leads to the enveloping notions of a “world soul” and a Natura that describes this in a way that—again using Stoic terminology of the antique world—draws in the person of God as Spirit.4 By now, Plato’s Timaeus has taken on a central role in this conceptualization, as in Bernardus Silvestris’s Cosmographia from the mid-twelfth century.5 The historical place of movements like Franciscan “inductive” spirituality (cf. Bonaventure’s Platonically informed The Mind’s Journey into God), that sought to move the contemplative mind from a consideration of God’s creatures to their Creator, seems to be related, if unclearly, to these developments. The “books” of Nature and of Scripture had by now, in any case, been seen to rest concordant (if not synonymous) one with another, a conviction well established into the seventeenth century, as Drummond’s famous sonnet lays out, “Of this fair volume which we World do name. . . .”
The blurring of philosophical and theological categories over this period, however, should not be seen in itself as a corruption of Christian realism. For even in its appropriation of non-Christian conceptions, the purpose of these discussions was always to elucidate something that Scripture itself was seen as centrally affirming: “ever since the creation of the world [God’s] invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made,” in Paul’s words (Rom 1:20). How can the world not witness to, even “reveal” God? And more so, how might we deny this in a specifically Christian sense, when the Apostle also tells us that “in him [Christ, the Son] all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities—all things were created through him and for him” (Col 1:16). If nothing else, the “visible world” of “secondary causes,” as Gregory of Nazianzus eloquently urged, was so marvelously fraught with mystery that at the least it unveiled the greater veil of God’s marvelous being, which only the revelation of Christ could indicate directly.6 In general, then, “natural theology” necessarily remained bound, for all its occasional odd stirrings and departures, to a scriptural ontology, much as Augustine himself seemed to presuppose.
A more noticeable decoupling between nature and Scripture, theologically speaking, begins in the sixteenth century and achieves completion in the seventeenth, at least according to compelling scholarly arguments such as those by Michael Buckley. Much of the impetus for this comes from a new questioning of religious tradition itself, including the Scriptures, growing out of an array of building forces from Renaissance and Reformation habits and dislocations. With a developing science of the observable world moving forward, both in terms of biology and physics, as well as in the documentary sciences of critical history, the “natural” came to have its own integral place apart from scriptural metaphysical conceptualities—including revelation—in which it had always previously found its home.
In particular, natural theology became more and more tied to the question of theistic “proof,” and the character of human knowledge’s foundations. Although the notion and formulation of “proofs of God” were already engaged in the Middle Ages, often on the basis of categories and conceptions derived from Augustinian exemplars (something that continued in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), they did not achieve a special status as apologetic disciplines in their own right. But by the seventeenth century it was just such independence of apprehension that began to be clamored after, in the face of growing public disputes over the rational and persuasive bases of conflicting ecclesial and religious claims. Whether moving from deductive premises, or ordering thought from inductively arranged data, the form and nature of God would be presented, so it was thought, in an almost necessary manner.
Summarizing the work of a Christian apologist and scholar like Leonard Lessius (1554–1623), who re-deployed Stoic “topics” in a new battle against Europe’s emerging class of religious skeptics, Buckley writes:
Natural theology, then, becomes no longer a part of metaphysics, but derivative by common sense of ordinary philosophic maxims from astronomy, comparative religion, mechanics, and biology. It is a world to which theology itself has very little contribution to make. So it remains in the centuries to come, an effort to provide a preamble to Christian convictions about god which does not include Christ.7
Only a few writers at the time accepted Spinoza’s neo-Stoic identification of this realm with God himself—deus sive natura8—an identification by which the divine was actually drawn away from revelation and church into a more exclusive natural orbit than “theology” formally understood. But even stopping short of such a move, natural theology came to be seen increasingly as an alternative and even rival to Christian scriptural and ecclesial doctrina, with its own subject matter, rules, and arguments.
The subversion of sacra doctrina was not, by and large, the intention of most Christian natural theologians in the early modern world. From Robert Boyle through John Ray (not to mention the more lugubrious Thomas Burnet), Bernard Nieuwentyt, J. C. Lesser, and finally the most successful (and currently intellectually vilified) exemplar of orthodox natural theology, William Paley, the study of natural phenomena was viewed as a buttress to the Christian faith against rationalistic and even skeptical atheism.9 It was also viewed, however and in its own right, as a means of devotion and joyful worship of God. And certainly for moral theologians like Joseph Butler (and Paley, in his own way) natural theology provided a wondrous opening by which the shape of the Christian life might be seen as coherent with the general shape of the world (although not without pain for all that).10
David Hume, to be sure, attempted to deal a death-blow to these kinds of hopes. In his Dialogues on Natural Religion, as well as in his Natural History of Religion from the mid-eighteenth century, he sought both to subvert the logic of drawing metaphysical (and religious) conclusions from observed phenomena and to offer an ersatz “historical” explanation for the (perhaps inescapable) rise of religious belief. Kant, for his part, tried to make a virtue of Hume’s skepticism in these regards, canonizing the rational limitations of the religious imagination as a kind of human distillate to be gratefully but responsibly used in translated human form. These kinds of arguments had a cumulative effect, especially as the religious imagination, as Kant would conceive it, was itself the object of increasing disdain and suspicion from many quarters of institutionally aggrieved Europeans. It was never clear, in any case, what to do with the religious leftovers of these debates, and philosophical theism has never found a social niche beyond dark corners of the academy.
Ultimately, with the elaboration of the natural sciences as well as the establishment of anti-ecclesial rationalism within European educated society, the distinction between the objects of natural theology and scriptural metaphysics grew into an actual rupture. Despite the efforts of natural theologians as wildly disparate as Coleridge and Philip Henry Gosse—both of whom, in their own ways (along with many others in the nineteenth century still) were caught up in the astonishing combustion brought about by the Bible and the Church’s encounter with naturalistic description—the rupture proved in fact to be a widening chasm. It was one that perhaps encouraged and certainly was used to promote broad and specific intellectual movements seeking to overthrow altogether the adequacy of traditional theology’s claims. In the place of such claims, many “natural theologians” sought to provide newly constructed descriptions of God that could be asserted as coherent with developing scientific understandings of the world, sometimes directly addressing Hume and Kant, sometimes simply plowing ahead as if they had never raised their questions. “Natural theology” came to have for its practitioners a greater stature, in terms of truth, than doctrinally oriented theologies set forth within the Church’s seminaries. An established churchman like Charles Raven in the twentieth century could certainly maintain his place within the classical structures of the Church; but his work led him to question in many ways the classic tenets of the Church he served.
Roman Catholics tended to eschew the conflict, by and large. Still, the last century has seen a growing unanimity among traditional Christians, classically enunciated by Karl Barth, that “natural theology” in its modern sense—and perhaps in all senses—is both useless and probably even corrupting of the Church’s understanding of God.11 From Barth’s perspective, natural theology
