General Revelation Throughout History

By Gerald R. McDermott

[Gerald R. McDermott is the Anglican Chair of Divinity, Samford University, Beeson Divinity School, Birmingham, Alabama.]

[This is the second article in the four-part series “A Typological View of Reality,” delivered as the W. H. Griffith Thomas lectures at Dallas Theological Seminary, February 7–10, 2017. The ideas presented in these lectures have been adapted and expanded in Everyday Glory: The Revelation of God in All of Reality (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018).]

My last lecture dealt with the typological view of reality seen in the Great Tradition from Gregory Nazianzus and Augustine through Aquinas and Bonaventure to Calvin and Edwards and Newman. What follows is the theological pushback on this view, starting with Martin Luther in the sixteenth century.

Martin Luther

Luther had a hard time separating properly Christian natural theology from the theologies of glory that he thought responsible for the Catholic Church’s late medieval teaching of semi-Pelagianism. In his Heidelberg Disputation (1518) he famously asserted, “That person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible in those things which have actually happened [sic]” (Rom 1:20).[1] His targets were late medieval philosophical theologians who thought they could use reason alone, apart from Scripture, to speculate about God’s attributes. Luther insisted that apart from the revelation of the Cross, nothing about God can be truly known by reason. In the absence of revelation from the Bible, reason—which is never static or neutral—immediately concocts a god whom the human self can manage. So Luther talked about a monk who imagines a god who forgives sins and grants eternal life in exchange for good works. He clings to and trusts in this god. The problem is that this god does not exist. It is an idol. And this, according to Luther, is what naturally happens when reason looks at the created world and analogizes from its beauty and goodness to a god who has as much beauty and goodness as the monk’s little mind can imagine. Not only is it a foolish exercise—how could the infinite God be anything like what our little minds could imagine?—but also the categories of beauty and goodness are devised by the monk. How is he to know that the true God’s goodness and beauty are anything like what he conceives beauty and goodness to be? Remember, this is a monk-philosopher who is deliberately setting the Bible aside and presuming to use reason alone to tell him about God. This, said Luther, is a theologian of glory, who cannot imagine that beauty is found in the ugliness of the Cross or that goodness is precisely where a Father permits his Son to be murdered.[2]

Yet for all of Luther’s insight into the folly of unaided reason’s presumptions about God, Luther joined what good Christian theology had separated: scriptureless philosophical theology on the one hand and biblical natural theology on the other. He failed to distinguish them appropriately and so prejudiced legions of followers against all natural revelation and Christian natural theology.

He did this by ignoring the plain sense of the Bible where it most clearly speaks of the glory of God in the creation. In his sermon on Psalm 19, one of the classic biblical texts on God’s natural revelation in creation, Luther commented on “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims His handiwork” (v. 1):

That is to say: “The glory of God is preached everywhere in all the lands under all of heaven.” The emphasis is on the word “telling,” to remind us that we should esteem the oral and external Word. The “glory of God” is the Gospel, for through the Gospel God is known. The “handiwork” of God is all the works wrought by the Gospel, like justification, salvation, and redemption from sin, from death, and from the kingdom of the devil.[3]

When verse 2 proclaims that “day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge,” Luther said, “This is to say that the Gospel will always be preached and that the Christian Church will stand and remain eternally.”[4]

Notice what has happened. Here, where the Bible contains a clear instance of its theology of creation—that God’s glory can be seen in the heavens and earth—Luther has replaced it with a theology of redemption. The heavens are not the stars, he asserts, and the firmament is not the sky; instead, they are the oral preaching of the Word at church, and the good works that are produced by that preaching. The verse for Luther speaks not of the beauty in the night sky, but of something going on inside the church. Just as the moon is obscured by the rising sun at dawn, the glory of nature has been swept from view to reveal instead a preacher in a pulpit.

