Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
abandoning their self-imposed requirement that all teachings have a bibli-
cal grounding.
Once we recognize how vital this millenarian pattern was in the
Protestant world in which Bacon situated the new science, we can better
understand why he was destined to become one of the chief forebears of
modernism. As Bacon strove to conflate the scientific ethos into the Protes-
tant ethos, he was also compelled to work within the new historical frame-
work that the reformers had brought into play. If science was to have some
share in the true priesthood of God's revelation, it also needed to represent
itself as an instrument of providence that played some part in bringing the
remnant church into the millennium. Thus, the emerging scientific move-
ment, just like the Protestant one in whose image Bacon was creating it,
found its primary historical reference point in the future.
By the time Bacon published his
Instauratio Magna
(1620) exactly a cen-
tury after Luther's first intimations of this historical shift, the identification
of Rome with Babylon had become a Protestant commonplace. Thus it is
not surprising that the title of Bacon's great effort to systematize the new sci-
ence (in tacit and sometimes explicit opposition to the Aristotelian natural
philosophy of the Catholic universities) would also reference this Old Tes-
tament episode. The word
instauratio
in Bacon's title,
meaning restoration
or re-edification, was the same Latin word used in Jerome's translations to
depict the Old Testament reforms that Luther had invoked as the model for
his second exodus.
2
This connection was an obvious one for Protestants.
The restoration of true worship that was enacted when the high priest Ezra
commanded that the Mosaic law should be read before a remnant congrega-
tion of Israel that was struggling to rediscover its truths (Nehemiah 9) antici-
pated the Protestants' own rediscovery of the text of the Bible.
Science's typological connection with this Old Testament episode was
the rebuilding of Solomon's temple. As a material act of reconstruction
corresponding to this larger program of reform, the temple's instauration,
as Charles Whitney has so ably shown, made science its millennial coun-
terpart.
3
Just as the temple had been an earthly representation of heaven,
Bacon now declared that the record of natural history was a “second Scrip-
ture” that needed to be “compiled with a most religious care, as if every
particular were stated upon oath; seeing that it is the topic of God's works.”
4
The oath-like fidelity that Bacon demanded for science reiterated the
biblical basis of his doctrine of empiricism. Because nature was a second
revelation, its reading was sacramental. But its linkage to the rebuilding of
the temple reiterated its historical significance. Since it was the prophetic
