Abstract

This chapter examines another explanation for why especially sixteenthcentury Europeans were interested in the water-earth relationship and the layout of the world's landmasses and waterways, focusing on the shifting conceptions of God and his providence that contemporary religious reformations caused. This chapter argues that these religious reformations helped lead authors to reconsider God's connection to the universe and how people were meant to perceive this connection through the behavior of natural phenomena such as water. They helped because the water-earth ontological and spatial relationships’ seeming violation of Europeans‘ understanding of the nature of these elements. This relationship provided an opportunity to explore just how God was associated with the universe and what people should learn from that association.

Keywords: incarnation; providence; revelation; creation; religious reformations

This also is an illustrious miracle that the waters by their dispersal gave people a place to inhabit. For philosophers concede that water's natural position is what Moses said it was at the beginning so that it should roll over the whole earth. First because water is an element and therefore ought to be circular and since the element of water is heavier than air and lighter than earth, it should cover the earth in its whole circumference. But that the seas, in being driven back into heaps, should concede a place to human beings seems preternatural (quasi praeter naturam), and therefore Scripture frequently extolls God's goodness in this particular. Psalm 33:7. “He has gathered the waters just as in a bottle.” Jerome 5:22. “Will you not fear me? Will you not be terrified by my presence, who placed the sand as the boundary of the seas?” Job 38:8 “Who has enclosed the sea with doors? Have I not surrounded it with gates and bars? I have said to this point you shall proceed; here your swelling waves shall break.” Therefore, let us know that we live on dry land because God removed the waters by his command so that they do not submerge the whole earth.