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A Problem for Theology: The Concept of Nature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

Gordon D. Kaufman
Gordon D. Kaufman
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

The growing general awareness that the order of nature within which man lives is a delicate ecological balance — a balance which cannot be indiscriminately exploited by men much longer without destroying the continuing possibility of human life — has not been without repercussions among theologians. There is an increasing attentiveness to nature as a theological problem and an interest in developing theologies of ecology and conservation. In addition there appears to be a growing belief that the theological focus on “history” in recent years has been extravagant or even entirely misplaced: it has turned attention in theology away from the natural world, which is “our real home”; it has led to a theological ignoring of the natural sciences and has thus helped to isolate theology from some of the most important and influential streams of human learning in modern culture; and it has contributed to and mightily re-enforced man's sense of self-importance and insularity, for history is preeminently the human story, and the “God of history” seems principally involved in transactions with men (although of course he is said to be the creator and father of all). What we need, we are told, is a “theology of nature” that will enable us to understand the orders of life and being within which we live and of which we are part, and even a “natural theology” that will illuminate for us, and teach us properly to worship, the God implicit in nature.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 65 , Issue 3 , July 1972 , pp. 337 - 366
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1972

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References

1 An early expression of the now common emphasis will be found in Sutler, Joseph, A Theology for Earth, The Christian Scholar 37 (1954), 367–74Google Scholar. See also, among many others: Bonlfazi, Conrad, A Theology of Things (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1967)Google Scholar ; Hefner, Philip J., Towards a New Doctrine of Man: The Relationship of Man and Nature, in Meland, B. E., ed., The Future of Empirical Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969)Google Scholar ; Elder, Frederick, Crisis in Eden: a Religious Study of Man and Environment (Nashville: Abingdon, 1970)Google Scholar; Santmire, H. Paul, Brother Earth: Nature, God and Ecology in Time of Crisis (New York: Nelson, 1970)Google Scholar ; Christians and the Good Earth (Alexandria, Va.: Faith-Man-Nature Group, 1968?)Google Scholar; This Little Planet, ed. Hamilton, Michael (New York: Scribner's, 1970)Google Scholar ; Earth Might Be Fair: Reflections on Ethics, Religion and Ecology, ed. Barbour, Ian (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972)Google Scholar. Cobb, John B. Jr., Is It Too Late? A Theology of Ecology (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Bruce, 1972)Google Scholar. A useful annotated bibliography of relevant theological and other writings will be found in Alpers, Kenneth P., Starting Points for an Ecological Theology: A Bibliographical Survey, in Marty, M. E. and Peerman, D. G., eds., New Theology No. 8 (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 292–312Google Scholar.

2 A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, ed. Murray, J. A. H. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901–1933), Vol. 6, Pt. 3, pp. 41–42Google Scholar. See also The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia, ed. Whitney, W. D. (New York: Century Co., 1889–1900), Vol. 5, p. 3943Google Scholar.

3 For as long as the term “nature” has been used with cosmic scope and reference, it has been more closely identified with the material universe than with the spiritual. In consequence “naturalism,” which in its more recent formulations has attempted to do full justice to the “spiritual” side of man's “nature” — thus directly employing the ambiguity in the concept with which we are here concerned — was often in earlier versions basically materialism. For discussion of these points see Danto, A. C., Naturalism, Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edwards, Paul (New York: Macmillan and Free Press, 1967), Vol. 5, 448–50)Google Scholar; also Krikorian, Y. H., Naturalism and the Human Spirit (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944)Google Scholar.

4 Here the modern concept of nature differs substantially from classical views, particularly Greek. In the classical period nature, the context of human life, was understood as a teleological order within which man's life — and also his purposes — were meaningfully situated (see Glacken, C. J., Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967], chs. 1–3)Google Scholar. Nature, even the earth itself, was viewed as a living organism of which man was a functioning part. However, as man has come to be understood (in the West) as essentially a personal and purposive being, able to envision and create whole worlds within which to live, nature has progressively lost its intrinsic teleology and become impersonal and dead. Perhaps the historical intervention of the Christian doctrine of creation is partly responsible here, for in the Christian perspective nature became viewed not as ordered by her own immanent vital principles, but as an artifact from the hand of God, given such order and direction as he extrinsically imposed. In this scheme purposiveness is lodged in the Creator, not in nature itself. And therefore it is in relation to his Creator that man's purposiveness finds a meaningful metaphysical ground, not in relation to the world of nature taken in and by itself. It is this naked and impersonal nature, now, that is the “natural order” studied by science and taken for granted in most of our experience and life. The development here is similar to that which occurred with the Cartesian dualism of mind and matter (and is not unrelated). Once mind (purpose) was wholly abstracted from matter, it was no longer possible to think of matter (nature) as a teleological order or organism; it was simply “dead.” Such a material (natural) order can never provide an adequate context for human existence, as the nature of the ancients did, for there is no intelligible grounding here for the purpose, meaning, and value which have such importance in human life. In this situation man must resign himself to existence in an impersonal and ultimately inhuman world (nature) or seek to live in relation to some extra-natural ground of meaning and purposiveness (God). It was Kant who perceived this development and its significance most clearly, constructing his metaphysics and ethics accordingly. “Against the eighteenth-century position that man is a part of nature and ought to be subservient to her laws, Kant reacted by inverting the order and making nature what she is because of how she appears to us. Then he transcended even this Copernican venture by daring to weigh nature in the scales of reason and to declare that she is wanting and does not contain the destiny of man. The practical — what man ought to be and how he ought to transform his existence — in this conception takes precedence over what nature is and what she demands of man as part of her order. Nature produced man but brought him to the stage where he can finally assert his independence of her.” (Beck, L. W., A Commentary on Kant's Critique of Practical Reason [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960], 125.Google Scholar)

