Session Abstract

As a creation religion, Christianity has always reserved an important place in its theology and practice for the definition of nature. Yet under the changing contexts of interests and theological emphases, what nature is and what humanity’s proper relationship to it should be have shifted considerably. The papers in this panel represent rather different answers to those problems in widely different places and times. Yet close to the center of all of them lies the issue of the proper Christian understanding of the natural world. In addressing the long, complex history of Christian thought and attitudes about nature, the session should appeal to both those interested in the conference’s environmental theme and to those interested in religious history more broadly.

Martha Henderson’s paper, “Rejecting the ‘New Prophecy’ Cult: Rejecting Nature: The Roman Rush to Redefine Human-Environment Relationships,” focuses on the ramifications for resource use of an influential fourth-century theological controversy over Montanism in Anatolia.

In “The Evangelical ‘Natures’ of Christoph Christian Sturm,” Christopher Hamlin surveys the influential work of the “nature-preacher” Christoph Christian Sturm, whose Betrachtungen über die Werke Gottes im Reiche der Natur und der Vorsehung auf alle Tage des Jahres of 1772 had a huge international readership in many languages. Hamlin’s analysis challenges easy assumptions about the importance of Christianity for broader environmental issues.

Mark Stoll’s “Calvinist Roots of the American Landscape Aesthetic” takes an extremely popular American landscape-ideal and traces its origins in Reformed-Protestant moral and aesthetic principles. The broad, glorious, unpeopled vistas in landscapes from Georgia O’Keeffe to Ansel Adams and beyond represent the culmination of several centuries of development in Reformed artist thought and practice.

In “The Two Faces of Nature: Conflicting Conservative Protestant Views, 1970–1984,” Neall Pogue traces the evolution of conservative evangelical Protestant ideas about environmentalism, from cautious endorsement to implacable opposition. With the rise of political evangelicalism in 1980, conservative Protestants hardened their attitudes against environmental regulation.