BARTH A N D THE PROBLEM OF

NATURAL THEOLOGY

by

THE REVEREND ANDREW LOUTH

IT is a commonplace among philosophers of religion discussing

the problem of natural theology to dismiss as irrelevant the views
of Karl Barth on this subject. A recent example is found in Professor
Flew's recent interesting book on natural theology, God and
Philosophy (London, 1967). He begins by making clear his rejection
1
of Karl Barth and quotes, as a fair summary of Barth's position,
the slogan, 'Belief cannot argue with unbelief: it can only preach
to it!' Unfortunately, he fails to give a reference for this quotation —
I cannot discover its source — but he rejects it on a number of
grounds. It would be to accept a 'sort of religious racism', and
further, he maintains that the Barthian position is either false or
question-begging: false — if it is maintained that faith, as a matter
of fact, has not argued with unbelief; question-begging — if it is
maintained that such discussion is fruitless, for the question is
precisely whether anything can be said on the rational level for the
Christian faith. For one begs the question if one assumes, as a
starting-point, that there is nothing to say. This might be thought a
little strange in view of the fact that Barth devotes over one hundred
pages of his Church Dogmatics to discussing the problem of natural
2
theology, yet such is Mr Flew's opinion. This general view of
Barth is shared, from the other side of the fence, by the reviewer of
this book by Flew in THE DOWNSIDE REVIEW. 3

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Yet what are these philosophers of religion arguing about as

they wrangle over the question of natural theology? For both sides
it seems that the Christian faith, though not reducible to natural
theology, demands a natural theology which must be capable of
validation at the bar of reason — or at any rate not at the bar of
faith. And yet it must seem strange to the opponent of natural
theology that, whatever he does, the Christian seems just as firm
in his avowal of his faith; however much he demolishes die proffered
natural theology, the Christian apologist seems able, either by a
further restatement of his position or by trump cards as yet
unrevealed, to maintain his faith. Perhaps the opponent of natural
theology begins to suspect that the real resources of the Christian
faith are not at all those utilised in the stating of a natural theology.
In suspecting this, he suspects what Barth proclaims — that natural
theology is not the necessary basis of Christian theology at all.
This article attempts to outline Barth's thought on natural theology,
to see what light it has to shed on the contemporary debate.
For Barth, theology is part of the response of the Church to God's
revelation in Jesus Christ, attested to by Sacred Scripture. So for
him Sacred Scripture is the only source, the only criterion, of
theology. In so far as natural theology attempts to set up a second
source for theology alongside Scripture, Barth feels bound to
reject it. And yet natural theology seems to occupy an inalienable
place in most theological systems. How can this be, Barth asks.
He sees three sorts of reasons that might be considered: apologetic,
biblical, and (for Barth, the true cause) man's endeavour to under­
stand himself and his situation in isolation from revelation, i.e. as
rejected by God. We shall not examine the last two groups of
suggested causes of natural theology (except in passing), but we
shall restrict our examination to the first group of suggested reasons
— the apologetic.
First, is apologetics so successful that we simply cannot ignore it?
Barth argues that it is not. For first, the 'god' of natural theology is
not the true god at all, but a false god — it is a god constructed by
man out of his own understanding of the world, and is thus not
presented to man's understanding in the same lineaments as the
God revealed in Jesus Christ. Secondly, if the achievements of
natural theology were to be admitted, they would amount to a

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second source of revelation alongside Jesus Christ. This would so

conflict with the Fourth Evangelist's presentation of Christ (to
take one example), that natural theology would have to be a very
impressive achievement indeed for the Christian theologian to
admit such a jolt to his understanding of revelation. But 'in none
of its forms are the achievements of "natural" theology so imposing
that they compel us to state that God, the real God, is "naturally"
knowable'.* In view of the work of Hume and Kant, Barth's view
does not seem unduly pessimistic.
To make this a little clearer, it may be helpful to draw a distinction
between natural theology and natural religion. It was only in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (beginning for us in England
with Lord Herbert of Cherbury) that men supposed that by the
light of natural reason they could know enough about God to be
able to worship him adequately and save their souls. Natural
theology is not necessarily, or even usually, defending that sort of
position. Rather, natural theology may be understood as asserting
that man by virtue of his natural reason has the capacity to know
God. And it is perfectly consonant with recognition of the claims
of natural theology to hold that unless he is helped by revelation,
man always uses his capacity wrongly and falls into idolatry. Indeed,
false religions are dependent on the possibility of man's being truly
religious, i.e. a hearer of the Word of God: idolatry is parasitic
upon man's capacity to know God, i.e. upon the possibility of
natural theology. Calvin, for instance, seems to have held some such
5
position. If natural theology is understood in this way, then Barth's
objections are seen rather as objections to natural religion or
perhaps to an understanding of natural theology as the basis of
revealed theology and thus a certain body of knowledge attainable
by reason to be used apologetically. With these clarifications we
can at least feel the force of Barth's objections to natural theology
— though they do not seem to affect natural theology when under­
stood as the bare assertion of man's capacity to know God.
Barth also discusses the endeavour of apologetics as a pastoral
or pedagogic exercise. It is claimed that the Church can only
communicate with natural man if it initially adopts a position
accessible to reason alone. But because the Church does in fact live
by faith, this exercise, Barth argues, will take the nature of a game.

