Darwin did not live within the context of Christian Fundamentalists who treat the Bible as a magical love letter written just for them and for whom it comes with no reference to tradition.
Darwin’s Christianity was of the nineteenth century variety, which is to say, it was a Christianity that was waking to the realization that scripture was the product of tradition and was shaped by history. (See Lessing, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, and von Harnack to name a few nineteenth century Christian theologians who emphasized this historical turn and the idea of becoming.)
The idea of history was changing in the nineteenth century. No longer was it seen simply as a chronicle of events, it came to be seen as a project that traced the transformation of institutions and emphasized their unique and organic development.
The geologist and mentor of Darwin, Charles Lyell, opposed such developmental thought. He described geology as equilibrium of two types of forces: those forces like earthquakes and volcanoes that raise the earth up and leveling forces such as erosion. For Lyell, science meant becoming aware of the back and forth that occurred between these forces. For Lyell, there was no sense of development. Though he had a notion of time and imagined that these forces had always been working against each other, time for him was the equivalent of t in the equations of Newtonian mechanics—it conveyed no sense of development.
Darwin opposed the view of Lyell. Instead, he adopted the historicism of Christianity. He was aware that adopting a Christian method amounted to treason against his mentor. Just as the Bible tells a story of transformation of a people and their relationship with God, Darwin’s theory would also describe a transformation.
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