If Psalm 19 is one of the best-known Old Testament passages about types in the creation, Romans 1:18–23 is one of the best-known New Testament passages. We have just seen how Luther used it in his Heidelberg Disputation, insisting that the invisible things of God mentioned in this passage are not perceptible through what is visible. When he commented more directly on Romans 1, Luther declared again that the invisible things of God, which Paul said “have been clearly perceived . . . in the things that have been made” (v. 20, ESV), are not clearly seen. Luther wrote that while God does indeed reveal his existence and power and even goodness through nature, and while unaided reason does indeed discern those realities, nevertheless those realities are immediately obscured by sin. Sin inevitably corrupts this true knowledge. That is why Paul said in verse 21 that they “became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened.”[5]

Later Lutheran theologians used this treatment of natural revelation by God to characterize all natural theology. Roland Ziegler has written recently: “In the hands of man, the natural revelation of the true God is turned into an idolatrous concept of god and gods. The problem of man is therefore not simply an intellectual one, but it is sin. The remedy for this is not a return to a purer, better natural theology but the proclamation of Christ.”[6] Ziegler’s interpretation is similar to that of nineteenth-century Lutheran theologian August Graebner: “God’s handwriting still covers every inch of the universe; but man’s defective mental vision prevents him from making out, even with his telescopes and microscopes, what the heavens as well as the mustard seeds declare.”[7]

For these Lutheran theologians, God’s types in nature are useless because they are inevitably distorted by sinful human minds. They serve only to condemn, for they show that human beings have no excuse for their idolatry, since they were originally given revelation of the true God but replaced it with images of false gods. This is what happens when hapless Christian theologians think anything useful is made of God’s revelation in nature. As a contemporary Lutheran theologian writes, “If any constructive space is given natural revelation, it becomes natural theology and the consequences are dire for the scriptural doctrine of the Trinity and our confession of the pure gospel.”[8]

Luther and these Lutherans are right about the consequences of a natural theology that presumes that unregenerate reason can be disinterested and neutral and that presumes it can “ascend” (as Luther put it) to the divine realm without the guidance of revelation. Luther wrote that when unbelievers see God in nature, they see only his wrath, for Paul wrote that the “wrath of God,” not the righteousness of God, is being revealed from heaven (Rom 1:18). The philosopher using reason alone can have a “left-handed and partial knowledge of God,” but he cannot know God’s will for him, particularly whether God will forgive him. Sin confuses all knowledge gained from natural revelation; so all so-called natural knowledge must die before it is to be taken up in faith. And at that point, it must submit to the revelation of God in Scripture.[9]

But what if reason is used in the way that most of the Great Tradition used it? What if it is faith seeking understanding, as Augustine first put it? What if it is a prayerful exploration, carefully mining the riches of revelation in the Bible, as it was used by Cyril of Jerusalem, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory Nazianzus, and Augustine? They spoke of faith’s reason and reason’s faith, faith informing reason and giving fullness to reason. Gregory of Nazianzus, for example, used biblically informed reason to write a hymn to nature that inspires humility before God. He used it to argue the irrationality of reason trying to know God without the use of biblical revelation from God.

Despite Luther’s blasts against reason as “that whore,” even he seemed to allow for this kind of humble and pious typological theology. In the Heidelberg Disputation he wrote that it is useless for a person to try to see God’s glory and majesty “unless he also recognizes him in the humility and shame of the cross” (AE 31:52–53). Notice the “unless,” which implies that God’s glory and majesty can be seen by those who embrace the shame of the Cross, who know that God’s beauty is in that very ugliness. Those believers can then go on to see God’s glory in the creation. In fact, Luther said just that in this Disputation: “He deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross” (AE 31:52).

Luther was brilliant in his denunciation of presumptuous natural theology that tries to soar to heaven without the wings of revelation. He rightly protested that that flight was headed toward a dark realm of alien beings. But Luther was so obsessed with human presumption about glory that he gave little attention to believers who humbly considered the beauties of God scattered throughout the creation. They knew the greatest glory was in the Cross, and therefore they could also know the glory of God that was in and beyond the physical heavens. They could see God’s handiwork in the firmament.

Later Lutheran (and other sorts of) theologians warned that all the analogies we use to talk about God are rooted in human terms and human concepts, things in nature as perceived by our limited minds. They suggested that it borders on the illegitimate to imagine that God could be anything like the things we see in nature and history—and that we should hesitate to so imagine. Yet the authors of Scripture showed no such hesitation. They regularly compared God to a rock and a storm and the sun. His wrath, they wrote, is like the ocean, and his righteousness like the mountains. He himself is like a human father, a shepherd, a vineyard owner. Jesus said he is bread, a vine, a king.

