From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, special prayers, fasts and thanksgivings were an important means by which the Established Churches of England, Scotland and Ireland responded to natural occurrences. Although war prompted the largest number of special religious observances in this period, environmental calamities – instances of plague, famine, drought, earthquakes and storms — led civil and ecclesiastical authorities to order prayers, or to call national fast days, requiring subjects to cease work and attend worship on a specific day. Natural blessings, such as seasonable rain, successful harvests and the abatement of plague, were also marked by prayers, and sometimes by days of national thanksgiving. In Reformation England, the appointment of special observances can be traced back to 1541, when Henry VIII ordered Archbishop Cranmer to organize prayers in response to drought. Henry’s successors developed the practice of ordering special prayers and days in response to natural events and man-made calamities. In Scotland, national fasts were observed at the appointment of the church courts from 1566; they were not regularly under the control of the Crown until the Restoration period.

This paper offers a brief examination of Cardinal Péter Pázmány’s meditation on the role of the beauty and wonder of the natural world in leading to the true knowledge of God, which is placed at the beginning of his most important work, the Guide to the Divine Truth (Isteni Igazsàgra Vezérlô Kalauz). Pázmány’s treatment of this subject offers an insight into the Catholic intellectual milieu which ultimately rejected the Copernican cosmology championed by Galileo in favour of a geocentric and geostatic universe. In this regard, the confidence with which Pázmány asserts the harmony and compatibility between secular knowledge and apprehension of nature and the conviction of the existence of a creator God is of particular importance. An analysis of this section of his work also points up a surprising contrast with Calvin’s treatment of the same subject in the Institutes of the Christian Religion.’ Pázmány was raised within the Reformed tradition until his teenage years and as a Catholic polemicist he devoted great attention to Calvin’s writings. Indeed, to some extent it can be suggested that the Institutes served as both target and model for his own great work. Yet his handling of the topic of nature as a proof of the existence of God, an area where relatively little difference might have been expected in view of its non-salience as a polemical issue, not only offers a revealing insight into the confident intellectual perspective of seventeenth-century Catholicism, but also suggests some additional ramifications of the great sola scriptura debate which split European Christianity in the early modern period.

Although the Reformed tradition advocated the primacy of the Word of God, the writings of Calvin and other theologians also emphasized the importance of the natural world for revealing the glory of God. As early as 1534, Calvin argued that God had

History supplanted nature as the most important apologetical language among English polemical divines during the mid-eighteenth century, but not for the reasons usually adduced. The triumph of history over nature owed everything to the power of orthodox patronage and to nature’s demonstrable apologetical efficacy, and nothing to natural theology’s supposed failure sufficiently to prove God’s existence. Put another way, by the late 1720s orthodox apologists had come to believe that the popular argument from design in nature applied equally to history. Moreover, the argument from design in history appears to have been an apologetical strategy which accorded more closely with the disposition of an increasingly orthodox episcopate during the mid-century period. Little evidences the mid-century historical turn — a shift either missed or ignored by most historians — more clearly than the second generation (1730–1785) of the Boyle lectures, a series of public sermons founded by Robert Boyle in order to defend Christianity from the attacks of unbelievers. For whereas the first generation of lecturers founded their defences of Christianity on natural theology, the second built on Christianity’s historical record.

The second quarter of the nineteenth century has long been recognized as a formative period for public discussion of the relationship between science and religion, particularly in emerging sciences such as geology, where new evidence raised questions about the interpretation of the Bible. Recent scholarly studies of scientific publishing, theologies of nature and links between missionaries and scientific endeavour have drawn attention to various ways in which the relationship between religion and science was understood during the period. A common theme has been the key role of clergymen in public discourse. A lacuna in this literature, however, has been analysis of colonial sites in which these debates took place. In colonies such as New South Wales, for example, public discussion of these issues was dominated by Anglican clergyman-scientists. Yet they have attracted little attention from scholars.

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century a new wind could be felt rustling in the branches of the Church of England. The transforming effect of the Oxford Movement on the High Church tradition is the most prominent example of this phenomenon but also well established in the literature are the transformations in contemporary Anglican Evangelicalism. David Bebbington in particular has stressed the impact of Romanticism as a cultural mood within the movement, tracing its effects in a heightened supernaturalism, a preoccupation with the Second Advent and with holiness which converged at Keswick, and also an emphasis on the discernment of spiritual significance in nature. But how did this emphasis play out in the lives of Evangelicals in the second half of the century and how might it have served their mission to society? This paper seeks to address the evangelical understanding of both the power and potential of nature through the example of one prominent Anglican clergyman, William Pennefather, and one little-known evangelical initiative, the Bible Flower Mission.

Historians of the nineteenth-century Keswick holiness movement have long observed, though seldom analysed, its theological appropriation of the natural world. With annual conventions held from 1875 in the Lake District, home territory of Wordsworth and Southey, the movement’s love of nature was one of its most obvious ‘Romantic afFinities’ and marked it out from other streams of contemporary Evangelicalism, as David Bebbington has recendy shown. Yet much of the early theological inspiration behind the Keswick Convention was drawn not from the Lake Poets, but from the devotional writings of Victorian England’s best-known evangelical poet, Frances Ridley Havergal. The Keswick emphases upon absolute surrender to God and ‘entire consecration’ in his service, with a deep christocentric piety and a passion for spiritual transformation, pervade her teaching. Although Havergal’s brief career lasted only two decades, being cut short by her untimely death in June 1879 at the age of 42, her output was prodigious. Alongside indefatigable letter-writing and the production of numerous evangelistic booklets, she published several collections of poetry and hymnody in a short space of time, notably The Ministry of Song (1869), Under the Surface (1874), Loyal Responses (1878) and, posthumously, Under His Shadow (1879). Her popular hymns, such as ‘Take My Life’ and ‘Like a River Glorious’, became synonymous with Keswick spirituality.

