Daily Inspiration Quote by Arthur Peacocke

Peacocke is quietly puncturing a stubborn myth: that “religion” and “evolution” have always been natural enemies. By specifying “many Anglican theologians” and then adding the seemingly paradoxical pair “both evangelical and catholic,” he’s doing institutional triangulation. This wasn’t a fringe accommodation by a few liberal outliers; it cut across parties that normally define themselves against each other. The intent is strategic: to relocate the perceived battlefield from “faith vs. science” to “which faith traditions, in which moments, had the intellectual elasticity to metabolize new knowledge.”

The subtext is a rebuke aimed at modern culture-war storytelling, especially the Americanized script that treats Darwin as a grenade lobbed into a pious world. Anglicanism, with its habit of holding doctrine and inquiry in uneasy but productive tension, becomes Peacocke’s counterexample. He’s also defending his own larger project (as a theologian who engaged science) by giving it ancestry: not novelty, but continuity.

Context matters. The nineteenth century is the century of Darwin, industrial modernity, biblical criticism, and a shifting sense of human origins. “Embraced positively” suggests more than grudging tolerance; it implies theological use-value. Evolution could be framed as providence working through law, a creation that’s dynamic rather than finished, a God who governs by processes instead of interruptions. Peacocke’s line is short, but it’s an argument about legitimacy: if respected believers once treated evolution as an opportunity for rethinking creation, then today’s reflexive hostility looks less like fidelity and more like selective memory.