New directions in natural theology

Since 1750, natural theology has suffered powerful attacks from both without and within the Church: from without by Hume, Kant, Marx, Freud and various followers of Darwin; from within by the towering figure of Karl Barth. ¹ Perhaps as a result of these attacks, natural theology seemed to be somewhat eclipsed for much of the last century, so much so that, in 1995, John Polkinghorne could observe that ‘natural theology is not widely endorsed by contemporary theologians’. ² Yet, by 2009, William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland could exult: ‘The renaissance of Christian philosophy over the last half century has served to reinvigorate natural theology … Today, in contrast to just a generation ago, natural theology is a vibrant field of study.’ ³ This article reviews some of the ways in which natural theology is being used by Christian philosophers and theologians today.

In 2013, the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology, Russell Re Manning, in his introduction to the book, sounded a similarly positive note, remarking on the ‘rich diversity of approaches’ to natural theology and ‘the importance of natural theological themes in contemporary theology, both for religious reflection on the relations between reason and revelation and for the contemporary concerns of inter-religious dialogue, the environment, and secularization’, as well as for ‘aesthetic engagement with the natural world and the complex relations between theology and the arts’, including ‘the role of the imagination’. ⁴ That handbook covered an enormously broad canvas, built up from the research of a distinguished gallery of scholars.

These positive perspectives on natural theology received further support in the special issue that the European Journal for the Philosophy of Religion devoted to natural theology in 2017. In this issue, Olli-Pekka Vainio, in his guest editorial, entitled ‘The return of natural theology’, wrote of this return in practically revivalist terms, with a hint that a new ‘golden age’ for this discipline might perhaps be on the horizon. ⁵ What has caused this turnaround? Are we witnessing the beginnings of a renaissance in natural theology?

There are several issues that might be considered here. One is the dichotomy between the philosophical and the theological commentators on natural theology, which holds a unique position at the meeting place of theology and philosophy. On the philosophical side of that line, the commentators cited above still seem to be viewing natural theology within its traditional boundaries, as a subset of the philosophy of religion. On the theological side, they are venturing forth into far-flung areas including inter-religious dialogue, the environment, secularization, theology’s relationship with the arts, and aesthetic aspects of its relationship with the natural world; there is a particular focus on the role of the imagination. Alister McGrath epitomizes this expansive vision when he argues that natural theology leads its practitioners ‘far beyond the traditional boundaries of systematic theology’, to explore ‘the borderlands of theology with the arts and sciences’. ⁶

Questions of definition

This raises questions regarding the definition of natural theology, which has been much discussed and remains contested, to the point that the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology could shrug his shoulders and write: ‘throughout this Handbook individual contributors give their own definitions of natural theology and there has been no editorial attempt to impose consistency’. ⁷ What all this debate obscures, however, is that the negative aspect of the definition of natural theology, its independence from divine revelation or religious authority, is very widely agreed.

Since 1888, many of the most distinguished thinkers in this area have spoken in the famous Gifford Lectures, established by the will of Adam Lord Gifford (1820–87) for ‘“Promoting, Advancing, Teaching, and Diffusing the study of Natural Theology,” in the widest sense of that term’. One of the clauses in his will, by which the lectures were established, was that the lecturers were to ‘treat their subject … without reference to or reliance upon any supposed special exceptional or so-called miraculous revelation’. ⁸ Therefore, an avoidance of any reliance on any kind of miraculous or divine revelation may be taken as a widely agreed beginning for a definition of natural theology. Of the many possible examples showing how widespread this agreement is, one might cite Keith Ward’s article ‘Natural theology’ in the Encyclopedia of Science and Religion, where Ward simply states: ‘Natural theology is the part of theology that does not depend upon revelation.’ ⁹ In an article such as this, space does not allow for long discussion of such a contested term, so I will take that basic definition as a starting point and investigate several current manifestations of natural theology, before returning to questions of definition, in the light of those manifestations.

Different forms of presence

What are the key developments in the role of natural theology in the theological world today? I will begin by investigating certain genres of theology. First, feminist theology: what connection might there be between feminist theology and theology that does not depend on revelation? The influential Carol P. Christ, in her 1989 essay ‘Embodied thinking: reflections on feminist theological method’, made these assertions:

As theologians, we have religious experience and vision which ground our symbols and theological vision … We seek to speak a truth rooted in our experience, our time and place, our bodies … We should think of our ‘truth claims’ as the product of embodied thinking not as eternally or universally valid thought. ¹⁰

How typical is such an approach? Linda Hogan, in her survey of feminist theology, sees it as effecting ‘a revolution’ in theological scholarship, in both ‘content and method’, based around a ‘praxis-based methodology’. In her view, ‘experience and activity’ are the ‘source and content’ of feminist theology. ¹¹ This implies, although Hogan does not note the point, a transition from a theology whose starting point is revelation to one framed in terms of natural theology.

