4 
 
 EVOLUTION THEORIES 
 
 and 
 
 CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 
 
 BY 
 
 W. DOUGLAS MACKENZIE, D.D. 
 
 Professor in Chicago Theological Seminary 
 
 AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE CEASS OF 1 897 AT OBEREIN 
 THEOEOGICAE SEMINARY, ON THE OCCASION OF ITS 
 GRADUATION, MAY 6, 1897 
 
 OBERLIN, OHIO 
 
 BIBEIOTHECA SACRA COMPANY 
 
[Reprint from Bibliotheca Sacra, July, 1897.] 
 
ZJ^DZO floreace Blackburn 
 
 'Ll 3 
 1Y\ |9e 
 
 ARTICLE VIII. 
 
 EVOLUTION THEORIES AND CHRISTIAN 
 DOCTRINE . 1 
 
 BY THE) REV. W. DOUGEAS MACKENZIE, D.D. 
 
 The word “evolution’’ has been popular for little more 
 than a generation. In that time it has awakened the en¬ 
 thusiasm or the dread of large numbers of people who knew 
 little or nothing of its previous history or inner meaning. 
 It has been clothed by some with regal authority over all 
 other ideas and theories that ever occupied the attention or 
 guided the research of the human mind; and by them has 
 been treated as the key to all mysteries, the one method of 
 explanation to which all events and facts in the history of 
 the universe must submit and by which their innermost 
 secrets shall be laid bare. By others this word has been 
 feared during these thirty years, aye, and hated too, just in 
 proportion to the mystic delight which it conferred on the 
 former class. Men have feared lest to believe in evolu¬ 
 tion necessitated a denial of the providence of God or of 
 the reality of his self-revelation; lest some would be forced 
 by holding this theory to give up their faith in Christian¬ 
 ity with all the hopes of a future which are identified with 
 that faith. 
 
 I. 
 
 We must not yield to the idea that evolution is an iso¬ 
 lated dream of our generation, that Darwin launched it up¬ 
 on the world on his own authority for the first time. The 
 
 1 An address delivered before the Class of 1897 at Oberlin Theological 
 Seminary, on the occasion of its graduation, May 6, 1897. 
 
 p 
 
4 
 
 idea is one which had occurred to many of the master 
 mind's both in ancient and modern times. Towards the 
 end of last century it began to attract and dominate the 
 thought of men who were working in very different fields 
 of investigation. On the one hand, the great metaphysical 
 schools of Germany were full of the conception of develop¬ 
 ment or evolution: to see all things as related to one an¬ 
 other, and to read the inner secret of those relations, was 
 their ambition and effort; to see a concrete universe un¬ 
 folding logically step by step before his eyes was the lofty 
 ^ajnbition of every true follower of Hegel. On the other 
 "hand, the students of science were working towards it in 
 their strenuous efforts to understand the relations of the 
 different classes of plants and animals to one another. The 
 great work of classification had proceeded on certain gener¬ 
 ally accepted principles; but enormous difficulties attended 
 the attempts of the most acute minds to state the princi¬ 
 ples of classification in a final form. No form could be 
 found that was final. Exceptions to every rule abounded 
 on every hand. Gradually there appeared one investigator 
 after another who dared to suggest that, perhaps, species 
 had not been separately and directly created, but that the 
 later forms of plant and animal life could be traced back 
 through intermediate stages to the earliest. That sugges¬ 
 tion was in the air during the first half of the century. It 
 assumed an impressive and authoritative form only when 
 the great work of Charles Darwin appeared. The reason 
 for his great success was that Darwin propounded the The¬ 
 ory of Natural Selection as that which could account for 
 most, if not all, of the problems involved in the hypothesis 
 that all animal species came originally from one source. 
 As a further indication of the extent to which the minds 
 of men were devoted to this problem and its solution, we 
 may name these two facts: (i) that the great Philosopher 
 of Evolution, Mr. Herbert Spencer, had begun to develop 
 
5 
 
 his system several years before Darwin’s book appeared; 
 and (2) that the publication of Darwin’s work was hurried 
 on by his astonishing discovery that another investigator, 
 Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace, had worked out the theory of 
 Natural Selection on lines almost identical with his own. 
 
 In yet another direction the middle of our century saw 
 another great scientific triumph which is of equal signifi¬ 
 cance, perhaps of superior practical value, when compared 
 with the theory of evolution. This was the discovery of 
 the correlation of physical forces. By this discovery it was 
 made plain, once for all, that the various physical forces 
 which hitherto had been supposed to be separate creations 
 are very closely related to, and even dependent on, one an¬ 
 other. Heat and light and electricity are all commensura¬ 
 ble with one another, and ultimately explicable as forms of 
 motion of the molecules of various substances. The word 
 “evolution” may be, as yet, quite inapplicable in this 
 sphere. But I name it here in order to make clear the 
 fact that, behind the specific scientific theories which reign 
 in different spheres of investigation in our day, there is one 
 ideal which gave them all their being. This is the princi¬ 
 ple of continuity. 
 
