ABSTRACT
The last 20 years have brought a "turn to naturalism". This turn has occurred in the wake of the sciences, giving people a picture of nature as incredibly varied and comprehensive. R. G. Collingwood believed that people's ideas of nature have changed over time. The ancient world held to the idea of nature as a living organism, while the Renaissance and Enlightenment viewed nature in analogy to the machine. Nature is a text that stands in need for interpreting; it is not a self-explicating continuum. To gain knowledge and understanding of nature, people require an interpretive method and concepts—a hermeneutic. Buddhist teachings and practices, for example, are responses to nature, and by no means anti-nature. Like all asceticisms, the Buddhist forms are careful strategies for taking nature seriously. At the heart of Christian faith is the belief that in Jesus Christ, divinity and humanity existed in indissoluble unity, each fully its own "nature".
