Most Americans who’ve been educated in the liberal arts have read about, if not through, Henry David Thoreau and his Walden. Some will be familiar with the works of one of Thoreau’s most avid disciples, the woodsman and adventurer, John Muir. But few Americans who care about the world of nature, I imagine, will think of the contributions of the Protestant Reformer, Martin Luther, in this connection. So here I want to remind any American who’s interested in the world of nature, specialist or non-specialist, about the freshness of this traditional voice.*
Be aware, to begin, that “nature” isn’t a word that Luther used to refer to what we commonly call the world of stars and planets, mountains and oceans, animals and plants, and humans, too, insofar as humans are products of evolutionary processes and integrally belong to the Earth’s biosphere. Luther preferred to use the word “creation” to refer to all such things, humans included. Further, the word nature is often employed in modern scientific and philosophical discourse to refer to a self-enclosed system that, as it were, runs by itself. In contrast, Luther’s view of things was profoundly God-centered (theocentric). For Luther the created world is not self-enclosed. It does not run by itself. So we can hear him speaking of the powerful presence of God in, with, and under all creatures, holding all things in being and energizing their becoming. In words such as these:
How long, do you suppose, would the sun, the moon, the entire firmament keep to the course maintained for so many thousands of years? Or how would the sun rise or set year after year at the same time in the same place if God, its Creator, did not continue to sustain it daily? If it were not for the divine power, it would be impossible for mankind to be fruitful and beget children; the beasts could not bring forth their young, each after its own kind, as they do every day; the earth would not be rejuvenated each year, producing a variety of fruit; the ocean would not supply fish…. If God were to withdraw His hand, this building and everything in it would collapse…. The sun would not long retain its position and shine in the heavens; no child would be born; no kernel, no blade of grass, nothing at all would grow on the earth or reproduce itself if God did not work forever and ever…. Daily we can see the birth into this world of new human beings, young children who were nonexistent before; we behold new trees, new animals on the earth, new fish in the water, new birds in the air. And such creation and preservation will continue until the Last Day.
In this our ecological era, those who are seeking to recapture long-forgotten traditional theological testimonies to the glory of God in nature and thereby to celebrate God’s embrace of the whole creation, not just humankind, will surely want to welcome the kind of theological vision that Luther offers here.*
*For those who would like to explore this proposal at length, see my essay: “Martin Luther, the Word of God, and Nature,” in Ecological Hermeneutics: Biblical, Historical and Theological Perspectives, ed. David G. Horrell et al (New York: T&T Clark International, 2010), chap. 12.
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