In this interesting book pitched at intellectual historians and philosophers of religion, Katherine Calloway examines the prominent ‘metanarrative’ within the latter discipline that views providential deism as emerging in Europe as a consequence of the natural theology of the ‘scientific revolution’. Specifically, Calloway undertakes a series of subtle analyses of the natural theology of five English authors during the second half of the seventeenth century: Henry More, Richard Baxter, John Wilkins, John Ray and Richard Bentley. These authors have been selected as representative but understudied figures who established ‘physico-theology’ as a new type of natural theology in the decades prior to the publications of Isaac Newton. Calloway's central point is that an awareness of the diversity of types of approach used by these authors undermines any view of English natural theology as a coherent body of thought, and thereby calls into question the simple trajectory of ‘Christian natural theology leads to providential deism’ as suggested by the influential works of Leslie Stephen, and more recently Charles Taylor and Brad Gregory. We are advised to think in terms of ‘natural theologies’ rather than ‘natural theology’. In defending this position, Calloway focuses on the different approaches of her authors to understanding the relationship between natural and revealed theology, between abstract reason and the observation of nature, between the study of ‘new’ knowledge and that of antiquity, and the intended audience(s) of the new styles of natural theology. The book can be read profitably by intellectual historians of seventeenth-century English religious thought, and it can also serve as an introductory text for advanced postgraduates. While each chapter has something new to say, that on Wilkins stood out. Calloway shows him to have been growing keener with age on the absolute necessity of revelation, and thereby modifies the commonplace positioning of Wilkins as at the forefront of a purely ‘rational religion’ that equated natural and revealed religion. Calloway does not quite follow through the promised reassessment of the ‘metanarrative’ that she has sought to undermine: the historical question of what ‘providential deism’ is and how it emerged is not addressed, and attention is instead directed to how her authors can inform present-day philosophers of religion. Calloway's prose is clear and readable; her analysis is careful, biographically detailed and often witty. Perhaps reflecting the interests of the work's intended audience, her analysis often feels only lightly embedded in the intellectual and cultural context of the period. An identification of who or what prompted these works in the first place is not a concern – the potential deep significance of the fact that the vast majority of the works identified as natural theologies of the scientific revolution were published after 1651 is not discussed. Similarly, the relationship between the two major concepts in the book's title (leaving aside the use of the problematic ‘scientific revolution’) is not analysed. However, these criticisms should not detract from that the fact that this is an engaging first book which succeeds in being a useful and often original study of seventeenth-century English natural theology.
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