Nature as creation from an eco-hermeneutical perspective: From a ‘Natural theology’ to a ‘Theology of nature’
Abstract
For researchers who are interested in the relationship between theology and the natural sciences, 2009 is of special importance. It is now 500 years since Calvin was born and 450 years since his Institution of the Christian Religion was fi nally published. It is also 200 years since Darwin’s birth and 150 years since his On the Origin of Species appeared in print for the fi rst time. Calvin and Darwin are representative of two separate lines which converge in a particular ‘transversal space’. Such insights are regenerating light on our search for scientifi c truth today. Neither the absolutisation of transcendent revelation, nor that of immanent knowledge of nature, provides an accountable understanding of reality. Against this background, the challenge for Systematic Theology today is to conceive of a ‘theology of nature’, which can be offered as a dialectical third option. An ‘ecohermeneutics’ offers a possibility of establishing such an option for theology. However, such an option will, on the one hand, have to deconstruct the reformed criticism of a natural theology and will, on the other hand, have to make serious work of an evolutionary epistemology.The author(s) retain copyright on work published by AOSIS unless specified otherwise.
Licensing and publishing rights
Author(s) of work published by AOSIS are required to grant AOSIS the unlimited rights to publish the definitive work in any format, language and medium, for any lawful purpose. AOSIS requires journal authors to publish their work in open access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.
Read more here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
The authors retain the non-exclusive right to do anything they wish with the published article(s), provided attribution is given to the applicable journal with details of the original publication, as set out in the official citation of the article published in the journal. The retained right specifically includes the right to post the article on the authors’ or their institution’s websites or in institutional repositories.
Previously published work may have been published under a different licence. We advise the community that if they would like to reuse the work to consult the applicable licence at article level.
