Many Christians assume that faith and science have always been at war, and that a believer must eventually pick a side. The historical record points elsewhere. In a Jude 3 Project conversation, Dr. Frederick Ware traces a line of Black Christians who held Scripture and scientific study together. It runs from AME ministers debating geology and biology in the 1880s to Pentecostal scholars writing on cosmology in our own time. Conflict is one Christian inheritance. It is not the only one, and for many believers it was not the first.
This guide works through that history. It does not argue the whole faith-and-science question over again. It asks you to look at who said what, and when. It also asks you to sort what is documented from what is reported, and to decide what that inheritance means for you. You can work through it alone in two or three sittings. A group can cover it in one long meeting or two shorter ones. The central practice is building a timeline, so keep paper or a shared document nearby.
Start with the story you were told
Before you read further, write one sentence answering this: When did Christians start believing that faith and science were enemies? Then write a second sentence naming where you learned that answer. It might be a sermon, a teacher, a documentary, a parent, or an argument online. Keep both sentences. You will come back to them at the end.
Lisa Fields voices a common assumption during the conversation: “I think often we think this is a new conversation that we’re having, especially amongst the African American community.” If your sentence placed the conflict in recent decades, or treated it as the natural state of things, you are in good company. The history below tests that assumption.
What the text puts on the table
Start with Scripture, read for what it actually claims. Genesis 1:1 reads, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” The verse names the Creator and says creation had a beginning. Read it in its setting as the opening of a carefully ordered account. It answers the question of who stands behind the world. It does not hand the reader a laboratory method.
Psalm 19:1 is poetry, and it should be read as poetry: “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.” The word “firmament” is old English for the vault of the sky as it appears to an observer. “Sheweth” means shows. The psalmist treats the created world as something that speaks of God. A believer who studies the sky closely is listening to that speech more carefully, not straying from it.
Proverbs 25:2 adds a wisdom saying: “It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter.” Proverbs states general principles, so this is not a promise that every search succeeds. It does describe searching out hidden things as honorable work.
Last, Acts 17:11 describes the Bereans, who “received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so.” This is narrative. It describes rather than commands, but Luke presents the Bereans’ habit with approval: eager reception paired with checking. Keep their habit in mind, because the practice later in this guide asks you to check the historical claims you are about to read.
Observation prompt: In these four passages, mark every verb that describes a human action toward God’s world or God’s word. What kind of person do they describe?
Five witnesses, in order
The conversation does not unfold in chronological order, so here it is rearranged by date. Watch for two kinds of information as you read: the dates and events, and the interpretation Ware places on them.
Centuries before: more than one way to read
Ware explains that Christian theologians long before the modern era taught that Scripture could be interpreted in more than one sense. He lists a literal sense, an allegorical or symbolic sense, a moral sense, and a spiritual or mystical sense. He does not name particular theologians or dates in this conversation. For this guide, take it as background: well before modern geology, Christian readers already asked what kind of meaning a passage carried.
The 1880s: an AME minister rereads Genesis
The center of Ware’s account is Theophilus Steward. Ware describes him as an AME minister who served as a chaplain during the Civil War and later taught at Wilberforce University. Ware says Steward wrote a book called Genesis Reread, which he dates to 1885. He says the book tried to show how to interpret Scripture alongside what was then being learned in geology and evolutionary biology. Ware’s summary of Steward’s aim is that the text need not always be read literally and yet can still be true.
Ware says the book set off “very lively debates happening in the 1880s” among AME ministers. He reports that Bishop Daniel Payne thought the book might confuse people without theological training. For ministers on the path to training, though, Ware recalls Payne saying “this book was essential and necessary reading.” He also reports that he knows of only two physical copies, in New York and in Ohio, with digitized copies available. He gives readers a caution too: “It’s an artifact from that period of time.”
Notice what Payne’s judgment reveals. The book was controversial, and a bishop thought it unsuitable for some readers. It still did not cut his church off from the science of the day. He treated it as required study for future ministers. That is a church holding a hard question inside its own life, not banishing it.
The 1970s: relativity and theology
Ware names Roy Morrison, who taught at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C. He says Morrison published a book from his dissertation research treating Einstein’s theory of relativity from a theological point of view, in the seventies.
The 1960s and after: a Church of God in Christ childhood
Ware’s own story belongs on the timeline. He was born in 1961 and grew up in the Church of God in Christ, in a family he calls very spiritual and very religious. He grew up in the years of the race to the moon. He read and followed the experiments his older siblings brought home from their science classes. “So that type of background and science and faith was already there,” he says. He later chose religion over engineering, but he says he never gave up science, describing himself this way: “So I’m not a scientist, but I am someone who’s like a philosopher or theologian of science.” He is now an ordained COGIC minister and associate dean for academic affairs at Howard University School of Divinity.
