ection>The World in the Shadow of God
An Introduction to Christian Natural Theology
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Ephraim Radner
CASCADE Books • Eugene, Oregon
THE WORLD IN THE SHADOW OF GOD
An Introduction to Christian Natural Theology
Copyright © 2010 Ephraim Radner. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1952 (2nd edition, 1971) by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Cascade Books
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
www.wipfandstock.com
isbn 13: 978-1-60899-017-7
Cataloging-in-Publication data:
Radner, Ephraim, 1956–
The world in the shadow of God : an introduction to Christian natural theology / Ephraim Radner.
viii + 170 p. ; 23 cm. —Includes bibliographic references.
isbn 13: 978-1-60899-017-7
1. Poetry—21st century—Collections. 2. Natural Theology. 3. Apostles’ Creed. I. Title.
pr6063 .i29 r33 2010
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
To Annette:
ad formicam, usque ad caritatem
Introducing an Introduction to Christian Natural Theology
This volume attempts two tasks, each one difficult in our own day. First, it ventures into the realm of natural theology, providing in brief span a view of how the world displays the life of God. Second, this first task is pursued, not discursively, but through a range of poems ordered according to the Apostles’ Creed. While each task, on its own terms, is hardly a popular exercise in today’s Christian culture, taken together, they strain habitual expectation. The following discussion seeks to explain this challenge in its historical context. In the end, I believe there is a strong argument to be made that poetry is a necessary aspect of the Christian faith, in large part because the created world itself is the positive instrument of the Christian faith’s practice. The two—poetry and world—go together, and Christian faith itself cannot do, indeed does not exist, without them.
The Nobel Prize-winning physicist and militant atheist Steven Weinberg has expressed a certain regret that the demise of Christian religious belief deprives us perhaps of a significant source of literary inspiration, once evident and forceful in the past at any rate. Where Christian faith has helped positively shape good poetry today, he argues, it is generally in the force of its rejection by the author (e.g., someone like Philip Larkin). But the “wonder” that Weinberg still believes it is possible and good to feel in the face of the natural world, as well as the fear at the annihilation of a bare death that is, in fact, all we have to look forward to, with whatever “good humor” we can muster, is not the last word on faith’s cultural dissolution in the West especially. Indeed, it represents itself one aspect that a robust Christian natural theology must itself embrace, as a reflection upon and within the world around us actually discloses the Lord from whom and with whom and towards whom we live, even in the drift of that current that has caught up the “honorable” facing into nothingness that apologists for unbelief like Weinberg have assumed. For even what is nothing takes its shadowed form from something beyond its seeming or perhaps all-too-real emptiness.1
It is important that the Christian faith itself struggle with the character of this transitory emptiness, and allow it to speak into the assertions of religious confession and thereby mark out more clearly that confession’s contours. This is what a robust natural theology can do, and it is what poetry most especially is bound up in doing.
The Historical Shape of Natural Theology
God is apprehended within the world around us, in which we live. But how can this be so? On this question hangs much of our contemporary culture’s religious unease.
Taken in its modern sense, “natural theology” is the study of God based on truths that do not derive directly either from Scriptural revelation or authoritative (and inspired) ecclesial discernment. These “natural” truths can include a range of realities, from the physical world to the world of human artifacts and individual or cultural experience. “Natural,” in other words, need not refer to non-human or pre-social reality as opposed to human community. But in encompassing the latter, the natural does so without direct reference to or derivation from the Creator towards whom the creature stands, as across an infinite qualitative divide.
And taken in this modern sense, the category of “natural theology” has been a problematic one. But it was not always so, in large measure because this modern sense of “natural theology” has not always exhausted the meaning of the phrase.2 Borrowing perhaps from the first century BCE Roman writer Varro, it was Augustine who enshrined the topic of theologia naturalis as a Christian scholarly focus, referring it to the nature of the gods, and, in its true Christian form, to the “divine nature” itself in its true substance. Hence, natural theology did not necessarily exclude, from the start, the presupposition of the Christian God. Rather, its orientation as “natural” marked it as having to do with just such presuppositional categories of even thinking or conceptualizing the Christian God, expecially in relation to other sub- or anti-Christian beliefs. Natural theology, that is, was primarily metaphysical in interest, rather than exegetical or doctrinal in the first instance. But if metaphysics might be involved, it would be a metaphysics grounded in, rather than opposed to, divine revelation as a clear coordinate for understanding the “nature” of what is real, with God as the defining center. So Augustine in The City of God engages theologia naturalis with a free-wheeling investigation into God’s standing toward other divine beings, and their relation to the world and to causation, including even angels in his discussion.3
Natural theology, once pursued in this way, was bound to be unclear in its extent and its boundaries. The Stoic near-identification of “nature” with the divine itself, and the equation of Reason or Logos with the active element of the world as God, provided conceptual handles for some later Christian philosophical metaphysics. Some of these identifications and associations simply crept into the late antique and early medieval discussions and cataloguing of observation and began to offer a storehouse of imagery by which the natural world began to be understood in Christian terms, whatever the blurring of distinctions this might have implied. And so we see works like Isidore of Seville’s seventh-century De Natura Rerum already opening the way for a metaphysical linkage between matter and God, at least as a means of understanding the world on its own terms as bound to some kind of Christian worldview.
Over the course of the next centuries, we can find among the philosophers and theologians
