ANew Natural Theology Is aGospel of Nature
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A New Natural Theology
Is a Gospel of Nature
In further distinguishing an “above to below” new species of Natural Theology in terms of God communicating to the creature through the natural world, a different lens emerges. In this view, scientific findings and discoveries are understood through the lens of God communicating to the creature, reaching out to the creature by messages embedded in the natural world. McGrath puts it this way,
Might nature be studded with emblazoned clues to its meanings, and human minds shaped so that these might be identified, and their significance grasped?
And again,
Nature is here understood to have the capacity to represent and to speak. So how might nature disclose its meaning? . . . .it might be “instressed” with the signs and symbols that point to its wise meaning.
In light of McGrath’s assertions, an important issue for a new Natural Theology emerges. The task lies in discovering and receiving these “instressed” signs of meaning in the natural world. There is a fundamental assumption here: that such instressed messages exist and that the Creator lovingly and intentionally embedded messages within every level of the creation in order to lead the creatures into deeper union with Himself; indeed, a gospel of nature.
We now explore how a gospel of nature could support Torrance’s invitation to re-open the book of nature as a portal into this new language; the language of the natural world. This “voice” was previously believed to be “mute” except to the intellect of scientific inquiry. Now, however, this language of nature, this “voice”, is speaking in a far grander, informative species of knowing. We revisit Psalm 19:1-4;
The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they reveal knowledge.
They have no speech, they use no words;
no sound is heard from them.
Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world.
This leads us to ask, what are the heavens declaring? What proclamations are the skies pouring forth? A new Natural Theology will seek answer these queries thusly: The voice going out into all the earth pouring forth speech is proclaiming knowledge of God’s invisible qualities, his eternal power, and divine triune nature, interwoven within scientific structures and mechanisms, placed in the creation by God, in order to communicate knowledge and glory of himself to humankind. To affirm God’s moment-by-moment acting, sustaining the universe by the word of his power, and communication to intelligent beings embedded within the discoveries of natural science is to move beyond descriptions of physical systems. Science itself becomes an investigation of divine action and Self-disclosure that is nature as creation. The language of the natural world is proclaiming the gospel, the good news of God reaching to man, in scientific truths about mechanism, and process, molecules and ecosystems, inherently holding in its mysteries the self-communication of the Divine. Torrance declares,
Here our fact is the living God, the active, willing and loving God, who communicated himself to us, and it is through his self-communication and self-disclosure that he gives himself to us. . . . It may be worth pausing here to note a parallel to this in exact science. We have said that the kind of fact we have in the natural world is mute and is only made to talk as it comes to cognition and expression in our rational experience . . . this rationality of nature objectively transcends our experience of it . . . we are ready to let it speak for itself.
In this passage, Torrance creates a direct link between the eloquence of nature and God’s communication of Himself. We are ready to let nature speak, not of itself, but of the living, active God. Torrance is inviting us to walk into a flourishing expansion of our apprehension of the absolute greatness of God. Few of us, as Strachan and Sweeney lament, “have too large a view of God. Most of us have far too small a view of God and his goodness.”
God reveals, as Torrance says above, “his self-communication and self-disclosure so that he gives himself to us.” God gives “himself to us” out of divine and supernatural love as He reveals Himself in the knowledge and beauty of the creation. And why would not we think that God would do this? Jonathan Edwards put it this way: “The works of God are but a kind of voice or language of God, to instruct intelligent beings in things pertaining to himself. And why should we not think that he would teach and instruct by his works in this way as well as others, viz. by representing divine things by his works, and so pointing them forth, especially since we know that God hath so much delighted in this way of instruction?” According to Edwards, the natural world is a language of God, given to teach us of Himself. Why should we think that God would not instruct us in this way? Why would we think that God would not reveal to us God’s invisible mysteries, God’s eternal power, and Divine loving nature through what has been made, when Scripture itself instructs us that He will? Reading the language of nature, then, construes such a gospel testimony of nature, where the living, all-loving, and powerful God comes to creatures in a language they can understand, embedded in the natural world within which they exist. Torrance draws witness to the role of man as the interpreter of nature, one that requires faith: “but whatever is not-God is laid open by God Himself as set in the creation of man, and which faith makes clear to him, that man can fulfill his function as an interpreter of nature.” Again, we see the reassertion here that it is God who has the plan to lay open and disclose, to reveal what God has set in the creation. Humankind was created to receive and appropriate that revelation by faith. Our next task, then, is to ask, how can it be that ontic reality holds simultaneously two revelations, one in the natural world, and one in Scripture? Can we invite a new understanding into Karl Barth’s opposition to any revelation outside Christ? A new version of Natural Theology must begin with Scripture and demonstrate the unified consonance between the revelation of God we find embedded in the natural world and the revelation of God in Scripture, particularly in the Incarnate Son.