 According to this principle or ideal of reason, our mind 
 refuses to think of any one fact or event as existing in 
 isolation, apart from the rest of the universe. If Nature 
 is one, then all her parts must be conceived as in some 
 degree and fashion related to one another. Nothing is 
 alone; nothing is for itself only; but each object of ex¬ 
 perience has some definite relation, some meaning or value, 
 for every other object of experience. It is only on this as¬ 
 sumption that we can think. To present the mind with 
 a certain object in Nature, and say that this one object has 
 been separately created by the absolute power of God is of 
 course to stop any further investigation into its origin. 
 Thought cannot master or surmount the fiat of creation. 
 
6 
 
 
 That is an ultimate wall against which the eager student 
 traveler rattles his staff and henceforth feels himself a pris¬ 
 oner. For example, if a man believes that the various spe¬ 
 cies of animals were all directly created by the absolute 
 power of God, he must believe that this is true of the thirty 
 different species of crow which are found in various parts 
 v of the world. He may henceforth observe their habits, in¬ 
 vestigate their anatomy, if he will; but he cannot ask, 
 Why are they so like one another, and yet so different? 
 There is only one answer possible to him. They are so 
 j just because they were made so, and you cannot from them 
 find out any other reason, why they are made so. That 
 could only be known by a direct revelation of his reasons 
 which might be given by their Creator. But consider these 
 thirty species of crow as having taken their place in the 
 history of Nature, as forming part of that history, as ex¬ 
 plicable in the matter of their habits, colors, organs, etc., 
 by means of that history, and at once a limitless field of 
 investigation and an alluring hope is held out to the stu¬ 
 dent of Nature. By placing them in a relation of continu¬ 
 ity with the facts of Nature which preceded and accompa¬ 
 nied their ^appearance upon the scene of life, you make 
 that appearance a subject of possible investigation and at 
 least partial explanation. This is the task of every biolo¬ 
 gist in our day. I do not know the name of one man who 
 is working upon the problems of plant or animal life who 
 does not deliberately aim at thus following out the ideal 
 of the Principle of Continuity. 
 
 Now Involuti on is the name given in the world of sci¬ 
 ence to the theory that all forms of life are thus historical¬ 
 ly related to one another. They have evolved. They have 
 reached their present forms throughout the world through 
 a long series of transformations from that first form which 
 was assumed by living matter, whatever it was, and how¬ 
 ever it came to be. Evolution, as a strict scientific term, 
 
7 
 
 says nothing as to whether there has been progress or not. 
 As a matter of fact, what is called “degeneration” from a 
 higher to a lower is as truly evolution as development from 
 a lower to a higher form of life. All that science, strictly 
 so called, is concerned with is the relation of continuity 
 which subsists between each successive stage of Nature’s 
 history and its predecessors. 
 
 Now the chief reason why the doctrine of evolution has 
 awakened so much dislike and dread is that, if this princi¬ 
 ple is consistently carried out, then man must be included 
 in the process of evolution. His animal nature must stand 
 in a relation of continuity with the animal world. It is for 
 this reason chiefly that some people to this very hour con¬ 
 test the theory of evolution ; it is for this reason that others 
 come forth to assert that, because it is true, we must forth¬ 
 with recast our whole theology ; it is for this reason that 
 yet others say, they cannot see their way to accept any the¬ 
 ology whatsoever. 
 
 Now,, in order to proceed carefully in this matter, it is 
 necessary to say, first , that the evidence appears to be over¬ 
 whelming, that man’s physical nature does stand in a rela¬ 
 tion of historical continuity with the animal world. No 
 amount of protests about man’s powers as a rational being, 
 or about his ethical or religious capacities, no amount of 
 humorous or defiant inquiries regarding the missing link, 
 no amount of appeals to the account of creation in Gene¬ 
 sis, which is a religious document, can possibly overthrow 
 the force of this ever-accumulating evidence, that man is 
 thus, on the side of his physical nature, related by natural 
 descent to the rest of the animal creation. The evidence, 
 which can be scanned in any book that deals professedly 
 with the subject, is positive and abundant. Those who op¬ 
 pose the idea of any historical connection whatever between 
 man and the animals cannot do so on general principles. 
 That is to court, and perhaps to confess, defeat. They 
 
8 
 
 must meet that mass of evidence by presenting some other 
 explanation of the phenomena adduced therein which shall 
 satisfy man’s reason more fully than this theory. Until 
 that is done, it must be held that some form of evolution 
 has taken place in which the human body was gradually 
 formed out of preceding stages of animal existence. 
 
