Book of Nature

The Book of Nature is a traditional theological metaphor holding that creation itself functions like a second book, alongside Scripture, in which God may be read: its order and design point back to their Maker much as a written text points back to its author. Augustine of Hippo, writing against the Manichaeans, is the first to describe nature this way, and the Reformation and Reformed scholastic traditions later systematized it as an expression of general revelation: real, but, unlike Scripture, insufficient on its own to save.

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession never uses “book of nature” language; the phrase is an Augustinian and early modern trope, not part of the confession’s own vocabulary. What underlies it confessionally is the opening clause of chapter 1, on the light of nature: “the light of nature, and the works of creation and providence do so far manifest the goodness, wisdom, and power of God, as to leave men inexcusable; yet are they not sufficient to give that knowledge of God and his will which is necessary unto salvation.”¹ The same “works of creation” the book-of-nature trope has in view are therefore real revelation confessionally, but revelation that cannot save without Scripture. The fuller doctrine of general and special revelation is stated in Revelation of God.

Biblical Basis

Scripture describes creation as legible testimony to its Maker: “the heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork,” and its “line” goes out “through all the earth” like a herald’s message (Ps. 19:1, 4). Paul makes the same claim of pagan nations with no access to God’s written word: “what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them… since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities… have been clearly perceived, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse” (Rom. 1:19-20).

Historical Development

Patristic origin

Augustine of Hippo gives the metaphor its first clear statement. Writing against the Manichaeans’ claim that the material world is intrinsically evil, he argues in Contra Faustum (c. 400) that the Manichaeans erred by judging creation’s mysteries against their own limited understanding rather than “looking on the book of nature as the production of the Creator of all.”² For Augustine the point was apologetic and specific to that controversy: creation, rightly read, testifies to a good Creator, not to the Manichaean cosmic conflict between light and darkness.

Calvin and the Reformation

John Calvin restates the same conviction in different terms. Creation is “the elegant structure of the world serving us as a kind of mirror, in which we may behold God, though otherwise invisible.”³ Behind that mirror, he holds, lies an innate “sense of divinity” (sensus divinitatis) that leaves no one without some knowledge of God: God has “engraved” on his works “certain marks of his own glory” so that even the unlearned “cannot open their eyes except that they are constrained to see him.”⁴ But sin corrupts that natural knowledge so badly that fallen readers need the “spectacles” of Scripture to read nature’s testimony rightly again.⁴ Herman Bavinck puts the same conviction differently: “all creation, the theater of God’s glory, is mined for the description of the knowledge of God because God is immanent in all creation.”⁵

Reformed scholastic systematization

Seventeenth-century Reformed scholastics gave the metaphor its most technical treatment. Johann Heinrich Alsted held that reason, guided by Scripture, “can also revisit the book of nature and correctly grasp its teaching about God,” and distinguished a “bare” natural theology available to fallen reason on its own (theologia naturalis nuda) from natural theology “clothed” and “exalted” in a regenerate mind (theologia naturalis vestita et exaltata).⁶ Francis Turretin assigned natural theology’s proofs of God’s existence a modest, apologetic role, useful “for confuting profane men and atheists” rather than as theology’s own foundation.⁷

Objections and Responses

Karl Barth rejected natural theology altogether, treating reliance on the “book of nature” as a rival to God’s self-revelation in Christ. Barth’s opposition to natural theology, developed through his own doctrine of sin and grace and his critique of the Roman Catholic analogia entis, became the most influential modern-era challenge to the whole tradition the book-of-nature trope belongs to.⁸

Response: the classical Reformed position, represented here by Bavinck, already holds general revelation to be real but radically insufficient, without discarding it altogether. “It is the unanimous conviction of Christian theologians that general revelation is inadequate,” Bavinck writes: it “fails to point us to sin, divine wrath, and grace,” and what knowledge it does yield is “uncertain, inconsistent, mixed with error, and unattainable for most people.”⁹ On this account the book of nature is neither sufficient on its own, as older natural theology sometimes assumed, nor illusory, as Barth’s rejection of the whole tradition would have it. It is real revelation that leaves its readers “without excuse” (Rom. 1:20) precisely because it is genuine, even though it cannot save them.

Related Doctrines

References

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 1. ↩
Augustine of Hippo, Contra Faustum 32.20, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 4, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. Richard Stothert (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1887). ↩
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 1, chap. 5, sec. 1, 51-52. ↩
Steven J. Duby, God in Himself: Scripture, Metaphysics, and the Task of Christian Theology, Studies in Christian Doctrine and Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019), chap. 2, “Preparation for the School of Grace,” 95-96. ↩ ↩²
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 7, “Knowing God.” ↩
Duby, 102-103. ↩
Duby, 103. ↩
Duby, 104. ↩
Bavinck, chap. 4, “Revelation.” ↩