Serene Jones highlights another important motif: imagination. She sees the task of feminist theology as ‘[h]elping to reshape our religious, global imagination, to recontour its landscape’. In her survey of feminist theology, she notes that it has been the work of feminist theologians to ‘explore and re-imagine almost every doctrine in the Christian tradition’, rather than rely on revelation as traditionally conceived. She points out that Christian feminist theologians have chosen to ‘seek new images of revelation, perhaps as a safe form of touch or an immanent knowing’, to ‘imagine the world not only as a distant Other to God, but as God’s body’, and to ‘imagine creation as an activity more like giving birth’. ¹² Such a programme seems to resemble natural theology more than revelation-dependent forms of Christian theology, especially in the freedom it takes for itself to reimagine Christian doctrine so comprehensively, regardless of revelation.

The methodologies of these feminist theologians place their work firmly within a broadly construed understanding of natural theology. Yet natural theology remains a largely undiscussed element in their work. Biology gives us an image that may be pertinent: that of the ‘recessive gene’ – that is, a gene whose effects are masked in the presence of a dominant gene. Does natural theology act as a ‘recessive gene’ in the presence of other, dominant theologies?

Consider eco-theology. To take one reasonably representative example, it might be argued that the authors of Ecospirit: religions and philosophies for the earth, in 2007, were collectively, though seemingly unconsciously, creating a form of interfaith natural theology that functioned as a mediating structure enabling them to integrate their theological and environmental concerns. This work included a ringing affirmation that ‘doctrines of the theological tradition are being reconstructed in the place opened by deconstruction’, to be replaced by something less precisely defined, involving, it would seem, ‘ecoecumenism’, ‘the human in common’ and ‘common ground’. ¹³

Not all envisionings of eco-friendly natural theologies have been such departures from Christian tradition. In recent years, partly in response to Pope Francis’s willingness to speak out regarding environmental concerns, there has been an increased dialogue between theology and environmentalism. For instance, in 2018, Theology and Ecology across the Disciplines brought them together within an interdisciplinary discussion. An important essay in that volume, Christopher Hamlin’s ‘Ecotheology before ecology and environmentalism: reclaiming the missing heritage of natural theology’, attempted to retrieve the significant role played by natural theology with regard to environmental issues. He notes ‘the deep roots of “common home” issues in natural theology’, which ‘have been neglected’ because natural theology has often been seen as being particularly concerned with very different issues. ¹⁴ Perhaps its very breadth has been a factor in the neglect of its role in areas of theology with which it has been assumed to have no concern?

With regard to apologetics, an area of theology in which natural theology has always played an important role, Alister McGrath has suggested that it possesses enormous resources for public engagement, especially with regard to attempts to demonstrate that ‘Christianity provides – but is not limited to – an intellectual framework which allows us to make sense of what we experience and observe’. ¹⁵ This remark draws attention to the mediatory capacity of natural theology: it can provide a ‘framework’ that facilitates interpretation of the world beyond theology. This mediatory capacity may be particularly significant in an age of globalization: where once relatively homogeneous cultures have been replaced by a fluid, ever changing mosaic of cultural and social elements, there is a much greater need for such mediation.

Elsewhere, developments in the role of natural theology might be characterized more in terms of return than innovation. Consider Roman Catholic theology: natural theology has deep and ancient roots in the Catholic tradition, yet at the time of the First Vatican Council (1869–70) the attitude taken towards it seems to have been somewhat restrictive. That council’s teaching on the subject is very limited, reflecting, or at least coinciding with, the Enlightenment stress on reason: ‘from the things that were created, God can be known with certainty through the natural light of human reason’. ¹⁶ By the time of The Catechism of the Catholic Church (promulgated in 1992), however, there is a much more expansive treatment of natural theology, one that indicates a role for imagination alongside reason, in terms of ‘openness to truth and beauty’, the ‘sense of moral goodness’, ‘freedom’, ‘the voice of … conscience’ and ‘longings for the infinite and for happiness’, together with ‘signs’ of the ‘spiritual soul’.

Denis Edwards’ survey of recent Catholic approaches to natural theology confirms that this broadening is continuing in Catholic circles, in a great variety of ways. Edwards very concisely looks at the contributions of Karl Rahner, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Walter Kasper, and numerous other recent Catholic theologians. ¹⁷ There is one very significant area he omits from his study, however: the field of moral theology. As James Keenan remarks in his survey ‘Fundamental moral theology at the beginning of the twenty-first century’, natural law has been ‘engaged again’ by moral theologians ‘precisely as a theological concept’, ¹⁸ with the natural law tradition providing ‘a way of thinking about the theological significance of human nature’. ¹⁹ Moral theologians including Lisa Sowle Cahill, Stephen Pope, David Hollenbach, Robin Gill, Keenan himself and others are making an extended attempt to develop and reformulate the natural law tradition for the twenty-first century, re-evaluating the tradition in the light of contemporary thought and contemporary concerns. ²⁰