 In the second place, no one theory of evolution has yet 
 been developed which can be said finally and fully to ex¬ 
 plain the causes, stages, and manner of the growth of spe¬ 
 cies from species. Darwin began by laying almost exclu¬ 
 sive emphasis upon Natural Selection, and later added cer¬ 
 tain significant modifications, including that of sexual 
 selection. But at present the scientific world is full of 
 most powerful disputants regarding the fundamental ele¬ 
 ments of the evolutionary process and their relation to one 
 another. There are those who, like Weismann and Alfred 
 Russel Wallace, stoutly maintain that the theory of Nat¬ 
 ural Selection is sufficient of itself to account for practical¬ 
 ly all the problems of the evolution of species. But they 
 are met by an apparently increasing number of men who, 
 while giving Natural Selection a position of great impor¬ 
 tance, would add to it the operation of other forces or prin¬ 
 ciples, and some of whom would very profoundly modify 
 the essential features of Natural Selection itself. The three 
 main elements in the process of Natural Selection are: (i) 
 the tendency of all offspring to vary from th eir parents in 
 more or less minute and numerous characteristics; (2) the 
 tendency of such to transmit their variations to their own 
 offspring; and (3) the action of the surrounding forces 
 which encircle the life of each generation of animals. 
 These forces tend to destroy, prior to maturity, all such 
 offspring as have variations which are less adequately re¬ 
 lated to their environment. 
 
 Now the real nature and influence of each of these fac¬ 
 tors in Natural Selection is, as I have said, at present a 
 
i7 
 
 according to its own inherent character and tendency, is 
 all a matter of historical investigation. That investigation 
 has undoubtedly been made more intelligent, more thor¬ 
 ough, more fruitful, during the past two generations, than 
 in any earlier period: and this triumphant work has been 
 the result of that historical spirit or method which is part 
 of the “sphere of influence” of the idea of evolution. The 
 religion of revelation did not end with the Apostles, it then 
 passed into a new form, resulting in the establishment of 
 the Christian church. That too has had a history. The 
 doctrines and institutions of Christendom have in a very 
 real sense evolved. You can trace them from the seed to 
 the seedling, thence to the fullgrown tree, and to the fruit 
 which ripens thereon for weal or woe to man. There are \ 
 to-day hundreds of highly trained specialists who are at 
 work upon this piece of evolution with the same patience, 
 skill, and spirit which are manifested by the biologist or 
 the physicist. 
 
 Manifestly this kind and extent of work cannot be done 
 without producing considerable effects upon our under¬ 
 standing and formulation of specific Christian doctrines 
 These doctrines have always been described and stated in 
 the light of their history and of their actual influence upon 
 the men who lived in the presence of revelation; and hence 
 the restatement of their history may be expected to lead to 
 a restatement of their nature. This is being attempted all 
 around us to-day, and the result is bizarre and bewildering. 
 Clearness will no doubt gradually come out of the present 
 confusion. But no thinker seems yet to have attained that 
 standpoint from which he can speak with convincing 
 power. Much of the confusion seems to me to be due to 
 the ignoring of three facts which are of fundamental im¬ 
 portance. 
 
 In the first place, a survey of the evolutionary process 
 shows us that in no case can the lower of the three or four 
 
i8 
 
 great stages into which it is divided make any prophecy re¬ 
 garding the higher stages which succeed it. The laws of 
 the physical forces contain no hint of the laws of life. The 
 history of a plant contains not the slightest suggestion re¬ 
 garding the nature and laws of sensation. Mere conscious¬ 
 ness of sensation does not bear the remotest resemblance to 
 the laws of conscience or experience of a moral being. Mr. 
 Herbert Spencer’s philosophy is an attempt to find a form¬ 
 ula which shall cover the universe and bridge these gulfs; 
 but his philosophy is summed up in a formula which, after 
 all, is but an empty abstraction, with no inward movement, 
 or life, or grip of reality; but which enables him at each 
 of these transitions, not to speak of other points in the to¬ 
 tal process, to elude the real problem, without even stating 
 its true nature and difficulty. 1 From this fact it must fol¬ 
 low that no study of animal life, as such, or of the condi¬ 
 tions under which man’s animal and mental nature have 
 been developed, can finally lead us to any certainty regard¬ 
 ing man’s moral and religious nature or his positive rela¬ 
 tions to God. 
 
