Pious Scientists

Posted on March 20, 2015 by theamericanplutarch

Oftentimes, missionaries in America were people of exceptional learning. Almon Bacone, for example, the founder of Bacone College, as a faculty member in the 1880s and 1890s taught an incredible number of subjects: Greek, Latin, rhetoric, English literature, logic, natural science, ancient and modern history, physiology, algebra, geometry, trigonometry.

Bacone used science, broadly interpreted, as a tool in his pious work responding to the Great Commission, as recorded in the Gospels, wherein Christ told His disciples to “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation.” Bacone and others like him, such as his student Alexander Posey, were fascinated by God’s Creation, human and natural history. This religious awe of Creation led to thinking in all forms of intellectual endeavor, based on the assumption that in coming to know the perfection of God’s Creation a person at the same time learns about the human creation and the best way for humans to live according to the mandates of their Creator.

The Protestant Christian community of intellectuals, of which Almon Bacone was a part, were trained as scientists and theologians and many practiced this dual character of the pious scientist. The pious scientist engaged in a search to know the secrets of the universe and to reach the limits of human understanding within the context of nature, an overwhelming entity of mystery that dwarfs any one of us, which generates a pious response, demanding reverence, stewardship, humility, dedication, and faith, and which generates a sense of the rational continuity of time and place and awareness of purposeful change, that answers exist to questions, that order not chaos exists, that reason and knowledge are possible. Piety is the response to the realization that we live in a universe of positive, rational, predictable, orderly phenomena. The scientist showed piety through natural theology, the belief in the continuity of and the order in the universe, the acceptance of natural laws, and the confidence that human reason can (and will) discover natural laws. At the same time the pious scientist recognized that nature represents a vast unknown of which humans would always be ignorant of the deepest secrets. As Cotton Mather once proclaimed, “there is not a fly, but that would confute an atheist,” which was as much an admission of his own ignorance before God’s creation as it was a condemnation of agnosticism and atheism. The scientist derived piety from an awareness of ignorance. The humility, lack of hubris, ability to know that one does not know (or quite know), marks the pious thinker, who is expectant, open-minded, in a way awaiting discovery, knowledge, but knows that knowledge is never absolute, always subject to constraints, changes, interpretations. It is this ability to have faith that knowledge exists, which faith drives the seeker to know, that defines the pious scientist. Such knowledge is acquired in time, therefore cannot be absolute, rather is relative, in a process of accumulation. The pious scientist knows that one day he and she will know. In the meantime the pious scientist is on a quest, everyday, to gain knowledge that will only terminate with death.

Jeremy Belknap the 18th century minister, was a pious scientist:

For more on the history of science, see my Science in the Ancient World: From Antiquity to the Middles Ages, published in an affordable paperback on Jan 22, 2026, by Bloomsbury: find it at: https://www.amazon.com/Science-Ancient-World-Antiquity-through/dp/B0FSW74DKZ/ref=books_amazonstores_desktop_mfs_aufs_ap_sc_dsk_0?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=6oCC7&content-id=amzn1.sym.299f645c-0a78-440a-94a2-fb482e7cb326&pf_rd_p=299f645c-0a78-440a-94a2-fb482e7cb326&pf_rd_r=142-5197957-8175817&pd_rd_wg=Erb81&pd_rd_r=7cdd0d6a-0a38-49cf-a2ba-a1a0959be396

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Missionaries and Love

Posted on March 17, 2015 by theamericanplutarch

Missionaries and Love:

There were many missionaries of many denominations who brought the Gospel to American Indians in the United States and Canada: Anglicans, Catholics, Methodists, Lutherans, Moravians, Presybterians, and Baptists. They shared a similar interpretation of the compelling call of the Great Commission; though some believed that conversion could occur in the moment, others thought that it required a long drawn out process. These missionaries were not just promulgators of Christianity, but agents of cultural transmission as well. They brought a new way of life. Some of their listeners willingly embraced the new ideas, others did not. The missionaries were part of a larger social, political, intellectual, and economic movement of society that, in the end, overwhelmed the American Indians. Often what is talked about today is the end product, the result, which is not a very pretty story. We learn of broken promises, lands taken away from tribal peoples, and cultural genocide in government-run schools intent on driving traditional customs and ideas out of the minds of Indian students. Reservations often turned into islands of poverty and despair amid a wealthier society.

But part of the job of the historian and thinker is to discover what occurred in a singular moment of time, to recreate a past time, and not just to look at the now to see how it all came about.

Were missionaries evil, ill-intentioned, out to hurt the Indians? If we look at subsequent history, at the forces of dislocation and abuse and exploitation that occurred over time, we might wonder about their motives. But what if we look into their hearts, as it were, in the moment, when it occurred—what if their motives were mostly love? Can this be erased by the consequences? How humans look at such events might differ with how God looks at them. God, who is not constrained by time, sees the person now, in an ongoing present, doing the action—and He sees their goals, drives, and motives. But we, in the future, looking at consequences, looking at what we see through the dark glass of time, looking at the past, might miss what were those motives and goals, which I believe were not so nefarious or evil.