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And precisely here lies the danger, for because the Christian is
playing this game only half-seriously, he may well lose — and
simply harden in his unbelief the unbeliever who will think that he
has in fact undermined the foundations of the Christian faith. But
the real danger, the most awful error of this attempt, lies deeper:
in this, that unbelief is not taken seriously enough. Unbelief is
trivialised if it is regarded as merely a mistaken philosophical
position. Natural theology, for Barth, takes neither faith nor
unbelief seriously enough, for it ignores what is at the heart of faith
in God, namely, the divine condescension.

'He who stoops down to the level of us all, both believers and
unbelievers, is the real God alone, in his grace and mercy. And it is
only by the fact that he knows this that the believing man is distinguished
from the unbeliever. Faith consists precisely in this — in the life which
is lived in consequence of God's coming down to our level. But if this
is faith, and the knowledge of faith is the knowledge of this, the believing
man is the one who will find unbelief first and foremost in himself.. .'*

Barth sees natural theology as supposing that faith or unbelief is

a choice made by man for or against God, prior to revelation, at
least logically. But man does not arrive at God by bis own decision ;
rather God comes to him, which is a very different thing. By ignoring
this, the natural theologian fails to see how close together the
believer and the unbeliever are. For he supposes the difference to
he in their natural assessment of natural evidence, whereas in reality
the only difference is intheirapprehension of the divine condescension
in Jesus Christ — an apprehension, that is, of Grace. So the believer
finds in his own faith and lack of faith how close he is to the
unbeliever, so sees how slight is the barrier which separates them,
or rather how slight is the barrier erected by their own self-
understandings. For Barth, believer and unbeliever can speak
together, without either compromising his own position. And yet
the believer knows that a man can only believe through God's own
action.
We see that Barth argues that natural theology errs because it
does not take faith seriously enough. On the one hand, it fails to
see that faith is a gift of grace, not something within the grasp of
natural man ; on the other hand, in making this mistake, it fails to

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see how close the believer is to the unbeliever — by failing to see

the unbeliever within the believer himself — and so creates its own
problem. If we have understood Barth aright, it would seem that
Flew is wrong in ascribing to Barth a sort of religious racism;
indeed it is just this that Barth sees lurking in the position of the
Christian natural theologian. It would seem too that Flew is wrong
to place great reliance on the slogan he quotes as an adequate
statement of Barth's position.
So far we have discussed what Barth says in his Church Dogmatics.
However, in the earlier work on Anselm which heralded his massive
Dogmatik, Barth treats more explicitly the problem of the unbeliever.
Barth insists that it is a fixed point theologically that the 'ratio
veritatis inherent in the Articles of the Christian Creed is itself at
no point the subject of discussion but on the contrary it forms the
7
basis of discussion'. Though Anselm argues with unbelievers, his
readers are Christians and the unbelievers are not on a par with
Anselm: they are in irrationabilitas and insipientia as opposed to
rationabilitas and sapientia. What then is Anselm's position vis-à-vis
the unbeliever? Barth comments on the mildness of Anselm's
polemic and draws attention to what Anselm says of his search as
compared with that of the unbeliever in Cur Deus Homo: quamvis
enim Uli ideo rationem quaerant, quia non credunt, nos vero, quia
credimus: unum idemque tarnen est, quodquaerimus* Barth explains
that 'quaerere rationem means to show the noetic rationality of faith
by explaining the mutual relations of the individual parts of the
9
Credo'. So, he argues, Anselm assumes that it is not the fact of
revelation itself which offends unbelievers; rather

'they take offence at some constituent part of the revelation because

the context, the totality of the revelation is unknown to them and
therefore this or that constituent (not being illumined by the whole)
is beyond their comprehension. In face of the unbeliever's rock of
offence, thus understood, the Christian theologian does not feel himself
powerless. Thus understood, it is in fact identical with the rock of
offence by which he himself was driven and continues to be driven from
10
credere to intelligere.'

