5 The theatre of the glory of God: a Christian view of nature
The theatre of the glory of God: a Christian view of nature
Few questions have so intrigued humanity as that of the meaning of the universe. The sight of a star-studded night sky can make us feel quite overwhelmed. Are these silent points of light harbingers of a more significant world than the one we know? Or are they simply symbols of the vastness of space and the brevity and pointlessness of human existence?
Recently, traditional questions such as these have been supplemented by others. A growing realization of the fragility of our environment has led many to call for the development of a new attitude towards the natural world. If we are not careful, we could destroy our habitat and hence eventually ourselves: humanity could be the first species to have brought about its own extinction.
The way in which we view the domain of nature is thus obviously important. The Christian way of looking at nature faces challenges from its rivals. On one side, there has been a resurgence of paganism in the West in recent decades.1 In its new forms, paganism represents a wide range of beliefs and practices: some forms are reappropriations of pre-Christian ideas (such as Druidism), others are better understood as postmodern constructions, reflecting a growing cultural interest in nature and spirituality.2 Yet underlying most, if not all, is a strong sense of nature as a sacred entity, capable of disclosing its secret wisdom to those who are able to discern its deeper levels of meaning.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, another range of worldviews denies that there is any spiritual or transcendent dimension to nature. In a famous lecture of 1917, the German sociologist Max Weber spoke of the ‘disenchantment of the world’.3 Nature was not mysterious, sacred or ‘special’; it was something that could be explained and mastered by science and technology. More recently, the new atheism has vigorously asserted nature as a self-referencing entity, devoid of any deeper significance.4
There is no consensus within contemporary Western culture on this matter, no shared interpretation of the identity and status of the natural world. We are told that we are free to interpret as we will, and to act on those interpretations.
Yet this does not prevent us from evaluating the merits of the neo-pagan and new atheist approaches. Postmodern writers such as Stanley Fish have emphasized the growth of ‘interpretive communities’, each committed to its own distinctive reading of reality, and its justification.5 The Church can see itself as a distinct ‘interpretive community’, sustained by its own narrative, and identified by its language, images and values. The power of the Christian interpretative community to capture the imagination of our culture will rest, to no small extent, on its imaginative rendering of the natural world, and on the way it defends and communicates its ideas.
Can the Christian faith offer a richer, deeper account of the natural world than its pagan or atheist rivals? The importance of the question is obvious. Both the credibility and utility of the Christian faith can legitimately be called into question if it fails to offer a better account of reality than its rivals.
Christian theology offers a distinct angle of gaze, a way of seeing things which both discloses the true identity of nature, and mandates certain ways of behaving towards it and within it. Theology enables us to see the fullness of reality, the world as it really is or could be. For contrary to what most thinkers of the Enlightenment believed, nature is not an autonomous, self-defined entity; rather, it is something that is always interpreted, whether consciously or subconsciously, from a theoretical standpoint.6 The term ‘nature’ does not designate an objective reality that requires interpretation: it is already an interpreted entity. As the great British philosopher of science William Whewell (1794–1866) once remarked, there is ‘a mask of theory over the whole face of nature’.7 The term ‘nature’ thus really denotes a variety of ways in which human observers choose to see, interpret and inhabit the empirical world.
Christians see the natural world through a theological prism. In the eighteenth century, many Christians chose to interpret nature through a lens that was deist rather than Trinitarian. God was seen as the creator of nature, whose involvement with the natural realm ceased thereafter. This encouraged the emergence of a functional atheism, in that God was, to all intents and purposes, thought of as being absent from the world.8 Yet during the twentieth century, through the influence of theologians such as Karl Barth and Karl Rahner, there has been a rediscovery of the coherence and explanatory power of a specifically Trinitarian vision of God. But perhaps we should allow that immensely gifted amateur theologian Dorothy L. Sayers to reflect on the importance of this development in her own characteristic way:9
The Christian affirmation is … that the Trinitarian structure which can be shown to exist in the mind of man and in all his works is, in fact, the integral structure of the universe, and corresponds, not by pictorial imagery but by a necessary uniformity of substance, with the nature of God.