Perhaps there is a place after all for believing, biblical use of natural revelation.

Karl Barth

Barth argued that there is no “point of contact” between things of earth and things of heaven and that when we think there is, we inevitably confuse the two, assigning something of earth to the heavenly sphere, turning it into a god by trusting in it and loving it. This sounds a lot like Luther. Barth was indeed steeped in the Reformers, Luther as well as Calvin. Luther helped Barth make sense of the insanity of early twentieth-century Europe, when millions of young men were mowed down in line after line as they climbed out of filthy trenches to face a faceless enemy whom their leaders had told them was a threat to civilization. Barth was horrified to learn that his liberal theology professors had endorsed this senseless First World War, confusing German ideals with God’s purposes. This made him rethink theology and God himself, and it drove him back to the Reformed scholastics whom he found in Heinrich Heppe’s Reformed Dogmatics. These theologians took seriously what Barth called “the strange new world of the Bible.” Unlike his liberal theology professors, who questioned the historicity of both Testaments, these Reformed theologians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries believed that God had inspired every word of Scripture and that the relation between each word and its historical referent was less important than the fact that the living God was speaking through that Word.

Then in the 1930s, when the most Christianized country in Europe turned against its fathers, the Jews, and when the most educated country in history allowed itself to believe lies, Barth turned again to Reformed theology—and Luther—to make sense of the madness. Barth was struck by Luther’s rejection of Aquinas and his turn to this world of being to find analogies to the Author of being. Even though Aquinas said that these analogies tell us more about what God is not than what he is, Luther considered all such analogies to this world to be dead ends. In the end they turn us to our own ideas of the world and suggest that we can contribute something to the search for God and eventually to our being accepted by God.

Both Lutheran and Reformed theologians have made these arguments against Aquinas. They think that Aquinas held that saving faith comes from adding data from special revelation to what reason can find on its own, and that Aquinas’s analogies use merely human concepts to interpret and replace biblical concepts. But Aquinas, who was writing when there was widespread acceptance of the Bible as the Word of God and when the capabilities of reason were debated by thinkers who assumed near-universal acceptance of the gospel, was discussing in his Five Ways not what naked reason could do to prove God to unbelievers but how reason could show to believers that faith is reasonable.

So it is not true that Aquinas thought saving faith relies on reason, even if, as he did teach, that reason could give believers “preambles” to saving faith. Saving faith, he wrote in his Summa Theologica, is not one of the intellectual virtues but one of the theological virtues, which are “above man’s nature” and from outside us.[10] Faith “has as its cause God, moving us inwardly through grace” (ST 2.2. Q6.a.1). Faith comes by revelation or preaching: “Because those things which are of faith surpass human reason, hence they do not come to man’s knowledge, unless God reveals them. To some, indeed, they are revealed by God immediately, as those things which were revealed to the apostles and prophets, while to some they are proposed by God in sending preachers of the faith, according to Romans 10:15, ‘How shall they preach, unless they be sent?’ ” (ST 2.2.Q6.1).

The word “preambles” has led Protestant observers astray from almost the beginning. They have assumed epistemological necessity, that one cannot believe unless reason has demonstrated basics, such as that God exists. But these basic truths are theological not epistemological preambles—preambles only in the sense that in any ordering of Christian thinking the believer must start with these and go on from there. Aquinas “holds ‘God exists’ to be a fundamental article for faith, to be, in other words, basic in the noetic structure of faith: one must either believe or know it so that one can order everything else that is believed in relation to it. For instance, it is quite obvious that one must believe that God exists if one believes that he is the rewarder of those who seek him.”[11]

Therefore when a person comes to God for the first time, according to Aquinas, it is entirely by grace and not by any preparation made by that person (contrary to later scholastics who famously argued that God waits for the person seeking grace to first facere quod in se est, “do what lies in themselves”): “Whilst we are being justified we consent to God’s justification by a movement of our free-will. Nevertheless this movement is not the cause of grace, but the effect; hence the whole operation pertains to grace” (ST 2.1.Q 111).

