The places in which science and religion meet are often controversial and contested. This landmark publication in the history of science and religion, an elegantly produced four-volume collection from Brill impeccably edited by Jitse M. van der Meer and Scott Mandelbrote and with (if my maths is correct) thirty-nine essays from thirty-five scholars, is indispensable reading for all those interested in this complex relationship. The ambitious objective is to explore how the development of different styles of interpretation found in reading Scripture across the Abrahamic religions and nature transformed ideas about both the written word and the created world across two millennia. The focus is on ‘specific strategies of interpretation and on hermeneutical principles that shape knowledge of God and nature in interaction with contextual influences’ (i. 3). This broad remit is narrowed down to a more manageable level of complexity by inviting contributions only from historians of exegesis and historians of science. Key themes include identifying harmony as well as conflict, appreciating that scripturally influenced readings of nature can stimulate as well as retard natural knowledge, that Scripture and nature are both texts that can be read and misread, and that the hermeneutical strategy of accommodation has proved highly durable and adaptive in this regard. The format of the collection combines introductory survey essays, case studies and response pieces, designed to enable the development of broad themes. The volumes follow a roughly chronological order to highlight the development of different phases of interpretative strategies within their historical context, with an understandable concentration of contributions around Copernicanism and Darwinism. Readers may prefer to read the essays by religious tradition or follow geographical emphases concentrated on England, America, Germany and the Netherlands.

Scholars of the early Christian Church and medievalists are well served. Pamela Bright provides an elegant discussion of nature and Scripture as the ‘two witnesses to the Creator’ in the early Christian Church. Bright identifies not an endless duel but an ongoing dialogue between early Christian exegetes and their philosophical opponents, but Gnosticism was perceived as a ‘clear and present danger’ to be unambiguously refuted. The study of nature alongside Scripture was not only complementary but indispensable ‘for recognizing the inherent dichotomy of divine revelation, which is universal in nature and specific in Scripture’ (i. 111). Paul M. Blowers skilfully sketches how representative early Christian thinkers including Basil of Caesarea, Clement, Origen, Athanasius, Evagrius and Maximus the Confessor read Scripture and nature, articulated the analogy of the ‘two books’, constructed meta-narratives about creation and redemption that fused the logoi of cosmos and Scripture, and incorporated natural-philosophical issues into a contemplative reading of creation texts. William E. Carroll provides a succinct analysis of the relationship between science and Scripture in the thinking of Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth-century theologian who most successfully fused Aristotelian philosophy and Christian revelation.

Kenneth J. Howell focuses on the commentaries on Genesis by Augustine, that most influential figure in Christian theology ‘whose interest in all things natural was at best marginal’ (i. 117). Howell highlights Augustine's appreciation for extra-scriptural knowledge, including natural knowledge gained through observation or reading philosophy (i. 122) and his use of that knowledge to exclude scriptural interpretations contrary to reason and to relate Scripture to the physical world. Augustine's proposals for reconciling and marrying scriptural assertions and empirical knowledge were taken up by Catholics and Protestants alike more than a thousand years later, and in his second contribution Howell surveys the hermeneutics of nature and Scripture in early modern science and theology, dipping into the writings of the astronomers Caspar Peucer, Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, the Hermetic German thinkers Valentine Weigel and Daniel Czepko, and the Englishmen William Whiston and John Ray. He argues convincingly that the traditional narrative of a growing disharmony between nature and Scripture prompted by mounting empirical evidence against the biblical cosmology is superficial and advances the subtler argument that a broader crisis in natural philosophy stimulated a diversity of exegetical strategies (i. 293).

