Philosophy:Christian naturalism

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Short description: Theological perspective combining Christian faith with philosophical naturalism
Not to be confused with Christian naturism.

Template:Nontheism and religion

Christian naturalism is a theological perspective that seeks to reinterpret Christian beliefs, practices, and symbols within a naturalist worldview, one that does not appeal to supernatural entities or events. Its proponents attempt to give positive, naturalistic accounts of God, Jesus, salvation, and other central Christian concepts while remaining within the Christian tradition. It is a subset of the broader movement of religious naturalism, distinguished by its specific engagement with Christian theological traditions.[1]

Jerome A. Stone proposed in 2011 that a Christian naturalism should retain the term "God," include positive references to Jesus Christ, develop some form of Christology, and offer a soteriology with a path to salvation.[2] The term was adopted most explicitly by Karl E. Peters in Christian Naturalism: Christian Thinking for Living in This World Only (2022), though the intellectual foundations were laid by earlier thinkers including Gordon D. Kaufman, Henry Nelson Wieman, Charley D. Hardwick, and Stone himself.[3][1]

Background

Christian naturalism has roots in the liberal theology that emerged in the eighteenth century, when German biblical scholars began developing the historical-critical method and studying scripture independently of doctrinal presuppositions.[1] The demythologization program of Rudolf Bultmann in the twentieth century, which sought to separate the existential content of Christian faith from its mythological framework, provided another important precedent.[4]

A more direct antecedent is the American empirical theology tradition associated with Henry Nelson Wieman. Wieman rejected the idea of a transcendent creator God who exists beyond history, arguing instead that God should be identified with the "creative event" itself, the observable process of creative transformation in nature and human experience.[1][5] Wieman's naturalistic theology proved foundational for later Christian naturalists, particularly Kaufman, Peters, and Hardwick.

The broader religious naturalism movement, as chronicled by Stone in Religious Naturalism Today (2008), encompasses Jewish, Buddhist, and non-tradition-specific forms alongside Christian ones. Christian naturalism is distinguished by its sustained engagement with specifically Christian doctrines, texts, and communities.[5][2]

Relation to neighboring perspectives

Religious naturalism

Religious naturalism is the broader category, holding that the natural world is the primary or sole source of religious meaning and that nature can elicit religious responses such as awe, gratitude, and moral commitment. Figures such as Ursula Goodenough, Loyal Rue, and Donald A. Crosby develop religious orientations grounded in nature without specifically Christian content. Christian naturalism is the subset that retains and reinterprets Christian theology, narrative, and practice within this naturalist framework.[1][2]

Christian atheism

Christian atheism, associated with the death of God theology of Thomas J. J. Altizer and others in the 1960s, also rejects supernatural theism. However, death-of-God theology is primarily deconstructive, proclaiming the end of the concept of God, whereas Christian naturalism is a constructive enterprise that proposes new naturalistic interpretations of God-language. Thinkers such as Kaufman and Peters continue to use the word "God" as a term for creativity or transformation within the natural world, rather than discarding it.[1]

Liberal and progressive Christianity

Christian naturalism overlaps with liberal Christianity and progressive Christianity. Marcus Borg's rejection of what he called "supernatural theism" and his historical-critical approach to Jesus influenced Peters' naturalist Christology.[3][6] John Shelby Spong's call for a Christianity "beyond theism" resonates with Christian naturalist themes. However, neither Borg nor Spong adopted a fully naturalist metaphysics; Borg preferred the term panentheism and retained a sense of God as a sacred presence that is "more than" the natural world, while Spong's position remained somewhat indeterminate.[1] Christian naturalism is more explicitly committed to a naturalist ontology than most liberal or progressive theology.