If we speak of grace as it signifies a help from God to move us to good, no preparation is required on man’s part, that, as it were, anticipates the Divine help, but rather, every preparation in man must be by the help of God moving the soul to good. And thus even the good movement of the free-will, whereby anyone is prepared for receiving the gift of grace is an act of the free-will moved by God. And thus man is said to prepare himself, according to Proverbs 16:1: “It is the part of man to prepare the soul”; yet it is principally from God, Who moves the free-will. Hence it is said that man’s will is prepared by God, and that man’s steps are guided by God (ST 2.1Q 112).

When it was asked if grace comes necessarily to someone who “does what he can”—as Biel and Ockham later taught—Aquinas denied it: “Man is compared to God as clay to the potter, according to Jeremiah 18:6: ‘As clay is in the hand of the potter, so are you in My hand.’ But however much the clay is prepared, it does not necessarily receive its shape from the potter. Hence, however much a man prepares himself, he does not necessarily receive grace from God” (ST 2.1.Q112.a3). And no man can merit the first grace (ST 2.1.Q114.a5).

It is true that Aquinas said that all analogies used by humans, even those used by the human authors of Scripture, derive their initial sense from ordinary human use: “[A]s to the names applied to God—viz. the perfections which they signify, such as goodness, life and the like, and their mode of signification. As regards what is signified by these names, they belong properly to God, and more properly than they belong to creatures, and are applied primarily to Him. But as regards their mode of signification, they do not properly and strictly apply to God; for their mode of signification applies to creatures” (ST 1.1.Q13.a.3).

But at the same time, Aquinas knew the noetic effects of sin and acknowledged the need for Scripture to correct faulty human conceptions: “For human reason is very deficient in things concerning God. A sign of this is that philosophers in their researches, by natural investigation, into human affairs, have fallen into many errors, and have disagreed among themselves. And consequently, in order that men might have knowledge of God, free of doubt and uncertainty, it was necessary for Divine matters to be delivered to them by way of faith, being told to them, as it were, by God Himself Who cannot lie” (ST 2.2.Q2.a.4); “[O]n the other hand, faith adheres to all the articles of faith by reason of one mean, viz. on account of the First Truth proposed to us in Scriptures, according to the teaching of the Church who has the right understanding of them. Hence whoever abandons this mean is altogether lacking in faith” (ST 2.2Q5.a.3). And finally,

Error arises, if, in matters of faith, reason has precedence of faith and not faith of reason, to the point that one would be willing to believe only what he could know by reason, when the converse ought to be the case: wherefore Hilary says, “While believing [in a spirit of faith], inquire, discuss, carry through your speculation. . . . By using [philosophical doctrines] in such manner as to include under the measure of philosophy truths of faith, as if one should be willing to believe nothing except what could be held by philosophic reasoning: when on the contrary, philosophy should be subject to the measure of faith, according to the saying of the Apostle, ‘Bringing into captivity every understanding unto the obedience of Christ.’ ”[12]

Van Til, a recent Reformed theologian, like many others, blamed Aquinas for assuming that reason was a neutral instrument untouched by sin, and therefore dismissed his doctrine of analogy. Yet Van Til’s acceptance of analogy as a principle of thinking for both unregenerate and regenerate alike was remarkably similar to that of Aquinas:

Christ was the Logos of creation as well as the Logos of redemption. The things of nature were adapted by him to the things of the Spirit. The lower was made for the higher. And because all things are made by God, that is, through the eternal Logos of creation, we too can use symbolism and analogy and know that, though we must always look for the tertium comparationis (the third element, the point of comparison, which explains the relation of the symbol to reality) in all symbolism, nevertheless it is at bottom true. . . . If we start, as Calvin started, by thinking of the mind of man and its a priori laws as created and controlled by God, then the facts of ‘nature’ have intelligence written in them.[13]

In Thomistic theology this is known as the analogy of being, which, in short, asserts that in the creation humans can see signposts of the Creator, earmarks left by the Designer. We can use our unaided reason to study these signposts and earmarks, and we can conclude from them that they point to an intelligent designer—indeed, a creator.

