Calm before the Storm.

In the decades following the Civil War, liberal theology made substantial inroads into Protestant seminaries and universities in the United States. The primary feature of this liberalism was an acceptance of and reliance upon scientific methods for the discovery of truth. This view of truth contrasted sharply with the traditional Christian commitment to revealed truth, especially as the Bible contained it. Instead of looking to the Scriptures to determine the truth of a matter, liberals often held biblical texts up for comparison with scientific theories, such as Darwinian evolution. When they found disagreement, liberals began to reinterpret the Bible not as a source of knowledge about the physical world but as a record of faith composed by human beings at different historical intervals, causing inconsistencies and errors where knowledge had been deficient. This method of reading the Bible became known as...