Process theology

Process theology, influenced by Alfred North Whitehead, also emphasizes the immanence of God and rejects interventionist supernaturalism. However, Stone has argued that process theism should be distinguished from religious naturalism: while process theology is "immanentist," it still treats God as an entity ontologically distinct from the universe, which sits in tension with the naturalist commitment to the primacy of the physical.[5][1] That said, Whitehead's concept of creativity as a fundamental feature of the universe has been an important philosophical resource for Christian naturalists, especially Kaufman and Peters.[1]

Key thinkers

Gordon D. Kaufman

Gordon D. Kaufman (1925–2011), Mallinckrodt Professor of Divinity Emeritus at Harvard Divinity School, is widely regarded as a central figure in the development of Christian naturalism. His earlier work, including In Face of Mystery (1993), was shaped by Kantian skepticism about direct knowledge of God, leading Kaufman to treat "God" as an imaginative construct rather than a being that could be experienced directly.[1]

In In the Beginning... Creativity (2004), Kaufman moved decisively toward a naturalistic framework, arguing that "God" should be understood as "serendipitous creativity": the capacity of the natural order to produce genuinely novel and unpredictable outcomes across cosmic, biological, and cultural domains. On this view, "God" functions as a symbol that points toward the mystery of how more complex realities emerge from simpler ones.[7] In Jesus and Creativity (2006), he extended this to Christology, proposing that Jesus exemplified the creative, transformative potential that Kaufman identified with the divine, and that the "Christ event" continues whenever people expand the boundaries of their communities through compassion and justice.[8][1]

Kaufman also argued that Christianity's traditional anthropocentrism had obscured ecological ways of thinking, and that a naturalized theology was needed to address the environmental crisis.[7][1]

Karl E. Peters

Karl E. Peters, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Rollins College and former editor of Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, has been the most explicit proponent of the term "Christian naturalism."

In Dancing with the Sacred (2002), Peters developed an evolutionary theology adopting Kaufman's concept of "serendipitous creativity." Peters described this creativity as operating through two phases: one that generates new variations in the cosmos and in human culture, and another that selects among them for those that contribute to ongoing flourishing.[9]

His 2022 book Christian Naturalism offered the most systematic treatment of the position, working through how Christian concepts of God, sin, salvation, Jesus, ethics, and practice might be rethought on the assumption that there is no afterlife and no supernatural intervention. For his understanding of Jesus, Peters drew on Borg's portrait of the historical Jesus as a wisdom teacher and social revolutionary, and on Abelard's moral influence theory of the atonement as an alternative to substitutionary models.[3][1]

Charley D. Hardwick

Charley D. Hardwick, of American University, developed what is perhaps the most philosophically austere version of Christian naturalism in Events of Grace: Naturalism, Existentialism, and Theology (1996, Cambridge University Press). Hardwick adopted a strict physicalism, maintaining that reality is ultimately constituted by the entities described by fundamental physics and that all higher-level phenomena depend on corresponding physical occurrences.[4][1]

Within this framework, Hardwick argued that "God" does not appear in a physicalist inventory of what exists. Instead, God-language functions as what he called a "theistic seeing-as," expressing a valuational stance toward the world rather than referring to any entity.[10] To develop this position, Hardwick combined Bultmann's method of existentialist interpretation, which reads Christian faith-claims as expressions of existential self-understanding, with Wieman's naturalistic concept of God as creative transformation. On this reading, salvation consists in an "openness to the future" that becomes possible when one receives life as a gift.[4][1]

Unlike other Christian naturalists who find religious significance in nature as a whole, Hardwick held that nature in itself carries no special religious meaning; transformative significance is located instead in particular events within human experience.[10][1]

Jerome A. Stone

Jerome A. Stone (1935–2020), in The Minimalist Vision of Transcendence (1992), proposed a concept of "this-worldly transcendence" as an alternative to both nihilistic secularism and what he called the "ontological maximalism" of classical theism. On Stone's account, experiences of transcendence are real but do not require a supernatural explanation; they refer to norms and powers that challenge existing ideals and push toward growth. The word "God" can function as a metaphor for this dimension of experience, though Stone, unlike Hardwick, left open the possibility that the divine might be something more than what this minimal framework describes.[5][1]

Stone later provided a comprehensive history of the broader religious naturalism tradition in Religious Naturalism Today (2008), and explicitly explored the question of whether a distinctively Christian form of naturalism is viable in a 2011 article, proposing criteria for what such a position would need to include.[5][2]

Theological content

God

Christian naturalists share a rejection of the idea of a personal god who acts intentionally in the world, performs miracles, or exists as a being distinct from the natural order. They differ on what replaces this concept.