 In the second place, it must ever be remembered that 
 you do not explain the nature of a fact by describing its 
 historical origin or dawn. For example, you cannot reach 
 a true understanding or definition of life by the study of 
 protoplasm. Not even Mr. Herbert Spencer’s definition of 
 
 1 An example of this is Mr. Spencer’s well-known definition of “ life ” 
 which Mr. John Fiske calls “the most profound and complete definition 
 of Life that has ever been framed.’’ Mr. Spencer saj^s : “ Life is the 
 
 definite combination of heterogeneous changes, both simultaneous and 
 successive, in correspondence with external coexistences and sequences.’’ 
 Mr. Fiske in his paraphrase (Cosmic Philosophy, Vol. ii. p. 67) more 
 naively says “ within the organism.’’ And of course there the whole 
 mystery lies. The definition perpetrates the logical fallacy of contain¬ 
 ing the thing to be defined. For “ life ” is in that word “ within.” We 
 do not speak of “within a stone” in defining it. What is that which 
 has a “ within ” and a “ without ” ? It is Life. Hence yoii'do not define 
 it by merely describing the relations of the ‘ ‘ within ’ ’ and the ‘ ‘ without. ’ ’ 
 
i 9 
 
 life could have been made possible by a summation of the 
 observed facts of so poor a specimen of living things. On 
 the contrary, you can understand the significance of proto¬ 
 plasm only by placing it in the light of a much larger fact. 
 Similarly you cannot explain an oak-tree by the study of 
 its seed; on the contrary, it is the life history of the whole 
 tree which explains the seed. So with any statement of 
 any portion of the relations of man to God, no adequate 
 justice can be done to them by treating the first moment of 
 their revelation or of their experience by man as contain¬ 
 ing the whole truth. 
 
 In the third place, if the faith of the Christian church be 
 grounded in fact, then that which constitutes the' subject- 
 matter of theological science is, the personal relations of 
 God and man and their historical manifestation or reali¬ 
 zation. The fact that they are personal relations must be 
 kept strenuously in the forefront. To treat sin as the strug¬ 
 gle between the animal and spiritual nature, in man; or 
 revelation, as the history of man’s consciousness of God ; or 
 the incarnation, as the attainment of the divine fullness by 
 one human life, may be useful enough. But these are only 
 half or quarter views of the whole fact. The real subject- 
 matter of doctrinal investigation remains to be explored I 
 even after so much has been said of sin, or revelation, or 
 incarnation. The personal relations of God to man, and 
 of man to God, in the light of each of these great facts, re¬ 
 main to be grasped and expounded. Each thinker who 
 keeps this principle patiently before his mind will find that 
 the evolution theory is going to influence his statement of 
 doctrine very really indeed, but not so directly and super¬ 
 ficially as is sometimes imagined. 
 
 Let me briefly, and in conclusion, illustrate these princi¬ 
 ples in relation to two doctrines to which evolution is sup¬ 
 posed to have much to say directly. 
 
 First, there is the Doctrine of Revelation. It is possible 
 
20 
 
 to put this matter in what is supposed to be a scientific or 
 evolutionary spirit by saying that revelation is ever pro¬ 
 ceeding, that God is ever making himself known to the 
 human consciousness from the moment in creation when 
 that consciousness develops the capacity forjapprehending 
 him. Hence the history of revelation is the history of 
 • man’s ever-growing consciousness of God. Now that is all 
 true, but it is not all the truth. To answer that question, 
 we must not abide humbly at the feet of our general defi¬ 
 nition of evolution. We must in the true scientific spirit 
 go to history. Now when we go to the history of the re¬ 
 ligion in which revelation has reached its climax, we find 
 that from beginning to end it records. acts which are de¬ 
 scribed as~specific acts, personal acts of Godjn relation to 
 specific'persons. The phenomena of prophetism in Israel 
 cannot be brought under the general formula of an evolv¬ 
 ing consciousness of God. The consciousness of God did 
 then undoubtedly develop, but through specific and per¬ 
 sonal acts of God towards individual persons. “ The word 
 of Jehovah ” came to a prophet in such a fashion as it did 
 not come to any other man in Israel except through him. 
 It is impossible to deny that there was involved in the cov¬ 
 enant with Israel and the inspiration of prophets a personal 
 act of the divine will without denying to God any specific 
 purpose of will concerning any specific portion of his uni¬ 
 verse and its history. But if that is so, then the doctrine 
 of revelation is much more than the history of the devel¬ 
 opment of man’s consciousness of God,—as much more as 
 it ever was. We may be in an indefinitely better position 
 to investigate its meaning and methods; and we are. We 
 may have gained enormously by the new emphasis which 
 is placed upon the history of the human consciousness in 
 this relation; and we have. We may be in a better posi¬ 
 tion to understand the Divine acts as historically connected 
 after a wider fashion than was possible three generations 
 
21 
 
 ago; and we are. But the actual nature of revelation, as 
 constituted by those acts of God in relation to individual 
 men, from Abraham to Paul, which have a supreme signif¬ 
 icance and a divine authority for all human consciences 
 for ever after, remains, as it ever has been, the free mani¬ 
 festation by a living person of his character and his pur¬ 
 poses unto sinful m«n. 
 