So what difference does this make to the way in which we see nature? Perhaps the most obvious is that the natural world is God’s created possession, entrusted to humanity. The Christian understanding of the created order immediately negates any notion that humanity is the originator or possessor of the natural world, entitled to exploit it for its own ends. Nature has been entrusted to humanity, who is to be thought of as its steward, not its master. It is not ours, so that we may do with it as we please. We may indeed bear the ‘image of God’ (Genesis 1.27), but this is a mark of responsibility, not privilege.10 To bear God’s image is to be accountable to God for our behaviour, not to be exempt from divine scrutiny or accountability. This insight does not solve the problem of how we deal with our environmental crisis, but it does provide an essential framework within which such reflection and action may take place. The way in which we see things shapes how we behave towards them.
Yet further reflection leads to other insights. If God created the natural world, does it not bear the divine imprint? Is not one of the implications of a Trinitarian doctrine of creation that the natural world displays in some sense the marks of its creator? This insight is famously stated in the opening words of Psalm 19:
The heavens are telling the glory of God;
and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
Israel already knew about its God, and did not need to look at the natural world for proof of God’s existence. Yet it saw God’s glory reflected in the creation. To use John Calvin’s phrase, the natural world is to be recognized as the ‘theatre of the glory of God’. God’s glory is stamped on the world by the act of creation; this is supplemented by the mighty acts by which God chose to redeem the world, which take place within this same theatre of nature.11 As Bonaventure of Bagnoregio (1221–74) argued, the many features of nature can be discerned as ‘shadows, echoes and pictures’ of God its creator, which ‘are set before us in order that we might know God’.12
While this deeper, more satisfying engagement with the natural realm allows us to appreciate its beauty and rationality, it does raise an obvious question: what of the moral and aesthetic ambiguity of nature? Is not nature characterized by ugliness as much as beauty? By violence, destruction and pain, as much as by goodness? How can this aesthetic and moral variegation within nature be accommodated theoretically?
A particularly distinctive aspect of a Trinitarian reading of nature is the notion of the ‘economy of salvation’, traditionally attributed to Irenaeus of Lyons in the second century.13 Irenaeus uses this framework to set out a panoramic vision that encompasses the entire breadth of history, from creation to consummation. God created the world ‘good’; it has now defected from this primal state, and is to be thought of as fallen, sinful or damaged. What might be the relevance of this theological framework for our engagement with nature?
One obvious point is that a fallen humanity here reflects on a fallen natural world.14 Neither observer nor observed are exempt from the damage of sin. This can be developed further, with reference to the present status of nature within the ‘economy of salvation’. Nature remains God’s creation, but is now profoundly ambiguous, signalling both its divine origins and its present distress.
This tension is evident within the New Testament. For example, at several points, Paul makes an appeal to the creation as the basis of knowledge of God. Yet while Paul clearly holds that God can be known through the creation (Romans 1), at other points he qualifies this by referring to the ‘groaning’ of the creation (Romans 8).15 The created order is to be seen as in transition, suspended between its original creation and final recreation.
Engaging nature using the Trinitarian framework of the economy of salvation allows the Christian interpreter of nature to accommodate the moral and aesthetic ambivalence of nature. How can the existence of a good God be inferred from such ambivalence, or reconciled with it? When all is said and done, there are really only two options at our disposal: turn a blind eye to those aspects of nature that cause us moral or aesthetic discomfort, or develop a theological framework that allows us to affirm the primordial goodness of nature while also accounting for evil. The first approach, in addition to being intellectually disreputable, causes considerable psychological discomfort, giving rise to a potentially destructive ‘cognitive dissonance’ between theory and observation. We are thus left with only one viable way of handling the issue – developing a framework which allows this moral ambiguity to be observed, honoured and interpreted.
Such a framework is provided by the Christian faith’s vision of God. It affirms that God created all things good, and that they will finally be restored to goodness. Yet at present, good and evil coexist in the world, as wheat and weeds grow together in the same field (Matthew 13.24–30). This Trinitarian framework allows us to locate good and evil, ugliness and beauty within the context of the theological trajectory of creation, fall, incarnation, redemption and consummation.
To explore this further, let us consider a passage from the final volume of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters (1860), in which he reflects on a landscape in the Scottish Highlands.16 Ruskin, one of the most influential cultural figures of the Victorian age, insists that God has given us ‘two sides’ of nature, and intends us to see them both. To make this point, Ruskin points to an unnamed ‘zealous’ Scottish clergyman who was determined to see the landscape as a pure and simple witness to the ‘goodness of God’. Nature is described in terms of ‘nothing but sunshine, and fresh breezes, and bleating lambs, and clean tartans, and all kinds of pleasantness’.
