Let me pick up on my last post, and fill it out with more substantial reflection. Karl Barth, no doubt, is always in the background of my thinking; particularly when it comes to musings on natural theology. In case it didn’t stand out enough in my last post, let me reiterate what I wrote there: ‘If we cannot know who or what God is apart from being able to say “He is Lord by the Spirit,” then we cannot say He is God by appealing to the philosophers who have not the Spirit.’ This is the key aspect that drives my rejection of natural theology; viz. that the CATEGORIES supposedly discovered about God from the philosophers, are not categories arrived at by an obedience to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—the God of Jesus Christ. Barth riffs on Calvin’s concept of ‘faith as knowledge of God,’ and of course develops it in his own way. But this is key, a genuine knowledge of God is the knowledge of faith. True, Calvin had his so called sensus divinitatis, and so I would argue that he was not fully consistent with the implications of his own adage about knowledge of God vis-à-vis faith; Barth takes Calvin where Calvin didn’t go himself, but should have. For Barth, and I think this is the biblical way, knowledge of God is never conceived of as something gained from an abstract creation; not in a primary sense. In the bible knowledge of God is always, from the very first verse of the bible, a knowledge that is grounded in God’s Self-revealed and spoken Word.

Natural theology, while claiming to respect this, does not. Natural theology fundamentally starts with the categories of the philosophers, in regard to the ‘actual infinite’ (or whatever ‘pure being’ theosophy someone wants to plug-in), and simply rests in the assertion that these identifications ‘just are’ who God must be. As a method the Christian natural theologizer will tell us that what the philosophers have discovered is coterminous with who God has revealed himself to be (the ‘two books’ of revelation theory), but then they will turn around and privilege the categories of the philosophers in their “synthesizing” work. The most ironic aspect of the natural theological approach is that it ‘proves’ itself; or it is circular. In other words, it operates as a tautology. It will say: ‘look, this just is how Christian theology in the Great Tradition developed, and so we know that God must have been providentially governing this process.’ This is ironic because natural theology, in order to prove its validity, will appeal to history as if we simply can read off of its canvas that God just does act the way the history and development of theological ideas suggests. Again, this all presumes something theologically anthropologically about human agents. It presumes that we have an inherent capacity (so the philosophers) to read and discover things about God without the direct and in-breaking reality of God in our lives. And the Christian natural theologizers, in the Thomistic realm (as an example), will argue for a created grace that ostensibly allows the theologian to cooperate with God in the soteriological practice of knowing God, and making God known. This is the caveat they will appeal to in order to argue that nature has an independence of its own, in regard to making divine things known.

In contrast to natural theology Karl Barth rightly identifies the role that God himself must play if we are going to have a real knowledge of who God is. And here is an important aspect: the God revealed in Jesus Christ comes without remainder. In other words, a genuinely Christian conception of God does not need to be supplemented by the philosopher’s knowledge of God. For the Christian it is Christ alone who has exegeted (exegato) who God is (cf. Jn 1.18). It is within the grace of God alone that a genuine knowledge of God obtains; and Jesus is the grace of God for us; Jesus is the graced telos and ground of creation itself as we come to recognize the work of recreation He has accomplished in His Incarnation and Atonement (and all that entails in the resurrection, ascension, and second advent). For the ‘revelational-theologian’ there is no abstract creation, there is only creation and recreation in and for Christ. This is why faith must be the ground of knowledge of God; the faith of Christ. In God’s economical Kingdom there is no other reality but the face (prosopon) of Christ smiling in every corner and cranny of the created order; the resurrection itself ensures this. Barth writes:

When we can no longer evade the objectivity of God, we can and will still evade God Himself; we can and will still see the objectivity of God changed into that world of dead gods or all too living demons, into a world whose essence we can contemplate without giving ourselves into the hands of God, but for that reason being all the more enslaved by these gods and demons. This is the characteristic temptation of those who are already called to the people and Church of God. If we give way to it, the knowledge of God is not merely partially but totally lost in the sphere of this people, in the sphere of this Church. What proceeds out of ourselves will always be this temptation—and this is true even of those who are chosen and called, enlightened and commissioned. Therefore we have to pray that we may overcome this temptation. The being of God for us is His being n hearing this prayer and therefore by the act of His grace. The being of God is either known by grace or it is not known at all. If, however, it is known by grace, then we are already displaced from that secure position and put in a position where the consideration of God can consist and be fulfilled only in the act of our own decision of obedience. The object of this consideration is God in His almighty and active will. But if it is consideration of God in His almighty and active will, how can it fail to lead at once to decision? Either the consideration will become a flight before what is considered, and therefore disobedience, and therefore meaningless, thus ceasing to be the knowledge of God; or the consideration will become that correspondence, and therefore obedience, and as such real knowledge of the real God. Tertium non datur (There is no third option). But where by grace it is really consideration of God in His almighty and active will, it has already passed this Either-Or, and has become obedience and therefore real knowledge of God. Concretely, this means that the distinction and union between God and man in which the knowledge of God comes to pass will be fulfilled in the order laid down by the almighty and active will of God. It will not be any sort of freely chosen union and distinction, but will be concerned under all circumstances with the gracious God on the one hand and sinful man on the other. This qualifying of God and man will be the norm and criterion of all union and distinction, and therefore of the knowledge of God, and therefore of all speaking and hearing about Him. This qualifying is, however, unthinkable as naked thought. It will not be realised, or man will not know what he is doing in realising it, if, when he realises it in thought, it is not fulfilled beforehand in himself; if he does not know the gracious God as his God and himself as the sinful man distinct from God and yet united with Him; if he is not the man directed by the act of God the living Lord; if, therefore, in his direction to God he does not stand in obedience. Just as truth is certainly only to be had as grace, so the securing of grace will certainly have to consist in the decision obedience.[1]

What we have to do with here is a fundamental and principled consideration; it is a consideration of what a theological ontology/epistemology entails. The reason I think this is so important is because who God is, is at stake. If we cannot follow, in principle, the idea that God Himself in Christ gets to determine what we think of Him, from within a koinonial and relational basis with Him, as constructed by Him, then we will indeed fall derelict to a knowing of God that is not grounded in God’s grace, but in a grace we have constructed ourselves.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1 §25, 25.