Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 02:2 (Fall 2020)
Article: Karl Barth, Natural Revelation, And Its Implications For Ethics
Author: Stephen J. Wellum

Eikon 2.2 (Fall 2020) p. 128

Karl Barth, Natural Revelation, And Its Implications For Ethics

Stephen J. Wellum

Stephen J. Wellum serves as Professor of Christian Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

Historically, natural or general revelation has played an important role in Christian theology and the grounding of a normative ethic. For example, appeal has been made to God’s creation order to warrant such important “natural law” truths as the sanctity of human life and the normativity of heterosexual, monogamous marriage. Although in the best of theology, natural revelation, and its corollary natural laws drawn from creation order, was never viewed as completely independent of special revelation, it has played a significant role in establishing the moral content that all people know and have access to. Thus, appeal to natural revelation is important on a number of fronts, especially the doing of Christian ethics, a point I will return to below.

However, for a number of reasons, the role that natural revelation has served in theology, especially in ethics, has come under severe criticism. Since the Enlightenment our age has grown more secular as it has experienced various worldview shifts away from historic Christian theology and morphed from views associated with modernism and now postmodernism.1 In these shifts away from theology, there has been a corresponding loss of the epistemological warrant for a normative ethic. Much of these shifts are also linked to the embrace of an evolutionary view of origins, which has directly undercut the ground for universal moral norms.

In theology, there have also been shifts away from historic Christianity and the place natural law has served in theology and ethics. Specifically, Karl Barth’s influence has been strong.2 For a variety of reasons, Barth introduced skepticism regarding the ability of humans to know God from nature and through natural means. Barth famously affirmed a strong,

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“Nien!” to natural theology, and he argued that humans have no inherent or “natural” capacity to know God apart from God’s free and gracious decision to reveal himself to us in Christ. As such, Barth denied that humans, especially fallen humans, have any direct epistemic access to God and universal laws of morality by our observation of the world. As people have accepted Barth’s view, appeal to natural revelation and natural law to establish a normative ethic has fallen by the wayside.

In this article, I reflect on Barth’s rejection of natural revelation in three steps. First, I describe why he rejected nat...