I take the following from the Apostle Paul to be the methodological sine qua non of how Christian theology ought to be done:

¹¹ For I would have you know, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not according to man. ¹² For I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. Galatians 1:11-12

Surprisingly, many (even most) Christian theologians these days, at least on the conservative side, reject this sort of ‘apocalyptic’ understanding of God’s Self-revelation, and the theologizing that can be achieved from this vista. Most theologians interested in the so called ‘theology of retrieval’ believe that we must slavishly repristinate, even if in ‘constructive’ dress, classical theism; particularly of the mediaeval and Thomist sort. As such, they reject the sort of Pauline existential model that Paul himself declares about his encounter with the living God in Christ; and instead they opt for the pedigree of school theology that definitionally works from the via negativa or negative way of discursively thinking God from what finitude is not.

I contend, and have for years, that Barth’s so called ‘analogy of faith’ or ‘analogy of relation’ is much more in line with the Pauline way of thinking and doing theology versus what has become the common mode for doing theology “classically” (which has become code and synonymous with doing theology “catholically”). I think this is so just for the reason that Paul presupposes upon in his Galatia correspondence; that is, that because Jesus Christ is so utterly unique, and without analogy, that his knowledge of the true and living God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob came not with philosophical buttress, but only through a mind-independent revelation of God Himself. For Paul, to know God, is something not discovered but ‘received’ through a revelation that comes without contingency upon humanity’s ability to conjure an image of godness from their own powers of observation and inference. Douglas Campbell agrees as he writes:

Without affirming the absolute oneness of Jesus with God—his complete unity—we lose our grip on where God has chosen to be revealed fully and completely: namely, in Jesus. If Jesus is not God “all the way down,” then we are still lost in our own world with all its fantasies and illusions; we have no direct contact with God. We are hemmed in by our limited creaturely existence, now further corrupted by sin, and we do not know what God is really like. We are reduced, the theologians would say, to analogies, which means to inevitable and largely uncontrolled gaps in our understanding of what God is really like. God is like a sunset, but in what sense? Is he warm? or glowing? or fading? Clearly, none of this is quite right. God is like a mother, but in what exact sense again? Does he wear my mother’s distinctive clothes or directly biologically breast-feed us or speak in a southern drawl about picking us up from soccer? Again, clearly none of this is directly applicable [sic], although we sense that something insightful is going on. But if we want to press on these claims and be really precise, we don’t know quite how to do so. This limitation arises because we are trying to understand a transcendent being who is fundamentally different from us, as creator to our createdness, by way of limited, emphatically nontranscendent things that this being has made, which are by the nature of the case different from him. There is a gap here that we just can’t bridge unless God has graciously bridged it from his side of the divide and become one of us and lived among us. What a gift! So we should really avoid mitigating or avoiding this gift or watering if down in any way, which means to avoid adding other potential candidates alongside in any sort of equality. God is definitively known only in Jesus. This is where God is present with us fully, and nowhere else—not in a book, a tradition, a piece of land, a building, or even in a particular people (unless, that is, he has taken up residence in one of them fully). We worship and pray to none of these things; we worship and pray to Jesus because Jesus is God, and so we know God fully and completely only as we know Jesus.[1]

If you have read Karl Barth or Thomas Torrance at any length (even my blog for awhile) what Campbell just iterated will be very familiar to you. I think though that Campbell elevates an important aspect of revealed theology (versus natural theology) in the sense that he emphasizes how important it is to realize what understanding Jesus as God ought to do to our understanding of what ‘doing’ theology entails. In other words, it is precisely because of the uniqueness of the hidden God (Deus absconditus) made revealed in Christ (Deus revelatus) that the human condition is FULLY reliant upon this God revealing Himself to us. Any other theological models, particularly ones that portend of classical pedigree, need to be willing to be corrected by the fact that unless God reveals Himself personally, then all the theologian is left with are non-personal ways for thinking God. This is the point that is so often lost on those who are slavishly committed to natural theology. They don’t seem capable, or at least willing to consider that if God’s revelation is discoverable in nature that such revelation, in abstraction from God’s triune Self-revelation in Christ, will necessarily give a hue of God that ends up being ‘natural’ and impersonal. But this flies in the face of the God that the Apostle Paul encountered on the way to Damascus. Maranatha

[1] Douglas A. Campbell, Pauline Dogmatics: The Triumph of God’s Love (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2020), 15-16.