Hodge, of Princeton; his anger toward the evolution doctrine was bitter: he denounced it as thoroughly “atheistic.”[86]
While failing to conceal his disdain for Hodge, White instead expressed a high regard for men like Dr. James McCosh (1811-1894), president of the College of New Jersey[87] from 1868-1888. Unlike the intransigent Hodge, “with [McCosh] began the inevitable compromise, and, in spite of mutterings against him as a Darwinian, he carried the day. Whatever may be thought of his general system of philosophy, no one can deny his great service in neutralizing the teachings of his predecessors and colleagues – so dangerous to all that is essential in Christianity.”[88] While it is true that McCosh did accommodate to biological evolution, theologically he still stood by and large in the Scottish, Calvinist tradition. But whereas Hodge attacked Darwin’s underlying philosophy, McCosh insisted, as Marsden puts it, “that Darwin’s plausible theories about natural mechanisms of development could be separated from his bad philosophy.”[89]
As president of Princeton Seminary for the last twenty-seven years of his life, Charles Hodge (1797-1898) stood against the tide of Darwinism and secularization by clinging tenaciously not only to traditional Calvinism, but to the particular scientific method of Baconian induction. In volume one of his magnum opus Systematic Theology he explains in quintessential Baconian principles the proper mode not just for scientific inquiry, but theological inquiry as well. The man of science comes to the study of nature with certain assumptions, including:
1. He assumes the trustworthiness of his sense perceptions.
2. He assumes the trustworthiness of his mental operations.
3. He assumes the certainty of those truths like the principle of causality.[90]
In language with which Witherspoon one hundred years earlier would certainly have concurred, Hodge equates the science of theology with the science of nature: “The Bible is to the theologian what nature is to the man of science. It is his store-house of facts; and his method of ascertaining what the Bible teaches, is the same as that which the natural philosopher adopts to ascertain what nature teaches.”[91] As was usual for a Baconian, Hodge spoke to the need for a perfect induction wherever possible when one seeks to investigate either nature and Scripture, for “an imperfect induction of facts led men for ages to believe that the sun moved round the earth, and that the earth was an extended plain. In theology a partial induction of particulars has led to like serious errors.”[92] Hodge’s philosophy, so typical of American Protestantism for the first hundred years of the republic, can thus be summarized: God gave us two revelations, one in nature and one in the Bible. Moreover, God gave humans the necessary faculties to discern at least the fundamental truths of both revelations. Since God cannot contradict Himself, what He revealed in nature cannot contradict what he revealed in Scripture. Therefore, not only can the Bible speak to the world of natural science, but the well-established facts of science should also influence how we interpret Scripture.[93]
Hodge’s perspective on the relation between science, philosophy, and theology were very typical for American Christians (particularly Protestants) in the nineteenth century: “God is the author of our nature and the maker of heaven and earth, therefore nothing which the laws of our nature or the facts of the external world prove to be true, can contradict the teachings of God’s Word. Neither can the Scriptures contradict the truths of philosophy or science.”[94] Had this view prevailed, perhaps a competitive balance between Calvinism and the Enlightenment, like was the case in Jefferson’s day, would have longer endured. But by 1880 the old Calvinism was on the way out, being forced to make room for the emerging naturalism.[95] It is tempting from a twenty-first century perspective to view nineteenth century anti-Darwinists as anti-scientific. But for men like Hodge, nothing could be further from the truth.[96] The demise of the old Calvinist “regime,” and thus, the erosion of academic influence on the public square by traditional Christianity, was in no way due to any wholesale rejection of science per se, but in that Hodge and men like him made their particular view of science absolute. Even the Princeton theologians who succeeded Hodge, including B.B. Warfield and Hodge’s own son Alexander Archibald Hodge, were compelled to accept the compromise championed by McCosh.[97] If Princeton had followed Hodge’s Baconian model, their faculty would have been ostracized from the scientific community that by now had fully embraced the naturalist viewpoint.[98] As Kuklick puts it: “As science changed in the late nineteenth century, Hodge was unable to alter his preconceptions about it – his zealous, if peculiar, Baconianism. . . . To put it briefly, Darwin-like biology was more conceptual than what had come before. It gave greater emphasis to a hypothesizing mind than its hyper-empirical predecessor, which demanded little in the way of human creativity in science. Baconian philosophy of science could not much accommodate Darwin.”[99] And thus, as the fact-driven scientific method was replaced by the hypothesizing method of Darwinism, Hodge found himself “in the position of disallowing many facts and, as matters turned out, all manner of science.”[100]
It is as if the Baconian divines walked on water with one foot on the raft of supernatural revelation and the other on the raft of general revelation. As long as those rafts were bound together, the Baconians retained their intellectual authority in the public square, being able to declare on the authority of one revelation what should be the case in the other. The fixed truths that bound the rafts together were the authority of Scripture and the static natural world which, when meticulously studied, together pointed to the Creator. This view of the unity of knowledge meant, as Garroutte shows, that “believers drew upon scientific findings for apologetic purposes; it also meant that they could challenge scientific claims on the grounds of spiritual deficiency.”[101] But because the traditional Calvinists by and large were committed to a particular scientific method, once that method was overthrown, so was their authority to declare on scientific matters. Thus, as historicism enervated the authority of Scripture and Darwinism simultaneously conquered the static view of the universe, the twin rafts of God’s complementary revelations, being loosed by the epistemological assumptions of modernism, drifted apart such that the traditional theologians eventually found their voices drowned out in the marketplace of ideas.
