This book offers a new way of looking at the Reformed tradition. The older, traditional view of the Swiss/Scots/New England heritage had emphasized its harsh Calvinism, focusing on divine transcendence, predestination, strict moral discipline, and a distrust of beauty and ritual. In contrast, this study looks at the historical development—from John Calvin to Jonathan Edwards—of a theology of beauty and desire, expressed in the metaphors of the world as a theater of God's glory and nature as a school of desire. In doing so, it lays a theological foundation for an environmental ethic based on th ... More

This book offers a new way of looking at the Reformed tradition. The older, traditional view of the Swiss/Scots/New England heritage had emphasized its harsh Calvinism, focusing on divine transcendence, predestination, strict moral discipline, and a distrust of beauty and ritual. In contrast, this study looks at the historical development—from John Calvin to Jonathan Edwards—of a theology of beauty and desire, expressed in the metaphors of the world as a theater of God's glory and nature as a school of desire. In doing so, it lays a theological foundation for an environmental ethic based on the impulse of the world to reflect God's beauty. The author speaks of a “double irony” in the history of Reformed spirituality, showing Calvinists who traditionally have seemed so prudish and proper to also have been a people of passionate desire. Reformed Christians who have focused so often on divine transcendence are revealed as nature mystics, exulting in God's glory everywhere. Nature and desire are thus intimately joined in Reformed piety. Finally, the book combines a personal, autobiographical perspective with academic research, modeling the self‐implicating pattern of scholarship seen in the emerging field of spirituality. The main chapters deal with the historical and theological development of Reformed piety as it relates to the natural world. These are joined by personal essays that share the author's own experience as a Reformed Christian raised within a morally rigid theology of transcendence and predestination while seeking a God of wild splendor who exults in nature's beauty.