Nature Theology, by Christie Gibbons, page 2  

Although some rejected the idea of the sacredness of the natural world, it was, likewise, acknowledged and valued by many, particularly landscape artists within the Romantic Movement. Many such painters were bold in the way they combined elements that in nature typically do not belong together. For instance, in A. I. Podolinsky’s Priroda (Nature; 1829) nature is portrayed as a sorceress leading men through an array of natural delights to “an abyss that will swallow up those who try to know her too closely.” 10 This speaks to the, once widely acknowledged, delicate balance between the natural and the spiritual world, a balance addressed today by Ruether, who writes:

God is the font from which the variety of plants and animals well up in each new generation, the matrix that sustains their life-giving interdependency with one another.11

In addition to the many people in the Romantic Movement who, like Ruether and Skehan, believed and acknowledged that the world was under God’s guiding hand, there were others who held such a view. Bacon, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, even Beethoven, are among many who conceived of the natural world as having been generated by, or to have emanated from, or at least to be of the same nature as God. 12 Bacon further believed that when humankind fell, nature did not, and that God’s secrets can still be found in the natural world. He once said,

I had rather believe all the fables of the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a mind…For while the mind of man looketh upon secondary causes, it may sometimes rest in them, and go no further; but when it beholdeth the chain of them, confederate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity. 13

The second-century Christian theologian Irenaeus, who imaged the whole cosmos as bodying forth God's Word and Spirit, also held this view. He saw the entire work of creation as the sacramental embodiment of the invisible God. 14 This view recognizes the essential balance between the natural world and theology.

In speaking with some people who profess to have religious faith about this essential, but lost, balance between nature and theology, I have encountered a persistent, often adamant, fear. It seems to be a fear of supplementing accepted theology with an idea like nature theology. It is a fear of the idea of nature worship, or pantheism, in which God is all things. It is a leeriness of taking the idea of nature theology to the extreme, becoming worshippers of nature itself, a pagan tendency that has long been actively rejected by the church. This active rejection possibly began with a Jew named Barruch Spinoza whose newly spawned pantheist views were incredibly controversial among his contemporaries.

The reluctance to accept the idea of nature theology, often misconceived as pantheism, God is all things, may be assuaged by becoming familiar with the phonetically similar term pan-en-theism, God in all things. Pan-en-theism is evident in Jürgen Moltmann’s use of traces of God, cited at the beginning of this paper. It can be understood as the idea that there are hints of the divine in all things. Such pan-en-theistic thought is actually quite prevalent within most major world religions, in which the belief is often attested to that elements of God are in, behind, before, above, and below all things, particularly those things found in the natural world; minerals, plants, animals, and natural phenomena.

So, it seems that the religious realm’s rejection of what was, and is, often conceived as pagan ideas, is a misunderstanding of terminology. For, many religious people themselves tend toward a pan-en-theistic view of the natural world. One such person, Ismar Schorsch, chancellor at Jewish Theological Seminary, recognizes these hints of the divine found in the natural world, saying:

We relate to God through God’s handiwork. Nature is God’s textbook. It’s God’s gift to existence. So, to read God, we read nature. 15

Here, such reading of nature must be understood as being supplemental to the reading of God’s Word, as it was through God’s Word that the natural world was breathed into being. We read this in John 1:1-5, which says: “At the beginning of time the Word already was; and God had the Word abiding with him, and the Word was God. He abode, at the beginning of time, with God. It was through him that all things came into being, and without him came nothing that has come to be. In him there was life...” 16

Reading nature to discover hints about God must also be understood as being supplemental to, even contingent upon, faith. Perhaps viewing nature theology as a beneficial supplement to accepted communion with God would result in less rejection on the part of the church, rendering the community of faith more whole.

Yet, to claim that the rejection of nature theology comes only from the realm of religion would be shortsighted. On the contrary, a significant share of rejection also comes from the realm of science, the study of the natural world:

11 Ruether, Ecofeminism: Symbolic and Social Connections of the Oppression of Women and the Domination of Nature, 21.

12 John Baillie, Natural Science & the Spiritual Life (NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952), 18-19

13 Bacon as cited by Baillie, Natural Science & the Spiritual Life, 37.

14 Iraneus as cited by Ruether, Ecofeminism: Symbolic and Social Connections of the Oppression of Women and the Domination of Nature, 18.                         

15  Ismar Schorsch as cited in Keeping the Earth: Religious and Scientific Perspectives on the Environment, Joseph Seamans and the Union of Concerned Scientists, 1996, video.

16 Translation from the Latin Vulgate, Holy Bible, 86.

17 Baillie, Natural Science & the Spiritual Life, 10.

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