Nature and Scripture in the Abrahamic religions, I: Up to 1700

• Published in: The Journal of ecclesiastical history Vol. 62; no. 1; p. 107
• Main Authors: KEENE, NICHOLAS, van der Meer; Mandelbrote, Jitze M ; Scott
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge Cambridge University Press 01.01.2011
• Subjects: Exegesis & hermeneutics; Philosophy; Religion; Theology; Netherlands
• ISSN: 0022-0469; 1469-7637
• DOI: 10.1017/S0022046910001211

Howell highlights Augustine's appreciation for extra-scriptural knowledge, including natural knowledge gained through observation or reading philosophy (i. 122) and his use of that knowledge to exclude scriptural interpretations contrary to reason and to relate Scripture to the physical world. Augustine's proposals for reconciling and marrying scriptural assertions and empirical knowledge were taken up by Catholics and Protestants alike more than a thousand years later, and in his second contribution Howell surveys the hermeneutics of nature and Scripture in early modern science and theology, dipping into the writings of the astronomers Caspar Peucer, Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, the Hermetic German thinkers Valentine Weigel and Daniel Czepko, and the Englishmen William Whiston and John Ray. Peter Harrison provides a brief account of his thesis that Protestant critiques of some aspects of medieval Catholic biblical interpretation gave rise, often unintentionally, to conditions that facilitated 'the erosion of religious meanings from the natural world' (i. 359), principally the replacement of symbolic relations between things with causal relations, that enhanced the development of more empirically orientated approaches to the study of nature. The school of biblical criticism centred in Oxford in the later eighteenth century, originating in the work of Robert Lowth and triumphing in the projects of Benjamin Kennicott, 'played at least as important a role in the development of German critical ideas about Scripture as English deism did' (ii. 18), a point easily missed in the current unbalanced historiography.