2 - The common realm of God, nature and humanity

Summary

Common realm

According to Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, there is an important relationship between what he calls the natural sciences and the spiritual sciences: both have a tendency to work with a reified notion of the natural. Both sciences, Rossi-Landi continues, are non-dialectical: one privileges space over time, the second interior space over the public realm. Both are ‘static’. Here lies the difficulty and challenge for a theology of nature. For a connection, restrictive and damaging, may be noted between the non-dialectical theorisation of space and religious interiority. A theology of nature must present nature as temporal as well as spatial, thereby as engaged with and other than humanity. Likewise, the Christian faith must, through the engagement with non-theological disciplines, perform a constructive argument in the public realm towards an ontology of nature. The presentation of a conceptuality that would support a dialectical reading of nature and the public character of the Christian faith is the aim of this chapter.

The theological explication of the conceptuality of the common realm of God, nature and humanity requires an account of the creaturely relations of humanity and nature before God in engagement with other, non-theological, accounts of the interrelations of humanity-in-nature. Such a theological explication must consider carefully problems of definition, hermeneutical issues, method and metaphysical matters. That is, the way forward must be by careful attention to the definition of nature operative at any point in the argument, the understanding of modernity in which the argument is conducted, the relation between theology and non-theological disciplines and the continuities and discontinuities posited between humanity and nature.