And we might pose this possibility as well: Jesus commanded His Apostles to bring the Gospel to all nations. Can we doubt that the second part of the Trinity, the Son, knew that missionaries would bring their culture, their ideas, their assumptions and prejudices to non-Christians? If we assume that he could peer into the future, to perceive what would happen, then we realize that He knew that according to God’s perception of time, it would all work for the best. Did Jesus, when He formed the Great Commission, have a broad viewpoint of past, present, and future? Did the missionaries have an ethical viewpoint of the Ends Justifies the Means, that anything goes to accomplish the larger purpose of the Great Commission, or did they perceive their role as acting just in the singular moment, and not according to an ethical view of accomplishment and results, but one that was Christlike, seeing what is true in real at a moment in time, acting according to, above all, love?

For the life of missionary Daniel Little, see https://ash-hill-publishing.square.site/product/apostle-of-the-east-soft-cover/XLY4EOWYX6MJRTGOQQFVDW4G?cp=true&sa=true&sbp=false&q=false

 

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In Praise of Alexander Posey

Posted on March 11, 2015 by theamericanplutarch

Alexander Posey, the Creek poet, was a student and librarian at Indian University, now Bacone College, in the 1890s. During his brief life (1873-1908), Posey published essays, satire, stories, and wonderful poems about nature, life, and death. He wrote whimsically about life on the Indian University campus under the presidency of Almon Bacone.

For example, in the B[acone] I[ndian] U[niversity] Instructor, a periodical published by Indian University in the 1890s, he wrote of a student-faculty picnic along the banks of the Arkansas River:

The “picnic was enjoyed in a beautiful grove of walnut trees on the Arkansaw river.” Everyone listened to the wonderful cry of the birds, which (quoting James Whitcomb Riley), “had something new in cadence for the hearing.” Students walked or rode in wagons a mile north of the Indian University campus “to the nymph and faun-hanted woods.” They ate and played games, such as croquet and baseball, and took boat rides on the river and walked along the shore. “The picnic grounds afforded a picturesque view of the confluence of Grand River with the Arkansaw, and the distant outlines of the historic and now deserted, Fort Gibson. Thus a day was spent with Nature in one of the loveliest spots of which the Hesperian lands can boast.”

At about the same time Posey wrote that “quotations from the poets on that delightful season” of spring “are beginning to appear on our black board. Even the professors, one or two at least, have betrayed inclinations to write delicious rhymes in praise of her for the coming violets and redolent breath already. Do not be surprised if you should see a book issued by the B[acone] I[ndian] U[niversity] press ere long, entitled, ‘Spring and Other Poems’.”

In his poem, Twilight, published in the Bacone Indian University Instructor in 1893, he imagined the setting sun on the seashore:

Beyond the far-off waves, the seagulls cry,

As twilight shades

The emerald glades

And zephyrs waft the strains of nightbirds nigh,

Now sinks the sun–

Its course is run–

The day is done–

It fades in the gold of the western sky.

Alexander Posey was the kind of person that Almon Bacone often talked about: an indigenous American, thoughtful and talented, given the chance to grow and bloom in a college in the midst of Indian Territory. When Bacone said, “A Christian school planted in the midst of a people becomes one of the most powerful agencies in the work of civilization,” he was thinking of the likes of Alexander Posey.

For more on Posey, see Marking the Jesus Road: Bacone College through the Years, newly republished in January 2026 and available at Marking the Jesus Road: Bacone College through the Years | Ash Hill Publishing

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The Messenger’s Way

Posted on March 9, 2015 by theamericanplutarch

Carved on the northeast corner of the Bacone College chapel is this passage from the Old Testament:

Micah, 6:8: He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good: and what doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God?”

We have found, in our world, that it is difficult indeed “to do justly,” “to love mercy,” “to walk humbly.”

The first Baptist missionaries to engage the Indians of western Oklahoma encouraged them to follow the Jesus Road. The Indians discovered, however, that the missionaries themselves struggled to keep to this road. On the northwestern corner of the Bacone chapel is this quote, from Charles Journeycake, Chief of the Delawares:

“We have been broken up and moved six times. We have been despoiled of our property. We thought when we moved across Missouri River and had paid for our home in Kansas we were safe, but in a few years the white man wanted our country. We had good farms, built comfortable houses and big barns. We had schools for our children and churches where we listened to the same gospel the white man listens to. The white man came into our country from Missouri and drove our cattle and horses away and if our people followed them they were killed. We try to forget these things but we could not forget that the white man brought us the blessed gospel, the Christian’s hope. This more than pays for all we have suffered.”

Indians, whites, and others, have found themselves joined on this same path to try to do good by one-another. Clearly, the thousands of people of Bacone College during the past 135 years have struggled to keep to the Jesus Road. But the very fact that the Bacone chapel has such inspiring words carved upon it indicates that notwithstanding the crooked paths and varying directions we take, there is one path that points the way.

For more on the Baptist missionaries of Oklahoma, see Marking the Jesus Road: Bacone College through the Years, newly republished in January 2026: https://ash-hill-publishing.square.site/product/marking-the-jesus-road-bacone-college-through-the-years/DA3I5IFCHDN6PROLSCGQVNKM?cp=true&sa=true&sbp=false&q=false

 

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