Peter Harrison provides a brief account of his thesis that Protestant critiques of some aspects of medieval Catholic biblical interpretation gave rise, often unintentionally, to conditions that facilitated ‘the erosion of religious meanings from the natural world’ (i. 359), principally the replacement of symbolic relations between things with causal relations, that enhanced the development of more empirically orientated approaches to the study of nature. Jitse M. van der Meer and Richard J. Oosterhoff provide a counter-argument that the decline in seeing symbolism in nature did not depend on the fate of symbolic interpretations of Scripture, but was rather linked to the rise of Aristotelianism, and that late medieval reformers developed a new sense of the literal that incorporated authorised symbolic interpretation that was built upon by later Protestants. They agree with Harrison that the rise of modern science required a focus on nature for nature's sake, but do not see the Protestant Reformation as a major catalyst but as part of an ongoing process to pursue determinacy of meaning primarily by means of literal interpretation, inadvertently highlighting an underlying ambiguity of language in Scripture that drove scholars to consider nature as God's clearest revelation (i. 388). James J. Bono provides an engrossing essay revolving around interpretations of the biblical accounts of the Fall, Babel and Pentecost in the early modern period and the resulting claims concerning humankind's postlapsarian access to knowledge of God, his Word and creation. Bono argues that the Protestant practices of literal scriptural interpretation should be seen as one aspect of a larger picture illustrating an intense reorientation toward the study of ‘natural particulars’ across a host of diverse fields of enquiry, often pre-dating the Reformation and not limited to Protestant scholars, linked to the reinterpretation of these scriptural narratives (i. 327).

Eric Jorink delves into the emergence of radical biblical criticism in the Dutch Republic. He explores the local context to the publication in Amsterdam in 1655 of Isaac la Peyrère's Praeadamitae, and the response of the philologist Isaac Vossius in De vera aetate. The impact of the French Calvinist's ‘monumentally heretical doctrine’ had ‘a tremendous impact, both on religion and science’ (i. 431) and prompted refutations from Grotius and several Dutch theologians. Vossius' attempt to reconcile non-western chronologies with traditional biblical chronology was designed to invalidate the preadamite hypothesis, but Jorink describes his method of critically evaluating all available scriptural and non-scriptural sources as ‘even more damaging to the authority of the Bible than La Peyrère's work’ (i. 442). G. Blair Nelson's discussion of nineteenth-century American debates on preadamist polygenism makes for an interesting sequel to Jorink's essay.

Kerry V. Magruder provides a sophisticated analysis of Thomas Burnet and seventeenth-century theories of the earth. ‘In a century of disorientating changes in natural philosophy accompanied by the rise of scepticism, biblical criticism, and deism’, Magruder argues, ‘the possibility of understanding the history of the Earth came to play a significant role in achieving a renewed epistemic confidence’ (i. 455–6). Burnet's Telluris theoria sacra (1681) skilfully blended ‘Cartesian cosmology, apocalyptic theology and classical learning in the service of the prisca sapientia, integrated in a mix of Cambridge Platonism’ (i. 484). Stephen D. Snobelen analyses the hermeneutics of accommodation in reference to Newton's treatment of Scripture. Newton believed that the Bible was written primarily for unlearned people but its deeper, mystical meanings were not accessible to all and it was necessary to distinguish between relative and absolute language. Like Galileo, Snobelen shows that Newton did not include the formal teaching of natural philosophy within the mandate of divine writ but still held the Bible to be at some level an account of natural history, a middle path that ‘allowed him to take the biblical text seriously without having to reject the discoveries of natural philosophy’ (i. 525).

In Jonathan Edwards, Robert E. Brown finds a real sense in which ‘science and the Bible collided’ (ii. 87). Brown demonstrates the tensions in Edwards's biblical commentary between ‘the sort of world discoverable by scientific investigation and the one depicted in the biblical texts’ (ii. 87). He argues convincingly that Edwards appreciated the critical implications of scientific discovery for biblical interpretation and that this ‘significantly affected his interpretative strategy’ (ii. 108), whilst retaining his belief that conflicts could be resolved. In Georges Cuvier, we encounter a practising Lutheran scholar who preached the benefits of keeping science separate from religion and metaphysics, but as van der Meer demonstrates with reference to his geology, did not entirely practise what he preached. Cuvier treated the Bible as a text of divine authority relevant to natural history, for instance corresponding the days of creation to geological epochs, but was not a scriptural geologist. He ‘followed the traditional Augustinian approach and walked between the biblicism of scriptural geology and the criticism of liberal theology’ (ii. 140).

