a 1917 essay by the modernist theologian (and Social Gospel promoter) Shailer Mathews, made it clear that a belief in premillennialism was essential for true-believing Christians: “the Second Coming as recorded in the New Testament is so bound up with every fundamental doctrine, every sublime promise and practical exhortation, that it is impossible to read them in that connection without being impelled to accept and confess them.”130 James M. Gray at the Moody Bible Institute in 1922 responded to the liberal Presbyterian Harry Emerson Fosdick, a faculty member at Union Seminary, saying Fosdick’s “conception of his text is purely naturalistic, or rationalistic, if you prefer. The supernatural is excluded from his vision entirely.”131 In another essay, he criticized Fosdick for believing that “the revelation in the Bible must now be qualified by modern philosophy, by the evolutionary hypothesis, and by comparative religion.”132
In spite of the attempt of some conservatives to protect a literal interpretation of the Bible by eschewing the use of science, other evangelicals used scientific data to explain events in the Bible, especially when not responding to modernist theology.133 George M. Marsden observes that “dispensationalist thought was characterized by a dual emphasis on the supernatural and the scientific. Supernaturalism was a conscious and conspicuous organizing principle. Underlying dispensationalist thought, however, was an almost equally important set of ideas concerning how to look at things scientifically.”134 As Brendan Pietsch has shown, dispensationalists promoted the use of scientific techniques, such as taxonomy, to explain common objections to a literal and infallible interpretation of the Bible. One such criticism was that modern Christians should obey the Mosaic laws, even ones that counter modern culture, such as strictures against eating particular animals. Dispensationalists explained that in their interpretation, those laws applied only to the dispensation, or age, of ancient Israel. Christians lived in the age where God judged individuals according to their faith in Jesus Christ. (Historically Calvinists stressed the uncertainty of salvation, but in practicality American Calvinists have watered down the doctrine of predestination in favor of a more democratic vision of God.) This approach differed from what modernists were doing; far from using science to suggest that the Bible was untrue or metaphorical in parts, conservative evangelicals used science to show the Bible was consistent with itself as well as how an event that seemed unlikely could occur.
Dispensationalism may have encouraged a scientific approach in particular, but other premillennial evangelicals were similarly open to scientific revelation. Seventh-day Adventism (SDA), the evangelical denomination that grew out of the Baptist William Miller’s failed end-of-the-world prophecies in 1843 and 1844, endorsed a premillennialist view of Bible prophecy, but one that held events predicted in the prophetic books of the Bible had been taking place since the first appearance of those prophecies. This historicist approach was more problematic than the futurist approach of dispensationalists, who located prophetic events as taking place right before the Second Coming. From the example of the historicist SDAs, dispensationalists learned the cautionary tale of setting specific dates.135
Dispensationalists could constantly shift their apocalyptic expectations according to current events, whereas the Adventist approach lent itself to the danger of failed prophecy by fixing prophetic events in the past. In practice Adventists and dispensationalists often sounded similar when it came to interpreting current events, but Adventist beliefs, like the necessity of a Saturday Sabbath, could be anti-ecumenical in emphasis.136 The authority that the SDAs gave to the visions and writings of Ellen G. White, the nineteenth-century leader who had helped shape the denomination after the failed predictions of 1844, guaranteed that fundamentalists would view SDAs with suspicion.137 Fundamentalist Christians rejected modern-day miracles and saw Christians who believed in prophetic visions, speaking in tongues, and faith healing as misguided at best and doing the work of Satan at worst.
Adventism only remained a minority among both evangelicals and premillennialists with dispensationalism quickly outpacing it in popularity. Dispensationalists may have been unique in their fixation on engineering methods, but in general conservative evangelicals were less hostile to science than modernist theologians of the day charged. Asa Oscar Tait, a Seventh-day Adventist who edited the periodical Signs of the Times, took a position similar to other conservative evangelicals dismayed by the modernist trend among Protestants in Heralds of the Morning (1899): “It is the boast of men to-day that ‘this age has outgrown many of the things taught in the Bible,’ and they call it an indication of great intellectual advancement.”138
Tait, like other SDAs, did not believe that God had blessed the United States as a country.139 God had chosen the church itself as His representative, and as early as the 1850s, SDAs even argued that God would destroy America because it was the beast described in Revelation 13.140 Likewise, Tait departed from many of his premillennialist colleagues in his willingness to see American industrial activity as displeasing to God. The way humans treated their environment indicated that the End was near: “The departing of earth’s vigor of youth, and the infirmities of age creeping over her, are thus pointed out as among the unmistakable tokens of her approaching dissolution.”141 In Tait’s account, humans had abused the Earth’s natural resources and were now even struggling to grow food.142 As a result, humanity would receive the punishment it deserved: “And our earth itself is groaning because of ‘the transgressions thereof’ that is ‘heavy upon it.’ The pollutions of mankind, their transgression of physical law, their failure to observe the most thoroughly demonstrated principles of sanitary science, creates a soil for the growth of the germs of decay and pestilence.”143 Much more than other premillennialists of his time, Tait was willing to echo the beliefs of scientific apocalypticists that it was possible humans might not merely commit spiritual transgressions but crimes against the physical world as well. In the future, however, dispensationalists would adopt positions similar to Tait, first by incorporating scientific apocalypticism and then by becoming more ambivalent toward the United States.
Other conservative evangelicals were no less friendly to science but used science in the older tradition of natural philosophy. Science could add to the understanding of the Bible, but its findings would never trump biblical scripture. The Methodist theologian Luther T. Townsend’s 1913 overview of the possible ends of the world exemplifies this disposition. He believed that science affirmed the biblical account of the End, saying “scientific specialists are no less pronounced in what they say of a destructive ending of physical things than are the utterances and warnings of Bible revelation.”144 Townsend concluded that between Peter’s and John’s prophecies (in 2 Peter and Revelation, respectively) the way the world will end, according to the Bible, is through fire: “the sun, moon, stars, the heavens and earth as now constituted shall be dissolved by some destructive agency and then vanish like smoke after a fire has done its work of devastation though the material may be transmuted into other forms.”145 In like manner, scientists not only predict that the natural world will come to an end at some point but also admit that the extinction of a species is final, Townsend asserted. On Townsend’s view, these were the various ways scientists had speculated the End might come: through drought; through freezing (because of the dying of the sun); through the Earth’s collision with a comet, another planet, or the sun; by passing through the tail of a comet (which could contaminate the Earth’s atmosphere); or through an explosion emanating from the interior of the Earth.146
When Townsend parsed through the various theories, he rejected all of the above except for the theories that contained an element of fire: “the coming deluge will be one of fire caused by cometic, planetic, or solar collisions, or by eruptions from the interior of the earth itself.”147 Science, used in that manner, strengthens biblical prophecy for Townsend: “prepare, for you are on the brink of a hell of fire, is the stern command that science is repeating.”148 Still, Townsend thought that God would use nature to bring about the End.149 Consistent with the attempt to reconcile the Bible with scientific conclusions, Townsend averred that “no scientist will question the statement that nature holds in reserve many intonings that could be heard world-wide among the unfoldings of the last things and that under the command
