Sunday, March 28, 2004
(12:58 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Natural Theology Today
In Church Dogmatics II/1, Karl Barth includes a commentary on the Barmen Confession, the official theological declaration of the Confessing Church in Germany in 1934:
This text is important and apposite because it represents the first confessional document in which the Evangelical Church has tacked the problem of natural theology. The theology as well as the confessional writings of the Reformation left the question open, and it has actually become acute only in recent centuries because natural theology has threatened to turn from a latent into an increasingly manifest standard and content of Church proclamation and theology. The question became a burning one at the moment when the Evangelical [Protestant] Church in Germany was unambiguously and consistently confronted by a definite and new form of natural theology, namely , by the demand to recognize in the political events of the year 1933, and especially in the form of the God-sent Adolf Hitler, a source of specific new revelation of God, which, demanding obedience and trust, took its place beside the revelation attested in Holy Scripture, claiming that it should be acknowledged by Christian proclamation and theology as equally binding and obligatory. When this demand was made, and a certain audience was given to it, there began, as is well known, the so-called German Church conflict. It has since become clear that behind this first demand stood quite another. According to the dynamic of the political movement, what was already intended, although only obscurely outlined, in 1933 was the proclamation of this new revelation as the only revelation, and therefore the transformation of the Christian Church into the temple of the German nature- and history-myth.
The same had already been the case in the developments of the preceding centuries. There can be no doubt that not merely a part but the whole had been intended and claimed when it had been demanded that side by side with its attestation in Jesus Christ and therefore in Holy Scripture the Church should also recognize and proclaim God's revelation in reason, in conscience, in the emotions, in history, in nature, and in culture and its achievements and developments. The history of the proclamation and theology of these centuries is simply a history of the wearisome conflict of the Church with the fact that the "also" demanded and to some extent acknowledged by it really meant an "only."
Barth claims that this conflict was wearisome because no one really wanted to carry natural theology to its logical conclusion and because everyone wanted to remain faithful to Scripture in some sense. The whole thing seemed rather innocuous, and "The resistance occasionaly offered to it necessarily came under suspicin as fanatical one-sidedness and exaggeration." It took a really extreme example of natural theology, namely the "theology" of National Socialism (which really did appeal to some Christians, including some who were closely associated with Barth), to show the true danger of natural theology. But is not Barth being somewhat one-sided and exaggerated here? Is every natural theology really of a piece with the Nazi theology that was developed with the explicit goal of undoing Christianity, rather than of expanding and rendering more comprehensible Christian proclamation?
I would argue, good Barthian that I am, that Nazism is quantitatively, but not qualitatively worse and more dangerous than every other natural theology that has been presented throughout history. Indeed, since it is a theology that is necessarily and plainly rooted in a specific period, it may in the long run turn out to be less dangerous than other possible natural theologies, in that it cannot, by nature, appeal to every person in the world. The most dangerous natural theologies might be those that arose explicitly within the church in specific times and places to deal with specific crises -- namely what could be termed "family values" theology and patriotic theology. (For a good reference of what a combination of both of those might look like, check here.)
Such theologies may have served the church well in the periods for which they were developed. Family values theology in particular helped the church to weather a storm of monastic extremism, in which some declared that Christ demands us never to have sex at all -- many people found this view convincing, so that the only way to preserve any sex at all was to point out the "necessary evil" of sex within marriage as a way of producing more people. Though this argument was basically a strategic compromise, it resonated well with certain passages from Plato and from Philo of Alexandria, which argued that it was an obvious fact of nature that all sex should be for procreation -- and since the Christian God was declared to be the creator of all nature, this Platonic idea was in some sense a "revelation" of God. Never mind that neither the Hebrew Scriptures (especially, ironically enough, the book of Leviticus!) nor the Apostle Paul give any indication that they think that sex is only for procreation. It was enough that certain scriptural passages lent themselves more or less easily to Plato-oriented readings in order to show that this natural theology, based on obvious facts of nature, an obvious interpretation of "what God intended," was broadly Christian and to be protected and promoted as such.
A strategic compromise, fraught with dangers and contradictions, changed into a matter of principle -- and as long as society as a whole continued to operate under the basic framework of the obvious interpretation of "what God intended," the Christian teaching on this matter remained a fairly innocuous item. In modern times, however, with the advent of contraception and an explosion of overt diversity in sexual lifestyles and practices, Christian teaching on this matter became less than completely innocuous. Leaving aside the question of whether particular lifestyles and practices may be compatible with God's revelation in Christ, it has become clear that Christian adherence to family values theology is threatening in some circles to replace the "also" with the "only." We have stories from across the theological spectrum showing that in some Christian circles, including in Vatican, adherence to the family values theology of appropriate gender roles is finally a more decisive litmus test for adherence to the Christian gospel than any other point -- and this is also increasingly true among certain broad swaths of the laity in American Evangelical churches.
Similarly, Christian theories of state were developed in response to the development of the modern nation-state, in a desire to guarantee the safety, first of the Reformation churches, then eventually of the Catholic Church as well. This may well have saved the Western world from further civil wars based on religion, and saved the church from destruction. In addition, separation of church and state has often given the church considerable freedom to assume a stance of productive critique -- but once this particular arrangement was made into a point of principle, such that the state handled people's bodies while the church handled their souls (see William Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist), then once more the possibility presented itself that the "also" of this obvious interpretation of what God intended when he gave us the social institution called the state might become an "only," such that adherence to a certain nationalist view might become the final litmus test of Christianity. And indeed, just as with the family values theology, certain texts in Scripture lend themselves notoriously easily to this reading, but then, natural theology is never an attempt to interpret Scripture in good faith, but rather to hijack Scripture for its own ends -- and so, ultimately, to hijack the church for its own ends.
Barth's rejection of natural theology is not simply a narrow partisanship, not a blindness to the truths that may be encountered outside the Bible, not an attempt to forbid Christians to interact with any other kind of thought. Rather, it is a deeply political attempt to make sure that any strategic decisions of the church to seek temporary peace with certain ideas and structures originating outside of it do not become principles that ultimately subvert the gospel -- by which he does not mean a certain style of preaching or the preservation of an ancient book, but instead a life that visibly displays a radical belief and trust that the life of Jesus Christ is where God has revealed himself and that concrete participation in that life, allowing oneself to be made a parable of the kingdom that that life announces and inaugurates, is participation in God's truth and God's saving work. Insofar as Christians' actions and proclamation illustrate that they believe in a concrete revelation of God occurring anywhere else than in Jesus Christ, whether it be Adolf Hitler or something more innocuous such as the worldwide mission of spreading democratic, free-market principles or a particular vision of the family structure that best corresponds to God's intentions at creation, they are objectively idolaters.
