The Meaning of Nature
One of the most abused words in the realm of theoretical thought is the word Nature. This is especially true in its adjectival form: natural. And it is even more especially true in the realm of theology.
I will not bore the reader with too much etymology. For one thing, the sort of verbal disagreements famous between Latin and Greek churches surrounding the nature of God is quite irrelevant to the kind of disagreement over the nature-concept today. In those disagreements, the question was between two ideas on the same plane, whereas now the classical metaphysical use of “nature” stands in between the naturalist’s worship of material nature and the fideist’s trepidation about fallen nature. When a typical modernist uses the word nature they mean it as a synonym for “the world outside.” When a Christian with fideist tendencies uses the word nature in our context, he will focus on that which is damaged by the fall. When used as a modifying adjective for man, it can come to mean that which is altogether hostile to God’s revelation (cf. Rom. 8:7). Lost in the shuffle is that this is not what the word “nature” primarily means in this context to begin with; and the modernist’s definition is ironically closer to the correct meaning here than that of the fideist.
We derive our word from the Latin natura, which would typically mean the natural constitution, property, or quality of a thing.1 Lewis analyzed that Latin term so as to use “what springs up, or comes forth, or arrives, or goes on, of its own accord: the given, what is there already: the spontaneous, the unintended, the unsolicited”2 as his starting point to refute Naturalism. To be concise for our purposes, the “nature” of things refers to the reality of those things independent of our own minds. We use it in the same manner in which we earlier used the word “objective” to describe the truth. In fact, all of us already use this meaning of nature all the time. It is only when coming to controversial matters like natural theology and natural law that we get talked out of it.
Here then is the common sense, traditional and primary definition of nature. The nature of a thing is the way that thing is.
In one sense, it is a broader category than the essence of any substance. Every finite substance is divided between its essence and accidents. The general word “nature” is therefore used to encompass both: all of its predicates and properties. So anything that exists has a nature. This position is acutely aware of the differences between the essential (original) nature of a thing, as opposed to its corrupted (or sinful) nature. An entire section will be devoted to the importance of that distinction.
This was not simply Aristotle talking. Christians adopted this language for the very good reason that any alternative would have been a rose by another name. For example, one author remarks, “The key word physis in Cyril might best be translated reality.”3 Vermigli even says, “God is a nature,” so that though he says this by way of contrasting God to those lower physical natures which He infinitely transcends, yet God has an essence as real Being. Granted that there is a distinction between God who is simple essence and the creature which is always composite, and that consequently in God alone existence and essence are one, yet the general descriptive “nature” still holds. God has a “way that He is,” and, in His unique case, it is impossible that He be anything other than that. In all other things, since it is not their essence to be, all of that which is could be otherwise. Yet it does not follow that they are otherwise. Each has a given objective nature.
The Post-Metaphysical Meaning of Nature
After Kant, the “nature” of anything that was neither a transcendental category nor an “appearance” of the empirical world was banished beyond the reach of reason. Thus Schleiermacher insisted that the word nature is “ill-adapted” for its use in the Creed about Christ. “Nature in this sense is for us the summary of all finite existence, or, as in the opposition of nature and history, the summary of all that is corporeal, and that goes back to what is elementary.”4 With the rise of geosciences and life sciences conceived only in terms that had long banished First and Final causes from the legitimate field of inquiry, naturalism was born. So nature now almost exclusively meant the field of material phenomena.
Even the best of Christian philosophers conceive of metaphysical concepts in terms of the naturalist. Thus, for Alvin Plantinga, a nature in God means “a property he has essentially that includes each property essential to him.”5 This is a notion of “property” for which Plantinga has been justly criticized,6 but leaving that aside it shows us how unavoidable this language of nature is even among those who take issue with associated elements of classical thought. Reflecting on what it means for God to have a nature will be crucial to recall when we encounter criticisms of natural law and realism, which criticisms think they detect morality rooted in “nature” or “natures” that are in the creation, or when we hear in the same discussions about the “naturalistic fallacy” in which the is and ought are allegedly conflated.