Scriptural Consonance: Revelation of God in the Language of Nature and in the Incarnate Son
In order for a new version of Natural Theology to construe nature as God’s communication, we must show how, and in what ways, this reconciles with God’s revelation of his ways, his character, and his divine plan in the Scriptures, and, most importantly, with God’s Self-revelation in the Incarnate Son. In the medieval scholastic tradition, St. Bonaventure claimed, “For it is by faith that we believe that the world was fashioned by the Word of life. By faith we believe that the periods of the three laws followed each other in a most orderly way; namely, the law of nature, the law of Scripture, and the law of grace.” According to St. Bonaventure, the law of nature, the law of Scripture, and the law of grace, each founded by and formed for the Word of Life (Christ) should be understood continually as God’s self-disclosed revelation, yet each having a different function. In God’s created order, the law of nature laid down God’s Self-disclosure in “shadows, echoes, and pictures . . . of that eternal source proposed to us for the contuition of God.” The law of Scripture and the law of grace both reveal God, in that “in them as in mirrors we can see the eternal generation of the Word, the Image, and the Son eternally emanating from God the Father.” According to St. Bonaventure, it is nature and the Incarnate Son (as attested in Scripture) that serve the function to disclose the knowledge of God, differently yet coordinately, by and through the act of God.
Likewise, according to Emil Brunner theology has forgotten that the knowledge of God through the Scriptures and through the creation cannot be two separate entities, but constitute one unified knowledge of the God whose end is communication of Himself: “It forgot that the Church bears this ‘treasure’ (of revelation) in ‘earthen vessels’; it confused the vessel and the content, the knowledge of God and the knowledge of the world.” This theme is, in fact, deeply embedded in Reformed theology,
Meanwhile let us not be ashamed to take pious delight in the works of God open and manifest in this most beautiful theater. For . . . it is not the chief evidence for faith, yet it is the first evidence in the order of nature, to be mindful that wherever we cast our eyes, all things they meet are works of God, and at the same time to ponder with pious meditation to what end God created them.
Calvin asserts that the created order attests to the Creator God and the end for which God created. The Creator Self-discloses the fullness of his own glory and divine nature in two critically important ways: through the incarnation of the Son, and in the works of the creation itself. These are not two separate revelations of God. They are one unified, consonant revelation, albeit different.
By consonant we mean that the two revelations of God are in agreement with one another, they are perfectly harmonious. Both reveal the knowledge and glory of God. Scripture teaches that the Son is the perfect representation of the Father. Jesus attested to the fact that He, in his divine Self, reveals the knowledge of God in his reply to Philip in John 14:9, “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen Me has seen the Father.” Jesus, in his own intimate prayer with the Father in John 17:22, also instructs us that He reveals the glory of God, “I have given them the glory that You gave Me, that they may be one as We are one.” In these passages, Scripture attests that Jesus, in his being, teachings, and actions, reveals the knowledge of and glory of God. Likewise, Scripture declares that the creation reveals the knowledge of God and the glory of God. These Scriptures attest to the knowledge and glory of God present in the created order, in the whole earth. Both the Hebrew כָּבוֹד (kabod), and the Greek δόξα, (doxa) found both in the Septuagint and the New Testament, are repeatedly used to convey the emanation or communication of God’s fullness, abundance, honor, and splendor, in reference to both nature and the Son. In terms of the translated use of the word “knowledge” of God, there is a parallel between the reference to “knowledge of God” found in John 14:9,“Don’t you know me, Philip . . .” and in Habakkuk 2:14, “For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord.” The Septuagint translation of knowledge in Habbakuk is γνῶσις (gnosis), derived from the same Greek word used in John 14:9 which has the connotation to come to know, recognize, perceive through experience. This is contrasted with other Greek words used repeatedly in the Septuagint and the New Testament for knowing such as ἐπίγνωσις (epignósis) which implies recognition, or οἶδα (oida)which is to become aware, to know about someone. From this, we can deduce that Scripture itself indicates in the original languages that there is a consonant harmony between knowledge and glory of God revealed through the works of his hands and in the incarnate Son.
Keith Johnson further supports the notion that the whole creation is just as much Self-revelation of God as the incarnate Jesus, that the divine Self-disclosure in and through the natural world is the same “above to below.” He writes, God ‘becomes Himself’ in the incarnation . . . the whole of creation is an ‘incarnation-cosmos’ (Menschwerdungskosmos) and is just as much a self-revelation of God as the incarnate Jesus Christ was, because the direction of the revelation is the same: ‘above to below.’” In this way, just as the incarnate Christ was part of the natural world, fully divine and fully human, the revelation of God through the natural world can, likewise, be a revelation of God without violating the supremacy of Christ or an understanding of God’s divine, free, Self-disclosure. However, consonance in the two sources of revelation of God’s glory and knowledge of the divine attributes does not imply equivalence. They are consonant, but different. The “weight” or significance of the revelation of God in Christ and in the natural order are different and have different functions in God’s plans and purposes for the world. The Son reveals the knowledge of the Father and communicates this in his life, his teachings, healings, and miracles. Jesus is fully human and Jesus is also fully divine. He is the glory of God, redemptively conveyed in his suffering and death on the cross and victoriously in the power of his resurrection from the dead. In Matthew 9, Jesus tells the teachers of the law, who were inwardly accusing Him of blasphemy, “So that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins . . . take up your mat and go home.” Jesus in his humanly being is revealing the knowledge and glory of God, and is, in his divinity, ὁμοούσιος, (homooúsios) “one in being with the Father” as declared in the First Council of Nicaea. Only God can forgive sins, only God has the power to redeem.