So Anselm can say, unum idemque est, quod quaerimus. This is

clearly to outline and justify a method of apologetic. But it is not an

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apologetic which twists philosophy to the service of religion by

making it supply a natural theology. Nor is it an apologetic which
'apologizes' for Christian theology by proffering to the non-Christian
a 'natural theology' which, though not the real thing, provides a
way to the real thing and so draws Christian theology into bondage
to natural theology through this dependence on it. Anselm sees
theology as simple, adequate in itself (or rather in him of whom it
speaks) and thus in no need of extraneous support from philosophy.
When we say 'Anselm', we include 'Barth', for Barth's Anselm is
of value to us primarily as Barth's own theology, rather than as an
historical work. Barth remarks further on Anselm's theology:
'In the history of theology at all times and developments the via
regia of divine simplicity and the way of the most incredible
deception have always run parallel, separated only by the merest
11
hair's breadth'. This is because the doctrine of justification by
faith alone assumes for Barth an epistemological value which must
be taken with complete seriousness by a theology which hopes to
remain faithful to the Word of God. And this fact provides the
theological reason why the apologetic Barth adumbrates is possible,
and is the only possible apologetic. For as the sinner is justified by
the non-imputation of sin — by an 'as if, so we find this 'as if' in
theology, and this 'as if provides the possibility of apologetic.

'Perhaps Anselm did not know any other way of speaking of the
Christian Credo except by addressing the sinner as one who had not
sinned, the non-christian as the Christian, the unbeliever as the believer,
on the basis of the great "as if" which is really not an "as if" at all,
but which at all times has been the final decisive means whereby the
12
believer could speak to the unbeliever.'

The 'as if manifests itself in the fact that the justified is simul Justus
et peccator and so by bis solidarity in sin and unbelief with the
unbeliever, he is not separated from the unbeliever as natural
theology seems to presuppose when trying to isolate some abstractly
pure common ground. To this effect Barth quotes from Anselm:

unde ego considerans quantum peccavi quantisque iniquitatibus

infelix anima mea polluta sit, intelligo me non solum aequalem cum
aliis peccatoribus sed plus quam ullum peccatorem et ultra peccatores
13
esse peccatorem.

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Thus Barth can essay an apologetic based on the divine 'as if —

that 'as if 'which is not really an "as if" at all' precisely because it
is divine. For God's 'as if in justification is not a legal fiction, but
his creative, forgiving word. Barth's apologetic can ignore the
unbeliever's 'rock of offence' without being guilty of that arrogance
and impatience toward the unbeliever, which is too often the mark
of Christian apologetic. And Barth's apologetic does not ignore the
gratuitousness of grace, since the motive for this method of apologetic
is trust in the divine initiative — an initiative we cannot manipulate
but only presuppose.
All this can be seen in perhaps a more unified way if we consider
14
the importance Barth attaches to the concreteness of Christ. For
Barth theology starts from God's revealing himself to us in Jesus
Christ. But Jesus Christ was on the human level 'the Rabbi of
Nazareth, historically so difficult to get information about, and
when it is got, one whose activity is so easily a little commonplace
alongside more than one founder of a religion and even alongside
16
many later representatives of his own religion'. Yet it is just this
man in whom God presents us the finality of his revelation. Now this
is a 'rock of offence' — that the eternal truth of God should find
definitive expression in the contingent life of a man — a man who
(for all we know) might never have been, and who is ineradicably
wedded to the contingent historical background of first-century
Judaea. This 'rock of offence' remains for the Christian. This is
what urges him on from mere faith to a faith striving for under­
standing. So, for Barth, precisely it is the same tension that spurs
on the Christian theologian to understanding and that separates
the believer and the unbeliever. But it is precisely this tension that
the natural theologian seeks to lessen — if not destroy. He seeks
to show the necessity of Christian theism — a nécessitas very
different from the necessary interrelatedness of the Credo that Barth
finds in Anselm. Is not one of the arguments of the natural theologian
the argument a contingentia mundil But is it not within the contingency
of this world — not outside it — that God has revealed his eternal
truth? If this is so, how can it be otherwise than that commitment
to God's revelation in this man will appear arbitrary? To demand
necessary reasons is to demand that God should have acted in some
other way than in fact he did. There is a nécessitas in the Incarnation,

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but Anselm can only demonstrate this within the context of the
Christian Credo, not from some assumed notiones communes.
Is there then nothing to be said for the Christian faith, as Flew
claims is entailed by Barth's position? It must be admitted that the
Christian theologian cannot produce a demonstrative argument for
the Christian faith ; so it remains that what he can say must simply be
demonstrations that demonstrative arguments against Christianity
fail. It is perhaps worth noting that the sparring partner that Flew
takes (viz. the Roman Catholic Church, and especially St Thomas
Aquinas) is not so unequivocal as Flew would like. For instance,
in this case when Aquinas answers the question how Christian
theology (sacra scriptura as he puts it) defends itself against attack,
he says:

Unde sacra scriptura, cum non habeat superiorem, disputât cum

negante sua principia, argumentando quidem si adversarius aliquid
concédât eorum quae per revelationem divinam habentur, sicut per
auctoritates sacrae doctrinae disputamus contra haereticos, et per
unum articulum contra negantem alium. Si vero adversarius nihil
credat eorum quae divinitus revelantur, non remaneat amplius via
ad probandum articulos fidei per rationem; sed ad solvendum rationes,
si quas inducit, contrafidem.Cum enimfidesinfallibili veritati innitatur,
impossibile autem sit de vero demonstrari contrarium, manifestatu m
est probationes quae contrafideminducuntur non esse demonstrationes,
1
sed solubilia argumenta. *

This may sound arrogant, and indeed it must be admitted that the
Christian steers a very dangerous course between humble acknow­
ledgement of divine revelation and human arrogance: but is not
this danger unavoidable if we wish to maintain that God has
revealed himself to men?
But do St Thomas's remarks extend to the fact of the existence
of God? Traditional Thomism thinks not (though with what
justification if it claims to represent the mind of him who gives room
to philosophical arguments only quasi extranea argumenta et
11
probabilia one cannot say). For traditional Thomists revelation
is something arbitrary if we do not know prior to revelation that
the revealing God exists and that we can trust this revelation.
18
Professor Root (quoted by Flew) echoes this:

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'If the only grounds for belief in the Christian Revelation are part
of that alleged revelation, the theologian has cut himself off from people
who wish to think about their beliefs. If there are no grounds for
believing that a Christian scheme is preferable to some non-Christian
one, the choice between some other religion or none becomes arbitrary,
irrational, even trivial.'

If this is true, then one must go much further than merely proving
the existence of God: one must show necessary reasons why God
must have revealed himself in the (from our point of view) contingent
life and death of the man Jesus. I do not see how, even in principle,
this could be done. It is interesting to note that the great Dutch
Dominican theologian, Schillebeeckx (ergo, a Thomist!), also finds
the real certainty of revelation in the revealing God himself — not
in the praeambula fidei:

'The guarantee of faith, which is of a supernatural kind, is to be found

in faith itself, in the act of believing. Faith is not a conclusion drawn
from an examination of history from which it should appear that God
has really addressed man. It is in and through the affective attraction
of grace (the lumenfideiwhich reaches the intellect via the will, according
to the definition given by the Thomist tradition) that we come into
18
contact, in the act of faith, with God's testimony.

All this does not mean (as Root suggests it must) that we can have
Christian theology without metaphysics; but it does mean that
metaphysics does not stand shoulder to shoulder with Christ as
the Way the Christian professes. It would be quite ridiculous to
maintain that Barth ignores metaphysics — he engages in dialogue
with many philosophers from Plato to Heidegger — and his thought
bears their mark. But for him metaphysics only helps him to
understand the revelation of God in Christ, it in no way constitutes
it. This is the essence of Barth's repudiation of natural theology.
He allows natural theology no place within the proclamation of the
gospel — we proclaim Christ, not some 'philosophy of life'. This
he defends with all his might. Yet, given that, philosophy, even
'natural theology', may find a place — but this place cannot then
be as part of the foundation of the Christian faith. He puts this
clearly in an essay in the collection, Theology and Church:

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'Natural theology (theologia naturalis) is included and brought into

clear light in the theology of revelation (theologia revelata); in the reality
of divine grace is included the truth of the divine creation. In this
sense it is true that "Grace does not destroy nature but completes it"
(gratia non tollit naturam sed perficit). The meaning of the Word of
God becomes manifest as it brings into full light the buried and forgotten
0
truth of the creation.'*

Ί , ι.
* Church Dogmatics ( E d i n b u r g h , 1955), H , I , p p . 63-178.
* V o l . L X X X V , N o . 278, p p . 74 ff.
« CD., I I , I, p . 87.
* Institutio, I , i i i , 1.
• CD., Π , I, p . 95.
' A n s e l m , Fides Quaerens Intellectum ( L o n d o n , i960), p . 6 o .
• O p . c i t . , I , 3.
• Anselm, p . 66.
1 0
Ibid.
1 1
I b i d . , p . 70.
" Ibid.
" Medit., 6.
1 4
T h i s l i n e o f a p p r o a c h is m u c h m o r e a d e q u a t e l y i l l u s t r a t e d i n P r o f e s s o r D . M .
M a c K i n n o n ' s The Borderlands of Theology ( L o n d o n , 1968), passim.
15
CD., I , I, p . 188.
" Summa Theologiae, la, 1, 8.
" I b i d . , l a , 1, 8, a d 2.
" God and Philosophy, 1,19.
" E . S c h i l l e b e e c k x , Revelation and Theology ( L o n d o n , 1967), p . 173-
*° O p . c i t . , p . 342.

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