Whatever else is wrong in this criticism (and there is actually much), the critic seems unaware that classical theistic natural law theory saw the nature of God as the ultimate ground for the obligations in the commands of God. This is the whole meaning of natural law being a participation in the form of eternal law, as spelled out by Aquinas or Hooker or Junius. Finite moral natures are in the same class as other finite natures in this respect. Their natures were created to be reflections of the divine nature. When we view the nature of things theologically—that is, in terms of the nature of the First and Final Cause of all things—that which ought to be really is according to that which is in God.
When we combine our “objective” concept with the concept of nature, what we really have is form. This cannot be reduced to Platonism. Actually, Plato more readily used the Greek for “idea” (eidos), whereas Aristotle set the notion of “form” (morphe) more at home in our world. This will be important in how the more fully developed thought of Augustine and Aquinas saw lesser forms as analogies of the divine, or by way of participation in that form of God who alone has substantial form. This also calls attention to the objective status of the nature of four philosophical concepts: possible worlds, propositions, states of affairs, and universals. These are certainly formal realities, even while they represent many physical phenomena.
Jacques Maritain summarizes what is at stake in knowing the things of God through the things (the natures) that have been made.
“Within the realm of the real, created and uncreated, there exists a whole class of objects which are of their nature attainable through the natural faculties of the human mind. If this were not the case, the distinction between the natural and the supernatural, between the orders of grace and nature, would be illusory.”7
Among the Reformed Orthodox there came to be solidified in the tradition what I have called a “soteriological critique of nature.” In other words, because the central struggle of the Reformation regarded the gospel itself (and rightly so) virtually all questions modified by the term “natural” were made to answer to how natural man tended to perform, given man’s chief end and the extent of the sin that prevents all things being directed to this end. Muller hints at the same in “the soteriologically reinterpreted discussion of reason and revelation” of that era.8
This is not to speak merely of a reduction of natural theology, since we see many of the same concerns in parallel criticisms against natural law and even in the criticisms against any kind of doctrine of common grace. It certainly cannot be doubted that natural theology was subjected to covenantal and soteriological categories in a way that had not been the case prior to the Reformation. There is much to be gained from this emphasis. John Owen and Thomas Goodwin spent a good deal of reflection on the nature of Adam’s use of natural theology.9 Junius, Turretin, and Mastricht had treated the same question, but in less detail.
By the time the Reformed tradition had articulated their theology in contradistinction to their four early modern nemeses—Romanism, Socinianism, Arminianism, and Cartesianism—their orthodox brand had also lost any control of the centers of cultural influence in the West. Thus no titans of philosophy ever emerged from the Reformed fold and no robust philosophy of objective nature was ever related to the main questions of prolegomena. Some may be inclined to offer Bavinck’s thought in that place, but I will argue that for all that was profound in his reflections, he did not pick up exactly where Reformed Orthodoxy had left off. All of that is to say that the idea of “nature” in Reformed prolegomena is not free to mean more than the subjective performances and prospects of fallen nature. Again, those are not irrelevant matters; but it is not the same thing.
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1. Logeion
2. C. S. Lewis, Miracles (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 14.
3. John Patrick Donnelly, Introduction to Vermigli, Dialogue on the Two Natures of Christ (Moscow, ID: The Davenant Institute, 2018), xxii-xxiii.
4. Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (Berkeley, CA: Apocryphile Press, 2011), 392.
5. Alvin Plantinga, Does God Have a Nature? (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1980), 7.
6. cf. Edward Feser, Five Proofs of the Existence of God (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2017), 191-194
7. Jacques Maritain, An Essay on Christian Philosophy (New York: Philosophical Library, 1955), 14.
8. Richard Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, I:289.
9. Joel Beeke and Mark Jones, A Puritan Theology (Grand Rapids, Reformation Heritage Books, 2012), 13-16.