Scott Mandelbrote's thought-provoking overview essay on biblical hermeneutics and the sciences in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is one of the stand-out contributions. He dismisses the idea that early modern scholars of the Bible were any less ‘critical’ in their reading than their modern equivalents; they asked different questions and were satisfied with different answers. He suggests that theologians ‘have defined their own modern identity through an imagined break with the precritical past at the close of the seventeenth century’ (ii. 10). Historians have ‘encouraged their readers to see this period as the one in which the foundations of the modern world (and particularly its intellectual foundations) were laid’ (ii. 11) and should re-examine the degree to which liberal Protestant assumptions going back to Mark Pattison, Leslie Stephen and others have determined their scope of inquiry. The school of biblical criticism centred in Oxford in the later eighteenth century, originating in the work of Robert Lowth and triumphing in the projects of Benjamin Kennicott, ‘played at least as important a role in the development of German critical ideas about Scripture as English deism did’ (ii. 18), a point easily missed in the current unbalanced historiography. The early eighteenth-century argument from design, although ‘often caricatured for being itself a form of deism’ more often than not stressed the benevolence not just the lawfulness of creation and is ‘not therefore best exemplified by the writings of Isaac Newton … but rather by a succession of physico-theologians writing in the tradition of John Ray’ (ii. 28). The debate over evolution certainly affected theology, but Mandelbrote points out that it also allowed theologians already unsure of the value of the link between traditional natural theology and revealed religion to ‘sever unwanted ties’ (ii. 19). Multiple approaches to the relationship between scientific and biblical hermeneutics remained valid after 1860: ‘Each of liberalism, modernism, fundamentalism, and conservatism had to define themselves through a body of assumptions about how one should interpret both the Bible and nature’ (ii. 29).

In a substantive Dutch trio on Darwinism and its repercussions, Rob P. W. Visser explores why Darwinism received a positive welcome from the scientific community and the liberal wing of the ruling Protestant Church in early twentieth-century Netherlands but until the 1950s was completely rejected by Dutch Calvinists, who held to a mechanical doctrine of scriptural inspiration and were very reluctant to accept that Genesis i did not contain historical data about the origin of biological species. From a complementary perspective, George Harinck looks at the emergence of the Dutch neo-Calvinist movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and its rejection of the positivistic and naturalistic interpretations of contemporary science and theology. Henri Wijnandus de Knijff looks at modern science and biblical hermeneutics in the twentieth-century Dutch Reformed Church in the light of a 1965/67 collaborative church publication Faith and Natural Science that presented a range of articles on hermeneutics, biblical interpretation and the relationship between different sciences and theology.

There are two contributions each addressing Jewish and Islamic perspectives. Robert G. Morrison discusses the influence of Hellenistic natural science and philosophy on tafsīr or exegesis of the Qur'ān between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries through a close analysis of commentators' treatment of one passage, Q2:6/7. Marwa Elshakry explores scientific exegesis in twentieth-century Arabic interpretations of the Qur'ān, focusing on a representative number of key popular commentaries in the Egyptian press. The nineteenth-century grand mufti of Egypt, Muhammad ‘Abduh, believed that Islam was an important aid to scientific enquiry and that it was Christianity not Islam that ‘had a history of persecuting men of science’ (ii. 500). For millions of Muslims around the world today, Elshakry concludes, scientific exegesis ‘continues to provide the means to demonstrate the modernity as well as the comprehensiveness of their faith’ (ii. 521).

T. M. Rudavsky finds that ‘Tension between religion and science characterizes the very essence of Jewish philosophy’ in his exploration of creation, time and biblical hermeneutics in early modern Jewish philosophy (i. 531). The accommodation of non-Jewish theories and paradigms, including Platonism, Aristotelianism and Copernicanism, into a scriptural theology resulted in a ‘struggle between Athens and Jerusalem, between rational speculation and Torah based study’ that was ‘replayed in every generation’ (i. 531). In a bravura finish to the collection, Menachem Fisch argues that rabbinical Judaism showed little religious interest in science and modern science has reciprocated the disinterest in rabbinic Judaism and its conceptions of religiosity. The ‘background, cultural context, initial motivations, and dramatic rise of modern science owe exclusively to Christian sensibilities’ (ii. 564).

The editors are clear about how much work remains to be done in this field; readers will nevertheless be impressed by the achievements on display in this collection.