As to Evolution

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Aug 5, 1909

THAT system of liberal teaching which is somewhat loosely designated as the New Theology is the result of applying the principle of evolution in the religious field. The fundamental feature of this system is the more or less complete elimination of the supernatural, and the substitution of natural laws and forces for the personal Creator who upholds all things by the word of his power.

The inevitable result of this method of attempting to account for the existence of things, to explain the present condition of man, and to foretell his future state, is to reject the Biblical revelation of the fall of man and the entrance of sin, to deny the divinity of Christ in any true sense of the term, to discard the idea of salvation through the sacrifice and the atoning work of Christ, and to make every man his own savior through a process of developing the divine elements within him according to certain fixed laws operating under the influences of his environment.

So fascinating and so fashionable has this evolutionary doctrine become, that few teachers have the courage to make any protest against this wholesale departure from the clear teachings of the Scriptures. But now and then some defender of the faith speaks out plainly in opposition to this speculative, scientific scheme which robs God of his personality, Christ of his divinity, and the Scriptures of their authority. Among those who thus refuse to abandon the old gospel is Dr. Walter Quincy Scott, of the Bible Teachers’ Training School, New York City, who writes at some length in the Bible Record for June, 1909, under the title “Some Reflections Upon Mechanical Theories of Evolution in Relation to the Person of Christ.” We think it will be of interest and profit to our readers to quote several paragraphs from this article:—

Evolution as looking upward by necessary laws can have no meaning at all in man's world except to reach its only possible end, the perfect man. If Jesus reached that goal by the perfecting process of evolution, how can his sufferings and death be accounted for unless his death is to be taken as the final step of his evolution and so his perfection be first realized in his future life, a life beyond the knowledge of such a theory of evolution?

Further, if by evolution Jesus did not attain complete identity with God, but did become divine, what sort of a divinity is it that is merely human, though perfectly human? If his humanity became perfect, divine, by necessary laws, how can such perfection be reconciled