Kaufman and Peters treat "God" as a term for the creative processes within nature, especially those that produce novel and unpredictable outcomes. On this reading, "God" picks out something genuinely operative in the world, though not a conscious agent.[7][3] Hardwick goes further, treating God-language as purely valuational: it expresses a way of orienting oneself toward the world rather than describing any feature of reality.[4] Stone occupies a middle position, using "God" as a metaphor for experiences of immanent transcendence while remaining agnostic about whether something further underlies those experiences.[5]

The distinction between "reductive" and "non-reductive" forms of naturalism maps roughly onto these positions. Non-reductive Christian naturalists (Kaufman, Peters) hold that nature's creative processes, while not supernatural, are genuinely real and irreducible to the categories of fundamental physics. Reductive Christian naturalists (Hardwick, and to some extent Willem Drees) hold that physics ultimately describes all that exists, though religious language may still serve a meaningful function.[1]

Jesus and Christology

Christian naturalists reject the traditional doctrines of the Incarnation and Trinity as conventionally understood, since these presuppose a supernatural divine being.

Peters, drawing on Borg and the Jesus Seminar, portrays Jesus as a historical figure who was a wisdom teacher and nonviolent social revolutionary. In a 2013 Zygon article, Peters proposed understanding Jesus as a "religious genius," someone whose life represented a particularly significant expression of the creative processes that Christian naturalists identify with God.[11][3]

Kaufman argued in Jesus and Creativity that Jesus' life and teachings embodied the creative, transformative potential he identified with the divine. Jesus provides what Kaufman called a "defining paradigm" for how human beings can participate in building communities of reconciliation and justice, though this paradigm carries no supernatural authority and must be freely chosen.[8][1]

Hardwick, consistent with his existentialist approach, interpreted the significance of Jesus not in terms of who Jesus was ontologically but in terms of what Jesus' story means for those who encounter it. The crucifixion functions not as a supernatural atonement but as a symbol pointing toward the possibility of an openness to the future.[4][1]

Salvation and eschatology

Christian naturalists typically reject belief in an afterlife, bodily resurrection, or any form of post-mortem survival. Peters frames this as the central premise of his 2022 book: rethinking Christian theology for those who assume that this life is all there is.[3]

Within this constraint, "salvation" is reinterpreted in this-worldly terms. Peters describes it through what he calls a "health model," where the aim is the dynamic harmony and wholeness of systems, whether those systems are individual persons, communities, or ecosystems. "Sin," correspondingly, refers to whatever obstructs or limits the creative processes that produce such wholeness.[3][1]

Kaufman understood salvation as overcoming the forces that inhibit human well-being and threaten the survival of ecosystems, and he argued that the ongoing creativity of nature provides grounds for hope that humanity might move toward a more sustainable and humane future.[1]

The eschatological symbols of Christianity, such as the Kingdom of God and resurrection, are read not as predictions about the future but as expressions of aspiration for this-worldly transformation. Hardwick interpreted such symbols existentially, as articulations of an openness to what the future may bring.[4][1]

Criticisms

Christian naturalism faces criticism from several directions.

From the perspective of traditional or orthodox Christianity, critics have argued that removing supernatural content from Christianity eliminates what is essential to the faith. The process theologian David Ray Griffin argued in response to Willem Drees' naturalism that the resulting religious beliefs were "so minimal as to be virtually nonexistent."[12] The theologian John F. Haught has also contended that naturalism, even in its religious forms, cannot adequately sustain the hope and moral seriousness that religion requires.[13]

Stone acknowledged the force of such objections while responding that religious naturalism, though unable to deliver everything traditional theism promises, nevertheless "suffices magnificently" for the challenges it does address. As he put it: nature is not self-explanatory, not completely meaningful, and does not fully satisfy our deepest longings, "But it's all we have, and it will have to do."[14]

From the opposite direction, secular naturalists have questioned whether retaining "God" and "Christian" language adds anything substantive to a naturalist worldview. Mikael Stenmark has pointed out that figures such as Richard Dawkins, while avowedly anti-religious, have also expressed awe and reverence at scientific depictions of the natural world, raising the question of what distinguishes religious naturalism from nonreligious naturalism.[15]

