Natural Theology

Alan Jacobs reviews Stanley Hauerwas’s Against the Grain of the Universe in the current issue of Books & Culture , and Hauerwas talks about Barth’s insight that natural theology can never be “first” theology: “Barth discovered early in his career that the great error of 19th-century Protestant theology was its decision to think that human ‘religious experience’ was an appropriate first principle of Christian theology. Indeed, some of the strongest opponents of Christianity ?Enotably Feuerbach and Nietzsche ?Erealized that a theologian who began with ‘religious experience’ had already given up the game; Barth learned from them not to make that mistake, and to insist instead on the priority of God’s revelation, no matter how dissonantly it might ring in the secular ear.” He goes on to suggest that the late Barth realized that his famous “Nein” to Brunner was inadequate, and came through a study of Aquinas to embrace a more analogical vision. Natural theology becomes possible, not as first theology, but only insofar it is nestled within the larger embrace of Christian theology. Hauerwas summarizes Barth by saying that “The Christian . . . cannot address the non-Christian on the basis of a general or human responsibilty interpreted as the responsibility to conscience or to supposed or real orders and forces of the cosmos. Rather, every person is to be addressed as one who exists and stands in the light of Jesus Christ.”