Much has been made of the roots of Darwinian theory in the work of Thomas Malthus, who argued for the inevitability of strife, suffering and death following on the scarcity of resources and the tendency of populations to multiply without limit. It has been noted that a Malthusian pessimism about human nature re-emerged in the 1830s, darkening the political discussions surrounding the welfare of the poor, and informing the legislation of the Poor Laws in those crucial years in which Darwin formulated his natural selection theory. Historians have also focussed on the harshness of the social Darwinism that was taken up by theorists later in the century, in contrast to the more optimistic, Lamarckian evolution of Herbert Spencer, Peter Kropotkin and others. Yet in the closing passage of Origin of Species, Darwin extended his famous metaphor of the entangled bank, offering a form of redemption through struggle toward higher forms of life.

Soapy Sam and the Devil’s Chaplain: even for an age in which public figures were regularly lampooned, the epithets are evocative. To call the recipients of the epithets, Samuel Wilberforce and Charles Darwin respectively, controversial figures of the nineteenth century is the intellectual equivalent of noting that the sky is blue. Without seemingly trying, both men were involved in controversy. Whether it was the Church of England’s response to Essays and Reviews or the creation of a government policy with regard to vivisection, for various reasons both men were regularly in the national spotlight in the mid-Victorian period.

The impact of industrialization and urbanization in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the Churches’ responses to it, in terms of meeting pastoral needs and devotional impulses, has produced an extensive literature since Owen Chadwick’s magisterial study of forty years ago. Much of that has focussed on the social mission of the Church, but the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species and the rapid transformation of parts of the physical landscape following industrialization and urbanization in the later nineteenth century also raised issues about humanity’s relationship to the natural world and in particular, for the purposes of this paper, the English countryside. Questions about that relationship have become even more pressing as industrialization has made a global impact and our use — and abuse — of the world’s natural resources threaten to deplete those life-giving assets upon which our future depends: clean air and clean water. Historians have much to contribute to the debate and the publication of The Oxford Handbook to Religion and Ecology in 2006 indicates the contemporary importance of the theme to theologians also.

In the rich and complex history of American Christianity, utopias in one form or another have played a constant part. From the early puritan settlements onwards, North America has played a distinctive role in the Christian imagination — as a place of refuge, as a place for experimentation, as the founding-spot for new sects, churches, and denominations. Among the experimenters have been many groups of Christians in America who have, over more than two centuries, gathered themselves into communal organizations — what participants and commentators now call ‘intentional communities’. Their numbers have been almost impossible to measure accurately; one authoritative listing counts about six hundred communal groups with over fifteen hundred separate settlements in the USA before 1965, and there will have been thousands more communes formed since then. Membership figures are even harder to pin down, but it is certain that the numbers of people who have at one time or another lived in an American intentional community runs into the hundreds of thousands.

It is no longer a name that everyone knows. At the height of his fame as historian and broadcaster, Herbert Butterfield (1900–1979) reached into homes and schools through his varied activities and established a public reputation far beyond Cambridge University, where he spent the entirety of his working life from 1923 to his retirement in 1968, and among people who knew nothing of his small and idiosyncratic college, Peterhouse, to which he had arrived as an undergraduate in 1919 and with which he would be associated for the rest of his career. The Chair of Modern History at Cambridge, which he held from 1944 to 1963, and the Regius Chair to which he was relocated for the remaining five years of his professional life, offered major platforms for one determined to communicate to a wider audience. His tenure of the Mastership of his college after 1955 offered another by lending him the possibility of hosting individuals and colloquia. Through less than a dozen major works of history — The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) and Christianity and History (1949) come at once to mind as the best-regarded — Butterfield established a persona considerably more influential than a fairly modest literary production might imply. Only when one stands back from that oeuvre and examines its internal consistencies does it become clear that it engenders in the reader a certain discomfort. For if his thought does not often become mired in outright contradiction, it frequently displays moments of inner tension.

Reviewing the diversity of responses in English-language ecotheology over the last forty years or so, what impresses the reader is the vigour of the response of theology to ecological concerns. Of course, every undergraduate who has studied in this area can quote Lynn White’s 1967 judgement that ‘Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen’. Yet, as you review the material, that is hardly the only impression the reader is left with. Mostly, what strikes home is the range and energy of the theological responses. Of course, some adherents of theology proper might regard ecotheology as without standing. Is not environmental concern after all properly a matter for Christian social ethics? However, for those who consider that environmental concern presents the need for the construction or reconstruction of Christian commitments, ecotheology names that theological effort. In what follows, three ways are identified in which nature enters into theology as a way of presenting how ecotheology proceeds. Moreover, a narrative of development is offered in the sense that ecotheology has unfolded by drawing on immanentist themes in theology that stress the presence of God. As difficulties have emerged with this procedure, ecotheology has sought to attend to emerging issues and problems. Finally, this essay concludes by bringing the story of ecotheology up to date: the final topic of consideration is the ecotheology of climate change.