Once the Calvinist-led intellectual unity was shattered in the post-bellum period, the resulting professionalization and specialization corresponded with a diminished epistemic status for traditional religious truth claims. While Philip Hamburger is correct in admitting the difficulty of demonstrating any direct cause and effect relationship between specialization and an increased advocacy for church-state separation, it is not difficult to surmise how the newly-circumscribed role for the Baconian divines contributed to such an environment. Indeed, whereas it was previously considered to be legitimate, even expected for theologians to critique practitioners of non-religious disciplines for contradicting revealed truth, the newly-appointed specialists of the modernist era were now dictating to the divines what they would have to affirm (or deny) if they wished to enjoy a continued voice in the public square. The twentieth century would later witness the culmination of the efforts of the nineteenth-century modernists as a series of mid-century Supreme Court decisions effectively institutionalized the secular regime. Was the separationist doctrine of the twentieth century, as Kent Greenawalt argues, a natural evolution of the disestablishment doctrine of the eighteenth? Or, as Hamburger would contend, were some of the events of the nineteenth century, including the intellectual trends overviewed here, an intentional radicalization of disestablishment? That topic cannot be directly addressed here, but it would seem that any attempt at answering those questions would have to take into consideration the shifting epistemology of the nineteenth century that effectively turned the American academy upside down, at least when viewed from the perspective of the Baconian divines.
In the post-Kantian, anti-metaphysical world of post-bellum America, common sense realism was no longer viewed as a rationally defensible epistemology. For religion to recover its public authority, a viable alternative to the Scottish philosophy would have to be found. The fundamentalist movement of the early twentieth century would form one attempt to battle the growing secularity in a culture that had abandoned the old realism. Another quite dissimilar attempt would be made by those who answered Pope Leo XIII’s call for a restoration of the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas.[102]The critical or methodical realism that subsequently was developed by neo-thomists like Etienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain would soon provide an impressive challenge for the modernists. The new realists, however, would find fault not just with the modernist principles that had formed the foundation for the secular city, but also with the individualism of the Reformation that they accused of helping to give rise to modernism in the first place. Thus, in an historical irony unthinkable in Charles Hodge’s day, one of the great twentieth-century efforts to restore the unity of knowledge and the broader authority of the theologian would be waged in contradiction to some of the core principles that had previously supported the now-ousted Calvinist regime.
[1] Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 3.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Hamburger admits: “The exact relationship of the separation of church and state to these more general social specializations is difficult to document, but in the writings of some nineteenth-century Americans it is possible to obtain at least glimpses of how the one sort of separation developed among others.” Ibid., 252-53.
[4] Ibid., 191.
