This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Emil Brunner argued in his 1934 essay Nature and Grace that a point of contact survives even in fallen human reason, a documented inbuilt capacity to be addressed by revelation once it comes, distinct from a claim that fallen reason can reach God unaided or generate revelation on its own. That position placed him alongside Karl Barth as one of the founding figures of the dialectical theology movement that became Neo-Orthodoxy, sharing Barth's insistence that revelation must come from God's own initiative while differing on whether anything in human nature was already prepared to receive it.
Barth answered that same year with an essay bluntly titled No!, a documented public rejection of any point of contact at all, a break severe enough that the two are recorded as having barely reconciled in later life despite decades of otherwise shared theological ground within the same movement. Brunner, a Swiss Reformed theologian teaching at Zurich, continued to defend the point of contact position afterward rather than withdrawing it under Barth's public rebuttal, and it remained the specific issue distinguishing his own Reformed theology from Barth's within Neo-Orthodoxy.
That two founding figures of the same theological movement, sharing its core insistence on revelation's divine initiative, could split so sharply over whether fallen human reason retained any capacity to be addressed by that revelation marks the Nature and Grace exchange as a documented case where a shared starting point produced one of Neo-Orthodoxy's most durable internal divisions.