5 This is already foreshadowed in Scotus Erigena's fourfold concept of nature-God: 1) nature uncreated and creating, or God in himself; 2) nature created and creating, or God as cause of all things; 3) nature created but not creating, or the world as continuous process; 4) nature neither creating nor created, or God as the consummation of the whole process.

6 As Tiluch, Paul has noted, the well-known modern formula “deus sive natura … indicates that the name ‘God’ does not add anything to what is already involved in the name ‘nature.’” (Systematic Theology [University of Chicago Press, 1951], I, 262.Google Scholar)

7 There are, of course, a variety of natural powers and processes which can serve as metaphysical paradigms, e.g., the vitality, growth, and evolution characteristic of life as understood in the biological sciences in contrast with the endless motion, mathematical order, and entropy characteristic of the matter studied in physics. Usually it is not simply the bare notion of “natural process” which provides the basis for the metaphysical concept of nature (i.e., nature viewed as the ultimate context of human life) ; rather it is one of these more concrete and particular kinds of natural order. In general one can say that if the subject-matter of biology is given this paradigmatic function, nature appears filled with vitality and activity and even teleological development, and human existence may seem meaningful and with hopeful prospects; when the subject-matter of physics provides the paradigm for understanding nature, however, we are confronted with images of mechanism and lifelessness and an ultimate future of icy death. (For elaboration, see Toulmin, Stephen, Contemporary Scientific Mythology, in Toulman, S., Hepburn, R. W., and MacIntyre, A., Metaphysical Beliefs [London: SCM Press, 1970], 60–65Google Scholar.)

8 See, e.g., Foster, Michael, The Christian Doctrine of Creation and the Rise of Modern Natural Science, Mind 43 (1934), 446–68Google Scholar; and Christian Theology and Modern Science of Nature, Mind 44 (1935), 439–46Google Scholar, and 45 (1936), 1–27; Collingwood, R. G., An Essay on Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940)Google Scholar, Pt. IIIA; and Oakley, Francis, Christian Theology and the Newtonian Science: The Rise of the Concept of the Laws of Nature, Church History 30 (1961), 433–57Google Scholar.

9 See esp. White, Lynn Jr., The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis, Science 155 (1967), 1203–07CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 It is worth remembering in this connection that the Hebrew vocabulary did not even have a term corresponding to our word “nature.” The fundamental unity and order of the context within which man lived was provided directly by God. (See Robinson, H. W., Inspiration and Revelation in the Old Testament [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946], Ch. 1.Google Scholar)

11 The turn away from such highly anthropocentric ways of interpreting the details of nature began during the high Middle Ages. Lynn White regards St. Francis as quite important in this respect. “St. Francis first taught Europe that nature is interesting and important in and of itself. No longer were flames merely the symbol of the soul's aspiration: they were Brother Fire. The ant was not simply a homily to sluggards, the worm not solely a sermon on humility: now both were autonomous entities. St. Francis was the greatest revolutionary in history: he forced man to abdicate his monarchy over the creation, and instituted a democracy of all God's creatures. Man was no longer the focus of the visible universe. In this sense Copernicus is a corollary of St. Francis …. it was no accident that his order attracted men who flung themselves into furthering the new natural science and who became its leading exponents in the thirteenth century” (Natural Science and the Naturalistic Art in the Middle Ages, American Historical Review 52 [1947], 433–34)Google Scholar.