The natural world, on the other hand, can reveal the knowledge and glory of God, yet it is not ὁμοούσιος (homooúsios), not “one in being” with God. Nature as such is not God. Otherwise, we would have to endorse pantheism. Perhaps we can recover use of the term ὁμοιούσιος (homoiousios) when referring to the “glory of God” that fills the earth, having similarity, not identity. Nature is not divine, but it gives us an authentic analogy of the knowledge of the divine.
In turning to the function of nature as a revelation of God, the Scriptures speak abundantly of the creation and God’s relation with it. For our purposes here, Scriptures relating God and the creation might be categorized under five general categories. They are:
1. God created the universe. It is the work of his hand
2. God owns the universe and everything in it.
Everything belongs to Him
3. God knows all of the creation intimately, and cares for it
4. The creation rejoices and worships Him
5. The creation reveals/displays God’s glory, divine nature,
eternal attributes
If we take up the final category, The creation reveals/displays God’s glory, divine nature, eternal attributes, we can see that there are numerous Old and New Testament passages that testify to God’s glory being revealed in and through the works of God’s hands. God’s own glory covers the creation and fills the creation, as God Himself tells Job, “But ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish in the sea inform you” (Job 12:7–8). Scripture itself implies God’s revelation exists in and through the creation. Since the creation is not ὁμοούσιος (homooúsios), as Christ is, perhaps it can be understood as ὁμοιούσιος (homoiousios). Nature cannot save, but can point and give witness to the One who does. In the next chapter, we will explore just how nature reveals the knowledge and glory of God by revisiting some of Emil Brunner’s insights on nature and grace.
. McGrath, A Fine-Tuned Universe, 3.
. McGrath, A Fine-Tuned Universe, 4.
. Torrance, Theological Science, 29.
. Strachan and Sweeney, Jonathan Edwards on Beauty, 85.
. Edwards, Images of Divine Things, 67.
. Torrance, Theological Science, 69.
. St. Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, Works of St. Bonaventure, 77.
. St. Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, Works of St. Bonaventure, 71.
. St. Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, Works of St. Bonaventure, 71.
. Brunner, The Christian Doctrine of Creation and Redemption, 4.
. Calvin, Institutes, 1:179.
. Hebrews 1:3.
. Just a few examples would include Habakkuk 2:14, “For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea,” again in Isaiah 6:3, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of His glory, “ and in Numbers 14:21 “Nevertheless, as surely as I live and as surely as the glory of the Lord fills the whole earth.”
. Johnson, Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis, 75.
. Since there are numerous scriptural references supporting each of these categories, a few examples are given for each:
a. God created the universe. Genesis 1:1; Nehemiah 9:6; Job 12:9; Psalms 24:1–2; 95:5; 104:24; John 1:3.
b. God owns the universe and everything in it. Everything belongs to him. Psalms 24:1; 50:10–11; 95:5; ; 104:2, 24–25; Romans 11:36.
c. God knows all of the creation intimately, and cares for it. Job 12:10; Psalms 50:10–11; 104.
d. The creation rejoices, and worships him. Psalm 96:11–12; Isaiah 49:13; 55:12.
e. The creation reveals/displays God’s glory, divine nature, eternal attributes. Numbers 14:21; Job 12:7–8; Psalms 19; 57:5, 11; 72:19; 108:5; Proverbs 3:19; Habakkuk 3:3; Romans 1:19–20; 11:36; Colossians 1:15–16; Hebrews 1:3; 2:10.
. At this point we must briefly address the Protestant reformed view that the creation is cursed and thus cannot reveal God. As a result of the fall in the Genesis account, the entirety of creation is not cursed, only the players involved in the sin narrative were “cursed.” For example, Genesis 3:14 states that the serpent above all other animals was cursed and made to walk on its belly. Genesis 3:17 states that the “ground will be cursed” in reference to Adam’s toil. Just as Eve’s “curse” is the pain of childbirth. According to the Genesis account, the entire creation was not cursed, only the serpent, the ground in relation to man’s toil, and the woman’s toil in child-bearing. In the narrative of Noah, the “curse” on the earth was repealed and God established His covenant with the all created beings and the earth itself, “ I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth.” Yet, the creation itself is subject to suffering just as human agents are. This is explained in Romans 8:18–24. This was by God’s design, holding with it the hope that in eschatological time that suffering will be relieved both for the creation and for human agents. Just as there are present sufferings for humans, with the hope of the “glory to be revealed,” so also the creation groans due to the “frustrations” it was subject to, also with the hope of a final redemption in the last days. This reveals God’s plan for the end of time and the fulfillment of days (Galatians 4:4–7; and Revelation 21:1).