For Barth, however, this approach to the creation was exactly the one used by the new generation of German theologians who were supporting the religion of “blood and soil” suggested by Adolf Hitler. Hitler gave hope to a generation of Germans who felt inferior after the Versailles Treaty had left them penniless because of its draconian reparations. Hitler told them they were not inferior but superior, and his rearmament of Germany was giving them jobs. Now they could put food on the table, and with self-respect. He told them he read the Bible every day, was protecting them from godless communism, and that God raises up leaders who enable a people to find their God-given strength and destiny.

For Barth, this was the handwriting on the wall. This showed why the analogy of being was damnable, from the infernal pit, in fact “the invention of Anti-Christ.”[14] It claimed to find God in the creation and in a particular people. It made the human being its own creator and redeemer.

We can understand, in hindsight, why Barth connected Aquinas’s analogy of being to the Nazi blut und boden. But that same hindsight reveals that Barth overreached. As Hans Urs von Balthasar argued in his seminal study of Barth’s theology, Barth had attacked a straw man. The analogy of being that Barth condemned was not the one taught by Thomas Aquinas. Barth had claimed that for Aquinas nature was able in its purity, apart from grace, to see the meaning of reality. It was not only able to see but then also to contribute to its salvation. Aquinas, however, never taught such a “pure nature” that could of its own being, apart from regeneration, see the meaning of nature and the identity of the true God. Aquinas always insisted that nature required grace to find itself and that only the historical event of Christ’s life and death and resurrection saves a fallen nature. As Balthasar put it, Aquinas wrote that the Word did not come to all of nature but to his own (John 1:11), and that that part of his own who received him had been prepared by grace. They were born not of blood or the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God (v. 12).[15]

Therefore the analogy of being, which depends on grace to see and grace to be redeemed, teaches that being is indeed “epiphanic.” All of nature is created with the capacity to “show” the grace that birthed it and lies beyond it. For example, all genuine love surrenders to the other, and it points to the surrender of each divine Person to the Trinity’s plans for creation and redemption. All of the fallen creation goes through death in order to make way for new life, just as death to sin is necessary for the resurrection of new life in redemption and sanctification. In these two ways, and millions of others, the creation shows that God is the fulfillment of the world’s being.[16] But only eyes that have been opened by the Holy Spirit can see this. This is where the true analogy of being is different from its counterfeit in deism and liberal theology.

But Barth was never able to see this distinction, or to separate analogia entis from general revelation in any clear way. For him, the two were of a piece. Claims for both assumed “an inborn or acquired property of man” rather than the result of an act of God, or that man “has created his own faith,” which we “acquire on our own,” or involve “an abstract metaphysics of God, the world, or religion which is supposed to obtain at all times and in all places.”[17]

He insisted in Church Dogmatics 2.1 that Romans 1:18–20 “is not speaking of man in the cosmos in himself and in general.” Paul referred not to some knowledge of God possible apart from knowledge of Jesus Christ, but only “the truth of revelation proclaimed by the apostle of Jesus Christ.” “It is impossible to draw from the text a statement . . . concerning a natural union with God or knowledge of God on the part of man in himself and as such” (CD 2.1, 119, 121).

In discussing Romans 1 and Paul’s Mars Hill sermon in Acts 17, Barth denied any natural analogy between the creation and its creator (analogia entis) and any revelation available to all apart from the revelation of Jesus Christ, hence general revelation (CD 2.1, 117–23). The rejection of the analogy and of general revelation went together.

What about Barth’s appeal later in his career to “little lights” and “parables of the Kingdom”? Did those discussions represent a change of mind on general revelation? Apparently not. Barth argued that the occurrence of such parables was not to be ascribed to “the sorry hypothesis” of natural theology. As George Hunsinger explains, Barth could not accept any true apprehension of God without personal conversion.[18] The notion that there could be objective revelation that was there even if a person could not apprehend it—this was impossible for Barth to accept.