 Second, there is the Doctrine of Sin. It is generally as¬ 
 sumed, on the one hand, that the Doctrine of Evolution 
 leads necessarily not only to a restatement, but to a certain 
 restatement, of the meaning and nature of sin. The idea 
 of a fall must, it is said, be abandoned. Man never fell ex¬ 
 cept upwards. He did not begin in a state of innocence 
 and break a known law of God deliberately, and so con¬ 
 tract the racial guilt. Man, it is argued, must have awak¬ 
 ened gradually from the sleep of sense in which the animal 
 world slumbers. As, out of the control of appetite and the 
 confusions of passion, the higher light of Reason began to 
 shine, he became aware of a deep contradiction between his 
 animal and spiritual self. The law of the animal life was, 
 on the whole, “grasp-all”; the law of reason is “give-all.” 
 Man’s struggle, man’s long story of toil and bitterness, of 
 wild self-abandonment and miserable self-contempt, is due 
 to that inward war of the past animal life and its remain¬ 
 ders with the new rational soul and its prophetic claims. 
 This may of course be very largely true, but again it is not 
 the whole truth. For instance, who knows yet what were 
 the conditions amid which man first emerged from the an¬ 
 imal to the human condition? No mere dogmatism from 
 general principles can be allowed to rule our thought at 
 this stage. We must strive to know something of the 
 dawn of conscience and of the knowledge of God ere we 
 can define man’s earliest sense of sin. For, be it observed, 
 the position which I have described is dogmatism pure and 
 simple, since it is an attempt to deduce the form and na- 
 
22 
 
 ture of an event frpm an abstract theory. Ere it can be 
 considered valid or legitimate it must reckon alike with 
 Anthropology and History. The fact is, we know nothing 
 from evolutionary science, absolutely nothing, about man’s 
 earliest consciousness of personal relations with God; and 
 until we have historical or other evidence, we are at least 
 as warranted in holding that, when man first stood forth as 
 man, rational and religious, he found sin to consist in his 
 deliberate disobedience to the known will of God, as in 
 holding any other theory. The degree of crudeness with 
 which at the birth of his reason and freedom he conceived 
 of God or law or disobedience, has nothing to do with the 
 determination of the essential nature of sin. 
 
 But this leads to another point. In the light of the 
 three principles enunciated above, it is obviously right to 
 insist that we shall not make our doctrine of sin to depend 
 on our theory as to its origin. That is one great mistake 
 in which the older orthodox and some evolutionary theol¬ 
 ogies alike share. The nature of sin is not fully revealed 
 nor a Christian doctrine of sin made possible, either by the 
 story of the Fall downwards or of the Fall upwards. To 
 understand sin we need to trace the relations of men to God 
 through the whole course of his self-revelation. The Old 
 Testament, in the prophetic writings including the pro¬ 
 phetic histories, in the Psalms, in the development of the 
 sacrificial ritual, presents us with a gradually deepening 
 view of the nature of sin, both profound and humbling. 
 The New Testament presents us with the most clear and 
 unmistakable revelation of the nature of sin in the charac¬ 
 ter and experience of Jesus Christ, as also in that form of re¬ 
 ligious consciousness which he awakened in the apostles 
 after his resurrection, and which formed the real climax of 
 the work of redemption and revelation. We need to look 
 at the ripe fruit of man’s history as he puts Jesus to death, 
 defying Jehovah ; we need to look at the ripe fruit of God’s 
 
23 
 
 grace as he offers his Son on the cross, if we would know 
 what sin really is. The Christian doctrine of sin must 
 come not from the study of*tETseed, but of the whole tree 
 of revelation. And when it is seen that throughout the 
 course of that unique history the personal nature and rela¬ 
 tions of both God and man were progressively unfolded, it 
 will be seen, first, that the doctrine of sin can be adequately 
 stated only when those natures and relations are adequately 
 appreciated ; and, second, that any account of the historical 
 beginnings of sin will not carry any thinker far in that 
 task. 
 
 
 
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