Yet Ruskin dismisses this as inept. The zealous clergyman has chosen to see what he wishes to see, not see what is actually there. For Ruskin, ‘to see clearly’ lies at the heart of poetry, prophecy and religion.17 How can nature be sunlit without there being shadows? Ruskin offers an alternative viewing of a Highland landscape, stressing its moral and aesthetic ambivalence:
It is a little valley of soft turf, enclosed in its narrow oval by jutting rocks and broad flakes of nodding fern. From one side of it to the other winds, serpentine, a clear brown stream, drooping into quicker ripple as it reaches the end of the oval field, and then, first islanding a purple and white rock with an amber pool, it dashes away into a narrow fall of foam under a thicket of mountain-ash and alder. The autumn sun, low but clear, shines on the scarlet ash-berries and on the golden birch-leaves, which, fallen here and there, when the breeze has not caught them, rest quiet in the crannies of the purple rock.
Up to this point, Ruskin echoes the somewhat one-sided sentiments of the Scottish parson. Yet the shadows, he now insists, must be seen. Ruskin’s mood alters as he describes the less attractive aspects of the scene. Death and decay are present in this paradise.
Beside the rock, in the hollow under the thicket, the carcass of a ewe, drowned in the last flood, lies nearly bare to the bone, its white ribs protruding through the skin, raven-torn; and the rags of its wool still flickering from the branches that first stayed it as the stream swept it down … At the turn of the brook, I see a man fishing, with a boy and a dog – a picturesque and pretty group enough certainly, if they had not been there all day starving. I know them, and I know the dog’s ribs also, which are nearly as bare as the dead ewe’s; and the child’s wasted shoulders, cutting his old tartan jacket through, so sharp are they.
Ruskin thus points to a shadowy side to nature, which cannot be denied or softened by even the most zealous Romantic imagination. Yet this is the real ‘nature’ that Christian theology must address – a harsh empirical reality, not some idealized and sanitized fiction.
A Trinitarian perspective enables us to see the natural world as decayed and ambivalent – as something that is morally and aesthetically variegated, whose goodness and beauty are often opaque and hidden, yet are nevertheless irradiated with the hope of transformation. Christian theology is the elixir, the philosopher’s stone, which turns the mundane into the epiphanic, the world of nature into the realm of God’s creation. Like a lens bringing a vast landscape into sharp focus, or a map helping us grasp the features of the terrain around us, Christian doctrine offers a new way of understanding, imagining and behaving. It invites us to see the natural order, and ourselves within it, in a special way – a way that might be hinted at, but cannot be confirmed, by the natural order itself. Above all, it allows us to avoid the fatal fundamental error that is so often the foundation or consequence of a natural theology – namely, that divine revelation is essentially reduced to the supreme awareness of an order already present in creation.
This leads us to consider a further question that arises from the Christian engagement with nature. Does nature prove the existence of God? William Paley’s famous Natural Theology (1802) set out to demonstrate the existence of God from the evidences of design in the natural world. (I discuss Paley’s work in greater detail in Chapter 8.) More recently, writers such as the philosopher William Lane Craig have argued that the existence of a creator God can be deduced from reflection on the natural world.18 An alternative approach, however, is to appeal to the notion of ‘empirical fit’. How well does the mental map of the Christian faith fit with what is actually observed in the world?
This approach is found in the writings of William Whewell, noted earlier, who believed that the best demonstration of the existence of God lay in ‘showing how admirably every advance in our knowledge of the universe harmonizes with the belief of a most wise and good God’.19 The argument that Whewell puts forward is that the observation of reality is consonant with the Christian vision of God, which is believed to be true on other grounds. In other words, nature does not ‘prove’ God’s existence; yet the existence of God may be held to be the best explanation of what is actually observed.
