For me, natural theology continues to be one of the most significant theological loci that the Christian thinker must (and ought to) consider. If you have read me for any length of time you know that I am severely opposed to natural theology; in particular, so called: Christian natural theology. If I ever actually get to write my PhD, I’m thinking it will finally be something oriented around this issue; with particular focus on a theory of revelation (as the broader consideration). This is a matter of what is called prolegomena. When the reader opens up a typical systematic theology book, the author of that book will have laid out the method, rationale, and structure she or he seeks to follow as they develop their theology. Most often, when reading evangelical and Reformed systematicians, and their respective theologies, they will have adopted the classical theistic mode of natural theology (Thomas Aquinas is their homeboy, most typically).

Very simply, if you don’t know by now, natural theology is the belief that a generic god concept can be discovered (by just about anybody), and then deployed, by way of synthesis, as the shape and grammar by which whatever god the theologian is seeking to explicate as their chosen god. For the Christian, of course, it is the triune God who is synthesized with these natural categories for knowing God. My contention, along with Karl Barth’s et al., is that this sort of synthesis gives us a tertium quid God, who neither represents the God Self-revealed in Christ, nor the philosopher’s god that the theologian is attempting to synthesize with the Christian God.

Beyond this, Christian theologians who operate in this natural theological mode are making an anthropological move; in regard to the capacity they believe people in general have to think godness. They are presuming upon (either consciously, or not) what Norman Fiering has identified as a Thomist Intellectualist anthropology. Since I don’t have Fiering’s work at hand, I’ll have to rely on Jeffrey Waddington’s summary of Fiering’s description of what this sort of intellectualist (faculty psychology) anthropology entails. Waddington writes, with reference to Fiering:

Historically, this kind of thinking (i.e., where the intellect is given priority over the will) can be seen in what Norman Fiering has labeled “Thomistic-Intellectualism.” The Thomistic-Intellectualistic school, which has typically been traced back to Thomas Aquinas, held that the will was blind and followed the last dictate or judgment of the “practical intellect.” In other words, it is the intellect or judgment that shows the will what is to be accepted or rejected. As such, the will can never be guilty of moral error or corruption. “The will itself is never culpable in the case of moral error, since it only follows the judgment of the intellect. The will as the rational appetite is supposed to govern the lower sensitive appetites, although it may happen that unruly vehement appetites from below will obscure rational judgment and thus influence choice wrongly.” Accordingly, without information from the intellect, “the will is not the will, but a confused appetite.” To summarize the Thomistic-Intellectualistic tradition, we can say with regard to the relationship between the intellect and the will in the human soul, there is a primacy of the intellect in the absolute sense since the will is itself blind. The will, then, must be ruled, governed, or directed by the faculty of the understanding. There is, then, an implied denigration of the will and the other powers.[1]

For our purposes what is important is to recognize the role the intellect plays in defining what in fact the human being is. In Thomas’s schema the intellect didn’t completely fall at the fall. He needs this aspect of humanity to remain intact because it is what he sees as the touchstone between God (as the Big Intellect in the sky), and God’s creatures made in his image. If the intellect would have completely fallen, in the Thomist schema, then the very essence of humanity itself would have been utterly lost; and there would have been no humanity for the Christ to assume in the incarnation; or no humanity to redeem. The intellect, in this schema, as we’ve seen through Fiering’s and Waddington’s analysis, has pride of place as the faculty that controls all others (i.e., will and affections).

Why would I draw this point out in this discussion? Because it speaks to the rationale of why so many retrieving theologians in the 21^st century simply recover the natural theology of someone like Aquinas without a thought. They are committed to, whether they acknowledge it or not, this sort of Thomistic-Intellectualistic anthropology that posits that it is within the human being, even if they are fallen and “effectually” unredeemed, to discover and even see ‘God’ embedded within the ratio of the created order. The point: such intellectually capable people have the capacity to make ‘contact’ with truths about God without revelation. It is this schema that funds the flaming approval of natural theology by most of the evangelical and Reformed theologians of our time (although not all Reformed folks affirm natural theologian; there are the Van Tilians, like Waddington and his comrades from Westminster Theological Seminary, who reject natural theology for other reasons). Embedded deep within the fabric of the theologian’s mind, those who are engaging in the “constructive” recovery of the “classical” [Thomistic] theology of the Church, is this belief that the intellect has ‘natural’ powers untouched by the lapse that we read about in Genesis 3.