This rethinking of the theology of natural law has largely focused on specifically theological discussions of anthropology, and of scientific and environmental issues in relation to natural law. Cahill, for instance, has developed a ‘revised version of Thomistic natural law’ that attempts to sift out culturally contingent elements imported in the past (regarding sexual equality, for example) to uncover ‘the basic concept of natural law … revised to incorporate an explicitly inductive and dialogical epistemology’, with the proviso that ‘normative discourse about “nature” today must be broadened from the human to the whole of nature’. Key aims of her project include: integrating a holistic environmental consciousness into natural law theology; addressing the issues raised by past prescriptive church teaching relying on descriptions of human nature that incorporated what she and others see as flawed theological anthropology; and providing natural law theology with a humbler epistemology, one that recognizes that ‘knowledge of the natural law is always perspectival and partial’ and modifies the prescriptive aspects of natural law theory in light of that realization, acknowledging that ‘contingent contexts are highly influential’. ²¹ Such reworkings of the tradition, and the ongoing debate they have inspired, demonstrate the enormous vigour of this aspect of natural theology in contemporary Catholic discourse.

In historical perspective, the present generous view of natural theology in Catholic circles may perhaps owe something to the ideas of John Henry Newman, who argued that Christianity ‘is a religion in addition to the religion of nature … [It] does not supersede or contradict it.’ He claimed that ‘we find in Scripture our Lord and His Apostles always treating Christianity as the completion and supplement of Natural Religion’ and wrote that those who are likely to respond to arguments for Christianity are ‘those only whose minds are properly prepared for it … I mean … those who are imbued with the religious opinions and sentiments which I have identified with Natural Religion.’ ²² As his influence has grown, Newman’s extremely positive approach to natural religion and to certain forms of natural theology may have contributed to the broader vision of natural theology reflected in the Catechism of the Catholic Church and recent Catholic scholarship.

Medium, structure and category

Space does not allow for a more extended investigation of the role played by natural theology across other parts of the theological spectrum. A brief essay such as this must content itself with making certain observations about characteristics of natural theology that seem to lend themselves to the freedom with which theologians (perhaps not so much philosophers) seem to be employing it in widely varied contexts at the present time. Crucial here is its interdisciplinary potential, its ability to act as a bridge between intellectual disciplines. Natural theology exists at the nexus between theology and philosophy, and its very nebulous and ambiguous nature, its resistance to definition, gives it an openness to intellectual adventure, for instance, that involved in conjoining theological enterprises with those of other disciplines. This characteristic makes it welcoming to theologians wishing to ‘reimagine’ their subject, as, for instance, feminist theologians and eco-theologians are wont to do.

This may be said to operate in two ways: natural theology can form a mediating structure or a medium of communication. The first of these can be seen, at the conceptual level, in relation to feminist theology and eco-theology, which make use of natural theology’s capacity for mediation between different disciplines. The feminist theologians cited above have used this capacity to create structures of thought in which ideas drawn from feminist theory can exist in dialogue with ideas drawn from Christian theology; the eco-theologians have operated in a similar fashion.

As for natural theology as a medium of communication, this has an effect at the linguistic as well as the conceptual level, an effect that can be seen in genres such as apologetics, where theologians such as McGrath translate Christian doctrines into non-religious terms, or transpose them, keeping the Christian terminology but bringing it into new contexts and into dialogue with non-theological areas of intellectual discourse. There is, of course, an element of transmutation in such operations; the translator can never leave what is translated unchanged.

To return to the questions of definition which this essay touched on earlier, the many ways in which natural theology is present in different genres of theology suggest a fluidity that goes beyond simple notions of categorization. If natural theology is present, as an element in a compound, in various theological genres, with the further characteristic that its presence is often veiled so that it acts rather as a recessive gene, then it cannot be defined simply and neatly as a distinct area of theology or philosophy. McGrath suggests that it might be viewed in terms of a ‘process of reflection’, ²³ and certainly it can be argued to be a way of doing theology (without reliance on revelation), but its amorphous nature requires more complex forms of description, even as it defies definition; those who would attempt a detailed description might also need to attend to questions of function alongside questions of content, to the methods and forms used by natural theologians as well as the resources they employ, to the mediating roles played by natural theology at the levels of concept and structure, and at the linguistic level also.

Conclusion

Apologetics, feminist theology, Roman Catholic theology, eco-theology: in each of these regions in the theological firmament the stars are aligning in ways that point to natural theology. Perhaps natural theology may find an expanded role in a globalized world in which there is no single ‘public square’ and there is no ‘view from nowhere’. If theologians seek to develop their discussions with other intellectual disciplines, where secular thought lacks the capacity to create the grounds for this, they may yet find assistance from natural theology in providing mediating structures and a medium of communication that can overcome the divisions between disciplines in the present day. Moreover, natural theology’s independence from revelation distances it from complications concerning belief commitments and truth claims and means that it claims no authority and demands no privileges; all of these characteristics make it a particularly suitable medium for discussions between ideologies, philosophies and theologies. Contemporary historians look back at theology’s ‘return to mystery’ in the mid-twentieth century; might they come to look back on a ‘return to natural theology’ in the early twenty-first?