A more recent exponent of this approach is the physicist-turned-theologian John Polkinghorne, who argues for ‘consonance’ between our observations of the world and the Christian tradition.20 Polkinghorne suggests that the capacity of mathematics to mirror the deep structures of reality is highly significant: ‘There is a congruence between our minds and the universe, between the rationality experienced within and the rationality observed without.’21 For Polkinghorne, this can be explained in terms of the created correspondence between the human mind and the natural order. I have developed a similar way of thinking, noting the ‘resonance’ between the Christian vision of things and what is actually observed.22
This approach does not demand that the observation of nature can prove the existence of God through necessary inference. Rather, it is argued that the vision of nature that is mandated and affirmed by the Christian vision of things is found to offer a highly satisfactory degree of consonance with what is actually observed. Christian theology offers, from its own distinctive point of view, a map of reality which, though not exhaustive, is found to correspond to the observed features of nature. The map corresponds to the landscape, the theory to the observation. Christian theology makes possible a way of seeing things that is capable of accommodating the totality of human experience and rendering it intelligible through its conceptual schemes. Christian theology offers us a mental map, a schema, that is able to explain much of what is observed in nature.
Where some have argued that the existence and at least some of the characteristics of God can be deduced from the natural world, Polkinghorne and I argue for a more modest and realistic approach, based on the idea of resonance or ‘empirical fit’ between the Christian worldview and what is actually observed. The Christian faith, grounded in divine self-revelation, illuminates and interprets the natural world; the ‘Book of Scripture’ enables a closer and more fruitful reading of the ‘Book of Nature’. The capacity of the Christian vision of reality to illuminate and explain what is observed, while important in its own right, can also be seen as a confirmation of its reliability as a theory. This does not ‘prove’ the existence of God; it does, however, point to the ability of Christianity to map the terrain of our universe.
Yet there is another aspect to the Christian engagement with nature, which forms a fitting conclusion to this chapter. Christianity regards nature as a limiting horizon to the unaided human gaze, which nevertheless possesses a created capacity, when rightly interpreted, to point beyond itself to the divine. The philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch (1919–99) used the term ‘imagination’ to refer to a capacity to see beyond the empirical in order to discern deeper truths about the world. This, she argues, is to be contrasted with ‘strict’ or ‘scientific’ thinking, which focuses on what is merely observed. An imaginative engagement with the world builds on the surface reading of things, taking the form of ‘a type of reflection on people, events, etc., which builds detail, adds colour, conjures up possibilities in ways which go beyond what could be said to be strictly factual’.23
Murdoch’s point here is that the imagination supplements what reason observes, thus disclosing a richer vision of reality. Her argument may falter at points; its potential outcomes, however, are important. To be limited to an empirical account of nature fails to disclose its (or our!) meaning, value or agency – the great questions that any ‘theory of life’ has to address.24 Yet the Christian faith is also able to offer an approach to nature which is grounded in its empirical reality, but transcends the empirical.25 It offers us theoretical spectacles which allow us to behold things in such a way that we are able to rise above the limits of the observable, and move into the richer realm of discerned meaning and value. In doing so, it does not descend into fantasy, but makes warranted assertions which are grounded in its deep and rich Trinitarian vision of God. The natural world thus becomes God’s creation, bearing the subtle imprint of its maker. We see not only the observable reality of the world, but its deeper value and true significance. Neither value nor significance, it must be emphasized, are empirical notions, things that we can see around us. They must be discerned, and then superimposed upon an empirical reading of the world.
This point is developed in a short poem by the German Romantic writer Joseph von Eichendorff (1788–1857):26
In all things a song lies sleeping,
That keeps dreaming to be heard,
And the world will rise up singing,
If you find the magic word.
Eichendorff’s point is that there is a hidden meaning to the natural world and we need to find the key that will unlock its secrets: the ‘magic word’ (Zauberwort) is widely interpreted as pointing to poetic vision, rather than scientific analysis, as enabling an authentic experience of nature. Such a key is provided by the Christian faith. Nature is an ‘open secret’ – yet its true meaning requires special interpretation.
Unless the Christian Church can offer a vision of the natural world which transcends those of its rivals in today’s marketplace of ideas, it cannot hope to retain the interest of contemporary culture. Sadly, we live in an age when too many see nature simply in the cold and abstract terms of scientific analysis. But historians have long recognized that the Christian view of creation played a major role in the emergence of modern science, by stressing the ordered and rational structures of the natural world. The Christian faith also allows us to see further and deeper, to appreciate that nature is studded with signs, radiant with reminders, and emblazoned with symbols of God, our creator and redeemer.