Reformation Day: a lament and a proposal

It's Reformation Day, apparently. Obviously, gains were made, many of them eventually adopted by the Roman Catholic Church in its own reformation at Vatican 2. But there were also huge losses. To my mind, the biggest of these losses was the widespead pre-reformation belief that divine presence and purpose can also be read from the non-human world.

Prior to the Reformation, there was a widespread understanding that God had two books. One was the bible. But the other was 'nature'. Raymond Sebond, in his book Natural Theology (1433) says, for example:

each creature is but as a letter, drawn by the hand of God.

Here the notion of sacred writ is applied, metaphorically, to every creature.  Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas goes further, just as the Reformation is gaining traction in 1578:

The World’s a Booke in Folio, printed all

With God’s great Workes in Letters Capitall:

Each Creature, is a Page, and each effect

A faire Caracter, void of all defect.

Jean Calvin, the reformer of Geneva, had already taken umbridge with this perspective in his influential Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536). Whilst he could agree that '[God] has been pleased . . . to manifest his perfections in the whole structure of the universe, and daily place himself in our view', he goes on to say that, because of the fall of human beings from perfection through Adam's sin, our interpretation of the book of nature is now deeply flawed. We see, now, only in fragements what used to be plain. Never mind, though, for God has given us Scripture:

another and better help must be given to guide us properly to God as a Creator [through] the light of his word that he might make himself known unto salvation.

This came to be the default setting of the reformers, and therefore of the protestant churches. ‘Nature’ needs to be read through Scripture in order to be a divine word. The Lutheran doctrine of 'sola scriptura', developed primarily at the Diet of Worms in 1521, posited the idea that neither 'nature' nor 'tradition' could be reliably interpreted without the interpolation of Scripture. Why? Because human beings are sinful. Only Scripture, it was argued, could overcome this hermeneutical sinfulness.

Over time, the doctrine of sola scriptura turned into a full-blown repression of all things non-human and 'natural'. It also turned into 500 years of colonialism, in which both the non-human world and the indigenous people who tend it, were mercilessly defiled and exploited by protestant princes. For colonisation is not only about the stealing of native lands and the destruction of our cultures and societies. It is also about the erasure of ‘nature’ as a sacred text, a source of divine presence and activity, which then allows for the exploitation and destruction of native-managed lands and ecosystems so that a few people, a very few, can become unimaginably weathly. In this perspective, Protestantism aids and abets colonisation. Indeed, Protestantism is a constitutive contributor to the colonial project.

Thus, my celebration of Reformation Day is rather muted.

Theologically, of course, none of this makes any sense whatsover. If the Holy Spirit can help us to read Scripture semi-accurately, then surely the Holy Spirit can help us to read tradition and the non-human world semi-accurately as well? Indeed, as a trawloolway man, I would argue that unless the protestant churches jetison the doctrine of sola scriptura entirely, they will condemn themselves to a continuing deafness with regard to all that the divine would say to us in country.
For Aboriginal peoples, by contrast, agree with the pre-Reformation divines that country/nature is able to speak clearly of divine things. In common Aboriginal parlance, the divine is the ‘dreaming’, our most primordial sense of reality. The dreaming is made material reality in ‘country’, our term for the managed native lands to which we are related as kin.  Country is therefore sacred. It teaches us who we are, to whom we belong, and what our responsibilities are. Country comes to (human) speech in rituals that are based on our multi-generational observation of the way 

that birds, animals, climate and ecosystem behave.These rituals condense and communicate the sacred lore we need to live sustainably and well on country. 

I would add that Jesus himself, as his story is recorded by the evangelists, both learned from the sacred text of country and also compared himself, analogically, to country. The parables, Jesus’ primary mode of teaching, were based mainly on observations of country. The kingdom of heaven is like . . . a vineyard, bread, the sowing of seed, seed growing, a mustard seed, a figtree, a pearl, fishing, a child, agricultural workers, etc. There is no sign in this homilising of an exegisis of existing Scripture. Jesus exegetes not sacred text, but sacred country.

Jesus also identifies himself as country by using the analogies of a seed which dies and is reborn (Jn 12: 23, 34), and the bread and wine that is consumed to sustain life (Mk 14:22-25). Both are images of life through death. Both are drawn from the natural ecological processes of renewal in country. 

We Protestants would do well to learn from Jesus, whose story is recorded in Scripture. Perhaps we could learn to imitate him as he seeks to imitate country. 

Garry Worete Deverell

Reformation Day, 2025