James Barr agrees that there was no change in the later Barth. “There was no talk of a revision, still less of an abandonment, of the violent earlier attacks on natural theology. . . . Since this is so, we are justified in taking the position of complete denial of natural theology, Barth’s position in his Gifford Lectures, in his controversy with Brunner, and in the earlier volumes of the Church Dogmatics, as the classic Barthian position.”[19]

The great Lutheran theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg studied under Barth and saw this problem in Barth’s theology. Pannenberg observed that Barth could not distinguish between natural knowledge of God and a natural theology constructed by autonomous man. As a result, according to Pannenberg, Barth created a false dichotomy—either Enlightenment-style natural theology that thinks natural revelation is enough for saving knowledge of God or no general revelation at all. Either knowledge of God apart from knowledge of Christ was something independently possessed by a human being for personal use, or there was no knowledge of God at all apart from revelation of the gospel.[20]

The great Dutch Reformed theologian G. C. Berkouwer joined Pannenberg in criticizing Barth for failing to distinguish between the natural theology of the Enlightenment and explicitly Christian natural theology based on general revelation. More recently, Alister McGrath has added a similar critique, along with a new call for revival of properly Christian natural theology.[21]

Barth misinterpreted the classic texts, not only Acts 17 but also Psalm 19 and Romans 1. On Psalm 19, he pointed to verse 3, “their voice is not heard,” and argued that the voices of creation are dumb, mute. After all, he wrote, the Old Testament shows that no one outside of Israel knew the true God. On Romans 1, Barth argued, following Luther, that all the so-called revelation of God to man through nature results only in condemnation. Therefore, Barth reasoned, since the testimonies of God in nature are invariably misunderstood, they are not revelation at all. They falsify rather than illumine. The only true knowledge we have of God is in the face of Jesus Christ. By implication, all the supposed types that observers say they find in nature and history and that point to the true God are counterfeit, pointing instead to things other than the true God, merely imagined in likeness to the observers. In a word, they are idols. The search for types is a wild goose chase, with a pagan god at its end.

Barth was practicing eisegesis rather than exegesis. He was reading into rather than out of the text. When the psalmist said the voices of the creation are “not heard,” he probably meant that their voice is not understood rather than that it is not sounded. For he went on to say that these voices “go out through all the earth” and reach to “the end of the world.” The point seems to be that their voices are sounded to all the world, not just Israel. Something is being proclaimed to the world outside of Israel, even if it is not always understood or received.

In Romans Paul said the same thing. In seven different ways he claimed that God makes himself known to what seems to be every human heart, on which he has written his law (2:15). That is the first way. In Romans 1, Paul claimed, “For what can be known [γνωστὸν] about God [that’s the second] is plain [φανερόν] to them [the third], because God has shown [ἐφανέρωσεν] it to them [fourth]. Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood [fifth] and seen [νοούμενα καθορᾶται] [sixth] through the things he has made. So they are without excuse; for though they knew [γνόντες] [seventh] God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him” (Rom 1:19–21a).

Barth is right that Paul suggested that this general revelation simply leads to condemnation. After all, Paul said that these same human beings “exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (1:25). But we must remember three things. First, Paul was speaking of the universal tendency of every human being to turn away from God to self and the world. This was true of every believer before the grace of God turned him to God. It speaks of the Fall, not redemption from the Fall. It speaks of the tendency to misread the signs in creation, not the legitimacy of the signs themselves. Just because our sinful tendency before redemption is to misread creation, this does not mean that once redeemed we cannot learn to read properly.

Second, Paul repeatedly declared that the message comes through loud and clear that there is a Creator who is divine and eternally powerful. Third, Scripture suggests that some fallen creatures can see something in the signs to encourage a search for the true sign-maker. This same Paul told the Athenians on Mars Hill that God “allotted the times of [human beings’] existence and the boundaries of their places where they should live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him” (Acts 17:26–27).

So Psalm 19 and Romans 1 teach that there is natural revelation from God. God speaks through nature of his existence and power and deity. Most use this revelation most of the time for idolatrous purposes, but it is revelation nonetheless. Scripture suggests that some unbelievers might use this natural revelation as an incentive to search for the true God. This search, if it is successful, always leads to the Trinitarian God of Scripture and is always both inspired and led by the Holy Spirit. Human nature by itself is powerless to see the meaning of the signs or to follow them to the true God. But God uses his signs to open eyes to his glory in the creation.

