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5 “A Revolution in Our Church” Founding and Filling the Perkins Professorship In 1859 South­ ern Presbyterians established the Perkins Professorship of Natural Science in Connexion with Revealed Religion at their seminary in Columbia, South Carolina. The creation of this chair institutionalized their conviction that revelation and reason were compatible, even mutually corroborative . Its occupant, they believed, would equip their ministers to repel the attacks of rationalism, whose primary theater of operations had now shifted to the natural sciences. Of course, South­ ern Presbyterians were not alone among evangelicals in their anxiety about rationalism, and numerous other chairs relating religion to science would spring up across the academic landscape of the late nineteenth century. South­ ern Presbyterians did of­ ten remark , however, that theirs was the first such chair in Anglo-­Ameri­ can academia . Heading this development, especially in a period when south­ erners were rarely in the cultural vanguard, suggests the great import South­ ern Presbyterians attached to articulating the relationship between science and religion. But the uniqueness of their handling of the science/religion relationship went beyond mere chronological priority. While other such chairs focused on the relationship between science and religion, the Perkins Professorship stressed “Natural Science in Connexion with Revealed Religion.”1 South­ ern Presbyterian ministers in Mississippi hatched the notion of establishing such a position. Richard Gladney of Aberdeen, Mississippi, and James Lyon, who was associated with the Tombeckbee Presbytery, had for some time stressed the importance of scientific fluency for properly trained ministers. In late 1857 the Tombeckbee Presbytery adopted a resolution— suggested by Lyon—recommending “the endowment of a professorship of the natural sciences, as connected with revealed religion in one or more of our theo­logi­cal seminaries” in order to repulse the “insidious attacks . . . made upon revealed religion, through the Natural sciences.” In 1858 the Synod of 130 Chapter 5 Mississippi considered the resolution, unanimously agreeing to recommend the establishment of such a chair to the next General Assembly. It was in 1859, the very year in which Charles Darwin published his On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, that South­ ern Presbyterians actually established the Perkins Professorship. The chair took its name from Judge John Perkins, a member of Lyon’s church who lived at “the Oaks” near Columbus , Mississippi. Disturbed by infidel attacks on the Bible in the environs of Columbus, Perkins contributed thirty thousand dollars to endow a professorship of “Natural Sciences as connected with Revealed Religion” at the seminary in Columbia, South Carolina.2 The synods in control of the institution—those of South Carolina, Georgia, and Ala­ bama—had by autumn 1859 established the professorship. The duty of filling the chair fell to the Synod of Georgia but, freighted with the magnitude of its responsibility, it postponed its election until 1860.3 The import of the decision was due to the gravity of the task in which the chosen expert would be involved: defending the alliance of revelation and reason. All South­ ern Presbyterians wanted to combat rationalism, a term they used with great frequency to describe intellectual trends that appeared bent on detaching reason from biblical revelation. “The great intellectual battle of the age,” wrote S. N. Stanfield, “is that which is now going on between Scripturalists and Rationalists.” The greatness of this battle owed to its high stakes: “This is a struggle, on which the welfare of the Church and the salvation of the world, alike depend.” Indeed, Stanfield averred, “Rationalism is now the grand prevailing type of error. It is the proton pseudos.” While “scripturalism,” to be sure, entailed the use of reason—in establishing both the Bible’s claims to divine provenance, via the “ordinary rules of evidence,” and also its meaning, via interpretation “according to the established usage of language”—it differed from rationalism in its willingness to accept the results of this evidentiary process on faith. That is, Stanfield clarified, while “rationalism proceeds upon the ground, that the human mind is of itself capable of deciding what a revelation ought to be,” scripturalism refused reason the role of final arbiter.4 While virtually all South­ ern Presbyterians shared Stanfield’s definition of rationalism and his assessment of its seriousness, they entertained divergent notions about what form it was taking and how to recognize it. But since natural science constituted the most articulate, most fashionable expression of reason in the mid-­nineteenth century—as well as the corner from which most contemporary threats to revelation seemed to materialize...

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