This brings us to the critique I’ve been attempting to get to throughout this post. Karl Barth has critique galore of this sort of natural theological trumpet blowing being currently engaged in by the evangelical and Reformed theologians of our time. Here he is writing about the seduction, and even the dominance, that natural theology has had for the Church for centuries. As you read this, bear in mind what we just covered in regard to theological anthropology. We pick up with Barth in his Church Dogmatics II/1 §26 in a section entitled: The Readiness of Man. You will notice that Barth is referring to the competition the theologians are in with God’s confronting grace; when they affirm and practice natural theology. He writes:

For has he not now exercised his mastery? Has he not won his battle against grace? If grace is alongside nature, however high above it it may be put, it is obviously no longer the grace of God, but the grace which man himself ascribes to himself. If God’s revelation is alongside a knowledge of God proper to man a such, even though it may never be advanced except as a prolegomenon, it is obviously no longer the revelation of God, but a new expression (borrowed or ever stolen) for the revelation which encounters man in his own reflection. If the miracle acknowledged by man—perhaps an inspired Scripture or an infallible Church—is included in his own reckoning, if it is placed by him alongside the other phenomena of his world, it is obviously no longer the miracle of God, but an astounding element in man’s view of the world and of himself. No supranaturalism which man can choose on this higher rung can hold its own against the fact that in the last resort, as chosen by man, it is only a higher, though masked, naturalism. God’s real revelation simply cannot be chosen by man and, as his own possibility, put beside another, and integrated with it into a system. God’s real revelation is the possibility which man does not have to choose, but by which he must regard himself as chosen without having space and time to come to an arrangement with it within the sphere and according to the method of other possibilities. By treating it as if it does not do the choosing but is something to be chosen, not the unique but just one possibility, Christian natural theology very respectfully and in all humility re-casts revelation into a new form of its own devising. But for all that its behavior is so respectful and forbearing, for all that it subordinates itself so consciously and consistently, natural theology has already conquered it at the very outset, making revelation into non-revelation. This will certainly show itself in what it does with the revelation that has been absorbed and domesticated by it. For the naturalism which already exists in the systematisation of the two possibilities will not leave permanently unmolested the supranaturalism of this higher stage which is at first respected and foreborne.[2]

Even though we won’t arrive at Barth’s doctrine of election until CD II/2, we can already see how that is taking form even in this single paragraph from him. Natural theology, by definition, is natural; that’s what Barth is saying. Natural theology confronts God; this is anti-thetical, for Barth, to revelational theology. Revelational theology confronts humanity in the flesh and blood incarnation of God in Christ.

The reader should also notice how Barth is pressing the seductive nature of a Christian natural theology. Indeed, it is so seductive that its proponents are simply taken in by it, based on the supposition that natural theology is subordinate to the superordinate reality of what has been revealed by God of Himself. As Barth so eloquently identifies: the natural theologian will make this sort of claim all along, but because of their prior commitments to an already capacious and active intellect in the human being, the theologian, under this pressure, is in point of fact, able to surmise God simply from their own natural powers. Once this fatal step has been made, such theologians can no longer make a critical heads or tails of what is special and what is natural; indeed the special has become subordinate to the natural, insofar that the Catholicium or so called ‘Great Tradition’ of the Church has pressed out a concept of godness in its own natural image.

You might see why I think this is such a big deal.

[1] Jeffrey C. Waddington, The Unified Operations of the Human Soul: Jonathan Edwards’s Theological Anthropology and Apologetic (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2015), 158. I was first alerted to Fiering’s work by my former seminary professor and mentor, Ron Frost. He develops even further, in his own doctoral work, how the Thomistic-Intellectualistic anthropology suffused most of what we now call the Post Reformation Reformed Orthodoxy of the 16^th and 17^th centuries, and her scholasticism reformed theologians.

[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1 The Doctrine of God: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 136.