What can we say about Barth, then? He rightly warned of our temptation to confuse culture with Christ and disastrously so. But his rejection of Scripture’s testimony to natural revelation was “more the result of an a priori view of revelation than an unprejudiced reading of the text itself.”[22] So Barth departed from a majority view of the Great Tradition, that while there is no saving knowledge of God in nature, there is nevertheless true knowledge available to the unregenerate, and that the regenerate have available to them a near-infinite panoply of revelations in man and the world testifying to the truths of redemption by the Triune God. So Barth departed from Basil, Gregory Nazianzus, Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, and Edwards on this, and even from many of the Lutheran and Reformed scholastics.

Lecture 3 will explore divine types in nature. There is strong Scriptural testimony to this—far more than many Christians have imagined—and there are some surprising examples outside of Scripture.

Notes

1. “Heidelberg Disputation,” in Luther’s Works (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1957), 31:52. The last part of this translation of his statement is curious. “Quae facta sunt” is translated as historical events (“things which have actually happened”) rather than things of nature (“things which have been made”). The latter translation is probably more accurate, and certainly closer to the Greek that lies behind the Latin. Perhaps this played a role in the way twentieth-century Lutherans have regarded this critical Pauline passage and natural revelation
2. Helpful in understanding Luther’s hypothetical monk is Carl Beckwith’s superb recounting of the medieval and Reformation debates about faith and reason in The Holy Trinity (Fort Wayne, IN: Luther Academy, 2016), 1–112. For the monk, see 75.
3. Luther’s Works (St. Louis: Concordia, 1955), 12:140. This American edition will be referred to as AE.
4. Ibid.
5. Beckwith, The Holy Trinity, 74–80.
6. Roland Ziegler, “Natural Knowledge of God and the Trinity,” quoted in Beckwith, The Holy Trinity, 27, italics added.
7. August Graebner, “Doctrinal Theology,” in Beckwith, The Holy Trinity, 27.
8. Beckwith, The Holy Trinity, 87, italics added.
9. Luther, “Lectures on Hebrews, 1517–18, ” in AE 29:111; quoted in Beckwith, 64. For the “left handed and partial knowledge,” see AE 22:152–53. On natural revelation having to die, AE 22:158.
10. ST 1.2.Q62.a.2; 1.2.Q63.a.1; the translation is that of the Dominican Fathers, Summa Theologica, 5 vols., rev. ed. 1920 (Notre Dame: Christian Classics, 1981).
11. Arvin Vos, Aquinas, Calvin, and Contemporary Protestant Thought (Grand Rapids: Christian College Consortium and Eerdmans, 1985), 83.
12. De Trinitate, trans. Rose Emanuella Brennan (St. Louis: Herder, 1946), 2, 1 obj. 1, resp.; 2, 3; cited in Vos, Aquinas, Calvin, and Contemporary Protestant Thought, 73–74.
13. Cornelius Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2007), 124–25. For his insistence that the unregenerate could use analogy to discover not merely the existence but also many attributes of the true God, see also 138–47, 156–70.
14. Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 214–15.
15. John Webster, “Balthasar and Karl Barth,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar, ed. Edwards T. Oakes and David Moss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 249–50; Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth (in German, 1951; English, San Francisco: Ignatius, 1991).
16. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Epilogue, trans. Edward T. Oakes (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2004), 59, 109; Balthasar, The Grain of Wheat: Aphorisms, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1995), 31; Balthasar, “The Fathers, the Scholastics, and Ourselves,” Communio 24 (Summer 1997 [orig. 1939]): 391.
17. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics [CD] 1.1 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2010), 245, 329, 389, 325.
18. CD 4.3.1, 117; George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 275.
19. James Barr, Biblical Faith and Natural Theology (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 13–14.
20. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 1:73–118.
21. G. C. Berkouwer, General Revelation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), 154; Alister McGrath, The Open Secret: A New Vision for Natural Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008).
22. Berkouwer, General Revelation, 154.