[5] Kent Greenawalt, “History as Ideology: Philip Hamburger’s Separation of Church and State,” California Law Review 93 (2005): 369. See also, Hamburger 14, 151-55, 191, 253-59, and 274. Greenawalt argues that the modern notion of separation is more or less a natural evolution of eighteenth-century disestablishment. In contrast, Hamburger seems to view the former as a radicalization of the latter, and thus a distortion of the founders’ intentions. Greenawalt contends that Hamburger’s fundamental claim, that there is a distinction between disestablishment and separation, is itself illicit because he “tends to compare a historically grounded notion of what disestablishment entailed with the most expansive versions of separation. A fairer comparison would be between what we might expect from contrasting an evolving notion of disestablishment with a reasonable modern version of separation.” John Witte’s harshest criticism is that Hamburger “too readily equates the separation of church and state with the disestablishment of religion in judging the pre-nineteenth century material. He thus too easily dismisses the varieties of separation that were taught by religious establishmentarians – even when they expressly called for (a wall of) separation between church and state.” Separationism, Witte argues, is not the nineteenth-century invention of rabid anti-Catholicism as Hamburger implies, but rather it has respectable roots traceable to early Catholic and Protestant models of the two communities, the two cities (or kingdoms), the two powers, and the two swords, not to mention the biblical distinction between Christ and Caesar. [John Witte, “That Serpentine Wall of Separation,” Michigan Law Review 101 (2003): 1876-89.] Professor Douglas Laycock, on the other hand, critiques Hamburger’s thesis primarily for what he considers its basic ambiguity, claiming that the book “treats its central concept as a term of art without seriously defining it.” Moreover, Laycock disapproves of what he sees as Hamburger’s easy identification of separationism with hostility to religion in general. Laycock also rebuffs Hamburger for “stopp[ing] his history in 1948, but . . . prominently and repeatedly assert[ing] broad conclusions about the present.” [Douglas Laycock, “The Many Meanings of Separation,” The University of Chicago Law Review 70:XX (2003): 1, 5, 18.]
[6] Hamburger, 16.
[7] Ibid., 252.
[8] Ibid., 252.
[9] Ibid., 153.
[10] Ibid., 155.
[11] Ibid., 16.
[12] Witte, 1896. Also note Witte’s generous appraisal that “particularly novel and valuable is [Hamburger’s] treatment of separationism in the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century . . . .” Witte, 1873. See Hamburger, generally 193-390.
[13] A search of Hamburger’s extensive index reveals no references to David Hume, Thomas Reid, or Immanuel Kant, and only one footnoted reference to Auguste Comte, all figures that loomed quite large in the intellectual development of the age of specialization. Every author, for obvious reasons, is compelled to leave out much material that he otherwise may have wished to include, Hamburger’s lengthy book being no exception. In a similar fashion, but to a much greater degree, the reader will undoubtedly find this essay devoid of much important detail that might have made its argument more compelling.
[14] More specifically, the age in which Comte’s philosophy became dominant in the university.
[15] George Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 40.
[16] Ibid., 37. Also see footnote 15 on pg. 45.
[17] Ibid., 40.
[18] Ibid., 48.
[19] E. Brooks Holifield, “Hodge, the Seminary, and the American Theological Context,” in Charles Hodge Revisited: A Critical Appraisal of His Life and Work, eds. John W. Stewart and James H. Moorhead (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002, 125.
[20] Bruce Kuklick, “The Place of Charles Hodge in the History of Ideas in America,” in Stewart and Moorhead, 73.
[21] Eva Marie Garroutte, “The Positivist Attack on Baconian Science and Religious Knowledge in the 1870s,” in The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life, ed. Christian Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 198.
[22] Ibid.
[23] In this paper, the Baconian view refers primarily to the inductive method as it was employed by eighteenth and nineteenth century intellectuals who combined it with their strong commitment to common sense realism, and not necessarily to the specific philosophy of Francis Bacon.
[24] Garroutte, 198.
[25] Bruce Kuklick, Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 69.
[26] Thomas Reid, “An Inquiry into the Human Mind and the Principles of Common Sense,” in The Works of Thomas Reid (Edinburgh: Maclachlan, Stewart, and Co., 1846), 96.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Thomas Reid, “Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man,” in Works, 236.
[29] “Berkeleyan idealism is the view that the only existing entities are finite and infinite perceivers each of which is a spirit or mental substance, and entities that are perceived. Such a thesis implies that ordinary physical objects exist if and only if they are perceived . . . .” The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 2nd ed., ed. Robert Audi (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 83.
[30] Kuklick, Churchmen, 70.
[31] Mark A. Noll and David N. Livingstone, eds., Charles Hodge: What is Darwinism? And other Writings on Science & Religion (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1994), 14.
[32] Kuklick, Churchmen, 68
[33] Technically, it was the philosophy of Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746) that Witherspoon instituted at Princeton upon his arrival in 1768. Hutcheson was one of the founders of the Scottish enlightenment who was later succeeded by Thomas Reid. See Marsden, 62.
[34] Norman L. Geisler, Christian Apologetics (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1976), 13-15.
[35] See generally David Hume, “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion,” in The English Philosophers from Bacon to Mill, ed. Edwin A. Burtt (New York: Random House, 1939), 690-764.