A further area of difficulty concerns the philosophical viability of the ontologies on which Christian naturalism rests. Griffin argued that Drees' physicalism presupposed the reality of freedom and self-determination while simultaneously adopting a framework that cannot account for them.[12] Emergentist approaches face their own challenges: both Mikael Leidenhag and Scot Yoder have argued, drawing on the work of Jaegwon Kim, that emergence theory may be unable to secure the causal effectiveness of higher-level properties (such as meaning, value, and agency) within a strictly naturalist framework.[16][17]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 1.16 1.17 1.18 1.19 1.20 1.21 1.22 Leidenhag, Mikael (2024). "Christianity and Religious Naturalism". in Wolfe, Brendan N.. St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology. https://www.saet.ac.uk/Christianity/ReligiousNaturalism. 
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Stone, Jerome A. (2011). "Is a 'Christian Naturalism' Possible?: Exploring the Boundaries of a Tradition". American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 32 (3): 205–220. 
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 Peters, Karl E. (2022). Christian Naturalism: Christian Thinking for Living in This World Only. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock. ISBN 978-1-6667-3637-3. 
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 Hardwick, Charley D. (1996). Events of Grace: Naturalism, Existentialism, and Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-55220-6. 
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 Stone, Jerome A. (2008). Religious Naturalism Today: The Rebirth of a Forgotten Alternative. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. ISBN 978-0-7914-7537-9. 
  6. ↑ Peters, Karl E. (2012). "Human Salvation in an Evolutionary World: An Exploration in Christian Naturalism". Zygon 47 (4): 843–869. 
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 Kaufman, Gordon D. (2004). In the Beginning... Creativity. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. ISBN 978-0-8006-3684-5. 
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Kaufman, Gordon D. (2006). Jesus and Creativity. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. ISBN 978-0-8006-3832-0. 
  9. ↑ Peters, Karl E. (2002). Dancing with the Sacred: Evolution, Ecology, and God. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International. ISBN 9781563383939. 
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Hardwick, Charley D. (2003). "Religious Naturalism Today". Zygon 38 (1): 111–116. 
  11. ↑ Peters, Karl E. (2013). "A Christian naturalism: developing the thinking of Gordon Kaufman". Zygon 48 (3): 578–591. 
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Griffin, David Ray (1997). "A Richer or Poorer Naturalism? A Critique of Willem Drees's Religion Science and Naturalism". Zygon 32 (4): 593–614. 
  13. ↑ Haught, John F. (2003). "Is Nature Enough? No". Zygon 38 (4): 769–782. 
  14. ↑ Stone, Jerome A. (2003). "Is Nature Enough? Yes". Zygon 38 (4): 783–800. 
  15. ↑ Stenmark, Mikael (2013). "Religious Naturalism and Its Rivals". Religious Studies 49 (4): 529–550. 
  16. ↑ Leidenhag, Mikael (2021). Naturalizing God? A Critical Evaluation of Religious Naturalism. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. ISBN 978-1-4384-8336-8. 
  17. ↑ Yoder, Scot (2015). "Emergence and Religious Naturalism: The Promise and Peril". American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 35 (2): 153–171. 

Further reading

  • Crosby, Donald A.; Stone, Jerome A. (2018). The Routledge Handbook of Religious Naturalism. New York: Routledge. 
  • Drees, Willem B. (1996). Religion, Science and Naturalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
  • Goodenough, Ursula (2023). The Sacred Depths of Nature (2nd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-766206-9. 
  • Hogue, Michael S. (2010). The Promise of Religious Naturalism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. 
  • Kaufman, Gordon D. (1993). In Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 
  • Leidenhag, Mikael (2021). Naturalizing God? A Critical Evaluation of Religious Naturalism. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. ISBN 978-1-4384-8336-8. 
  • Rue, Loyal (2011). Nature Is Enough: Religious Naturalism and the Meaning of Life. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. ISBN 978-1-4384-3799-6. 
  • Stone, Jerome A. (2017). Sacred Nature: The Environmental Potential of Religious Naturalism. London: Routledge. 



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