12 Boyce Gibson is correct in suggesting that precisely this notion of God is the ground of the strong sense of the meaningfulness of human life and activity characteristic of Hebrew culture. “Nowhere does fate play a smaller part than among the Hebrews; and the reason is that they resisted more firmly than any other civilization the assimilation of God to nature. Even the arbitrariness of their God had its compensations.” (Theism and Empiricism [London: SCM Press, 1970], 189.Google Scholar)

13 Albrecht Ritschl put this in an especially sharp way: “… nature is called into being to serve as a means to God's essential purpose in creating the world of spirits …. the creation of nature by God is … a relative necessity, the necessity, namely, of serving as a means to God's previously chosen end of calling into being a multitude of spirits akin to Himself…. For the apparatus by which the individual life and all commerce in things spiritual is carried on, presupposes for its permanent existence the whole immeasurable system of the world, mechanical, chemical, organic…. The whole universe, therefore, considered thus as the precondition of the moral kingdom of created spirits, is throughout God's creation for this end” (The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation [Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1900], 279–80). This general point of view was just as characteristic of neo-orthodoxy as of liberalism. See, e.g., the extensive examination of Karl Barth's theology with respect to the understanding of nature by Santmire, Paul: Creation and Nature: A Study of the Doctrine of Nature with Special Attention to Karl Barth's Doctrine of Creation (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation in Harvard Divinity School Library, 1966)Google Scholar.

14 I have myself frequently taken this route, most obviously perhaps in my Systematic Theology: a Historicist Perspective (New York: Scribner's, 1968)Google Scholar, esp. in Pts. II and III (cf. also the Introduction), and in God the Problem (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972), ch. 6Google Scholar.

15 “… everything depends on grasping and expressing the ultimate truth not as Substance but as Subject as well” (Phenomenology of Mind [London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1931], 80)Google Scholar.

16 Of course, there always have been, and doubtless there always will be, materialist or physicalist interpretations of selfhood, and much is to be learned from studying these. These perspectives are always based, however, on a preferred status given to the objective or observable sides of selves, i.e., to third-person language. One does not need to move all the way to idealism to be persuaded that there is a dimension of selfhood (“subjectivity”) which cannot be handled in purely objective or descriptive categories; first-person language seems in principle not to be reducible to second-person or third-person language. It would seem to be impossible in principle, therefore, to grasp these dimensions of selfhood (the “I”) in terms of the concept of “nature” with its essentially descriptivist or objectivist categories. Something — precisely that which essentially characterizes the “I” as I — will always be left out.

17 See, e.g., Philosophy of History (New York: Dover, 1956), 40–41Google ScholarPubMed.

18 Cf. Marx, Karl: “It is that nature which he develops in history which is the real nature of man” (quoted in Philosophisches Wörterbuch, ed. Klaus, G. and Buhr, M. [Berlin: Europäische Buch, 1970], 769)Google Scholar.

19 See Collingwood, R. G., The Idea of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945)Google Scholar.

20 Cf. von Weizsäcker, C. F., The History of Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949)Google Scholar.

21 Some may regard Whitehead's philosophy, with its stress on nature as process, as already showing the way to this new notion of nature-history; others may see such possibilities in Hegel. Although both of these men have contributed much toward an understanding of reality as processive and historical, I do not think either succeeds in resolving the issues with which we are here concerned. Hegel is certainly sensitive to the problems of conceiving the self and reality in such a way as to make place for the distinctive self-reflexive character of selfhood; however, though he attempts to carry through his dialectical metaphysics into the interpretation of nature, he does not succeed in developing a very persuasive conception, probably in part because he was working prior to both modern evolutionary biology and also the new physics, and thus did not have available to him means to interpret natural phenomena in historical or processive terms. On the other hand, though Whitehead certainly exploits such modern scientific developments in working out his philosophy of organism and process, and thus produces a concept of nature in many ways open to reconciliation with the problems raised by history and selfhood, even using concepts and images drawn from self-experience (e.g., “subjective aim,” “feeling,” “decision”) to articulate his understanding of the ultimate metaphysical realities, he does not seem to have clearly grasped the distinctive self-reflexive character of the self and the peculiar problems which it raises for metaphysical conceptualization, and he devotes very little attention to the consequently peculiar character of the historical order in contrast with evolutionary and other natural processes. Instead, his conception seems rooted largely in his analysis of the notions of process, event, and organism, as these grow out of the contentions and claims of the (largely objectivist) natural sciences. Whereas Hegel thus seems too far on the history side of the history-nature polarity with which we have been concerned, Whitehead remains too far on the nature side; neither is sufficiently aware of the problems raised by both sides of this polarity to be able to transcend it and produce a truly unifying conceptual scheme. Some might wish to claim that Teilhard de Chardin has produced such a conceptual apparatus. Certainly he has provided us with a unified vision of nature-history, and that is undoubtedly an important achievement. But it is not clear that his fundamental notions have been thought through with sufficient rigor to enable us actually to conceive nature and history in one unified and comprehensive metaphysical scheme. More significant in this regard, perhaps, is Paul Tillich. Volume III (1963) of his Systematic Theology, the importance and originality of which has not been widely noted, attempts to work through these issues by developing the concept of life as an all-embracing metaphysical category. Tillich's work here certainly calls for careful consideration. However, I suspect that the development of concepts adequate for grasping history-nature awaits some future genius. Or perhaps it is never to be accomplished. Perhaps the contrasts of self and world, of mind and body, of history and nature, of subject and object, of man and the rest of creation are finally irreducible (cf. Kant), and we will have to be satisfied with various compromises and partial perspectives.