Around 2000 onward: Pentecostal awe and cosmology
Ware points to his late colleague Barbara Holmes. He says her work on faith and science began with a book on race and the cosmos around 2000 to 2002. He notes that she came from a Pentecostal, charismatic background, and “that spirituality that she had was never lost.” She studied physics and cosmology in depth, and Ware’s judgment is that the science deepened her wonder: “And the science did not rid her of that, or take it or rob her of that. It just only became more enhanced.”
Now: seminaries catching up
Finally, Ware describes the Science for Seminaries program. He calls it a partnership between the Association of Theological Schools and the American Association for the Advancement of Science that funds schools to add science to ministry training. He reports that the association includes about 270 schools and that close to a third are involved. He frames the change this way: “At one time, it was only so-called elite schools that only dealt with theology and science.”
What this history shows, and what it does not
Read as a sequence, these witnesses establish something modest and important. In Black church settings, believers took up scientific questions openly in the 1880s, the 1970s, and the decades since. Their faith and their churches did not collapse as a result. Ware’s own conclusion is that past generations show “how they managed to maintain vibrant faith and also vital churches during that time.”
Now apply the Berean habit. Almost every date and detail above reaches us through one speaker in one interview. A transcript proves that Ware said these things. It does not, by itself, prove each detail of Steward’s career, the dating of every book, or the number of surviving copies. Ware is a theologian who studies this field, so his account deserves a hearing. It is still his account until you check it.
The history also does not show that every believer agreed. Payne’s caution is itself evidence that Genesis Reread unsettled people. Ware does not claim that conflict never happened. He says only that some scientific advances can be unsettling when faith has not yet matured enough to wrestle with something new. Selecting witnesses who held faith and science together shows that this path existed and was walked. It does not show that it was the only path or the majority one.
Steward’s approach also raises a question of method. Reading Scripture in several senses has a long Christian history. A careful reader should still ask first what the human author meant in the original setting, including what kind of writing Genesis 1 is, before moving to other layers of meaning. Faithful Christians who do that work disagree about the age of the earth and how God created. Some hold a young earth, some an old earth, and some see evolution as a process God used. In the conversation, Lisa Fields says that for her the question is not a defining one: God could have worked through evolution or spoken the world into existence. That is her stated view, and believers still differ on it. What Genesis 1:1 states plainly, and what every witness above affirms, is that God is the Creator.
The practice: build the timeline yourself
This exercise turns the history above into something you have checked rather than something you were told.
- Draw five columns: Date, Person, What they did or said, How I know, and What it means.
- Enter each witness from this guide. Put Steward, Payne, Morrison, Holmes, Ware and Science for Seminaries on separate rows.
- In the How I know column, write Ware’s account for now. Then pick at least two rows and try to confirm them from an independent source, such as a library catalog, a digitized edition of Genesis Reread, a university archive, or the Science for Seminaries website. Mark each row as confirmed, corrected, or still unverified.
- If you find the digitized Genesis Reread, read two or three pages. Write one sentence on what Steward is actually arguing in those pages, kept separate from what anyone has said about him.
- Keep the What it means column apart from the facts. A date is not an interpretation. The year Steward wrote belongs in one column. A judgment such as whether Black churches feared science is a conclusion, and it belongs in the other, with your reasons.
- Add one row from your own family or church: someone you know who worked in medicine, engineering, teaching or research while staying active in their faith. Ware gives an example from his church, where medical doctors and researchers explained during the pandemic how viruses spread. Record only what you actually know, and ask permission before sharing anyone’s story.
Questions for discussion
- Look at the sentence you wrote at the start. Did your timeline confirm it, correct it, or complicate it? Which row made the biggest difference?
- Bishop Payne reportedly treated the same book as confusing for one audience and necessary for another. Is that a wise way to handle hard questions in a church, or does it risk keeping ordinary members in the dark? What would you do differently today?
- Which details in this history could you confirm independently, and which rested only on one speaker’s account? How should that difference affect the way you repeat this history to someone else?
- Ware and Holmes both came from Pentecostal backgrounds that expect God to act in the present. Why might that tradition make it easier, or harder, to welcome scientific study?
- Steward read Genesis in more than one sense. Read Genesis 1 through slowly. What does the passage claim plainly, and where do you think faithful readers might reasonably differ about its kind of writing?
- If the conflict model is not the only Christian inheritance, why do you think it became the one many people grew up with? What evidence would you need to answer that well?
For whoever is leading
Divide the timeline rows among participants before the meeting so the checking work is shared. Expect some rows to stay unverified, and treat that as an honest result rather than a failure. Some people in the room may hold firm views on the age of the earth. Keep the conversation on what the history shows and on what Genesis plainly claims, and do not settle the open questions by vote. Question 2 tends to produce the most disagreement. Give it room.
Return, finally, to the second sentence you wrote at the start, the one naming where you learned the conflict story. Ware’s own judgment is that “a lot of the things that we are wrestling with and we’re struggling with is not totally unique to our time and our generation.” Before the week ends, find one person who first told you the war story. Ask them where they learned it, and add their answer to your timeline.