[36] Gary R. Habermas, “Skepticism: Hume,” in Biblical Errancy: An Analysis of its Philosophical Roots, Norman L. Geisler, ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1981), 32.
[37] D. H. Meyer, “American Intellectuals and the Victorian Crisis of Faith,” American Quarterly 27, no. 5 (Dec. 1975): 587.
[38] Ibid.
[39] Marsden, 50.
[40] Ibid., 63.
[41] Ibid., 57.
[42] Ibid., 81.
[43] Ibid., 69.
[44] Ibid., 71.
[45] Stuart C. Hackett, The Resurrection of Theism: Prolegomena to Christian Apology (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1957), 37.
[46] Ibid., 40.
[47] Ibid.
[48] See generally, Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1950).
[49] Kuklick, Churchmen, 121.
[50] Etienne Gilson traces the problem of modern philosophy to Rene Descartes: “He who begins with Descartes, cannot avoid ending up with Berkeley or with Kant.” Etienne Gilson, Methodical Realism, trans. Philip Trower (Front Royal, Va.: Christendom Press, 1990), 23.
[51] Alfred J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (City: Publisher, Year), 34.
[52] Marsden, 104.
[53] Ibid.
[54] Ibid., 107-08.
[55] Kuklick, Churchmen, 122.
[56] Hamburger, 253.
[57] Ibid.
[58] Ibid., 254.
[59] Ibid.
[60] Kuklick, Churchmen, 134.
[61] Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 360-61.
[62] Kuklick, Churchmen, 134.
[63] Ibid., 142-43.
[64] John G. Trapani, Jr., “The Blind Man and the Elephant: Understanding the Secret of Epistemological Realism,” in Truth Matters: Essays in Honor of Jacques Maritain, ed. John G. Trapani, Jr. (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2004), 8.
[65] The lack of observable phenomena as it relates to the Darwinian hypothesis concerns macro-evolution, or species change, and not micro-evolution, or changes within a species.
[66] John Dewey, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1951), 18-19. emphasis mine.
[67] This is not at all to suggest that divisions of labor were not previously recognized in the academic world. The traditional view, however, unified all the subdivisions under the Christian metaphysic, thereby forming a unit: “Knowledge.” The positivist view forsook the Christian metaphysic as a unifying force, and thus divorced the subdivisions of knowledge one from another.
[68] Holifield, 104.
[69] Marsden, 124.
[70] Garroutte, 197.
[71] John Locke is but one example.
[72] Garroutte, 211.
[73] Etienne Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999), 206-08.
[74] Garroutte, 203.
[75] Ibid.
[76] Ibid., 204.
[77] Ibid., 207.
[78] Ibid., 204-05.
[79] Norman L. Geisler and William E. Nix, A General Introduction to the Bible, revised and expanded (Chicago: Moody Press, 1986), 133. Emphasis added.
[80] Meyer, 596.
[81] Borden Parker Bowne, Theism (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1887), 320. The reference to the “feeling of dependence” is intentional; Bowne was strongly influenced by Friedrich Schleiermacher. See Meyer, 595.
[82] Meyer, 593.
[83] See Hamburger, 193-201.
[84] Gary Scott Smith, The Seeds of Secularization: Calvinism, Culture, and Pluralism in America 1870-1915 (Grand Rapids: Christian University Press, 1985), 2-3.
[85] Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, vol. 1 (New York: Thoemmes Press, 1897), 70.
[86] Ibid., 78-79.
[87] Renamed Princeton University in 1896.
[88] White, 80.
[89] Marsden, Soul, 203.
[90] Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol.1 (Hendrickson Publishers, 2003), 9.
[91] Ibid., 10.
[92] Ibid., 11-12.
[93] Noll and Livingstone, 31.
[94] Ibid., 56.
[95] One attempted Calvinist solution to this developing cleavage came from the presuppositionalist Abraham Kuyper who gave a series of lectures at Princeton in 1898. Kuyper believed that sin affected the human understanding to such a devastating degree that the regenerate and the unregenerate could not help but produce two sets of sciences. This view was vigorously opposed by Hodge successor B.B. Warfield. See Smith, 107-09.
[96] Noll and Livingstone, 16-22.
[97] Marsden, 204.
[98] Ibid.
[99] Kuklick, “Place of Charles Hodge,” 74.
[100] Ibid.
[101] Garroutte, 200.
[102] Aeterni Patris (On the Restoration of Christian Philosophy), August 4, 1879.
Available at http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Leo13/l13cph.htm. Accessed April 13, 2006.