Neo-Orthodoxy

In 1934 Emil Brunner, a theologian who had stood with Karl Barth against liberal Protestantism through the 1920s, published an essay arguing that some point of contact must exist within natural human capacity, reason, conscience or the structure of human existence itself, for God's revelation to be received at all; without it, Brunner asked, how could a person even recognize revelation as addressed to them. Barth's answer, published the same year under the single word "Nein!", German for "No!", was total. Any natural point of contact, Barth argued, however modest, smuggles back in exactly what neo-orthodoxy existed to rule out, a human capacity that revelation merely completes rather than one that revelation alone creates from nothing, since fallen human nature has no standing capacity of its own to reach toward God.

The exchange was not a minor academic disagreement between allies. It marked a real division within the movement over how absolute the break with natural theology had to be, and it arrived in the same year Barth co-authored the Barmen Declaration, rejecting the German Christian movement's attempt to read National Socialist ideology as a second source of revelation alongside scripture. The two acts shared a single conviction: that granting any independent standing to natural human insight or ideology, however plausible or however patriotic, opened a door revelation alone should occupy, and once opened, a door could be walked through toward political catastrophe as readily as toward false theology.

Karl Barth had trained under the leading liberal Protestant theologians of his day and, by his own later account, lost confidence in their whole approach almost overnight when, in August 1914, nearly all his former teachers signed a public declaration supporting the Kaiser's war policy. For Barth this was not a political disagreement but a theological verdict: a theology that had taught him to locate God's revelation in the depths of human religious experience and cultural achievement had produced, at the moment of real testing, an unhesitating blessing on nationalist war-making. If that was where nineteenth-century liberal theology's confidence in human experience led, the confidence itself, Barth concluded, had to be wrong at the root.

His 1919 commentary on Romans and the Church Dogmatics that followed it built the alternative from that diagnosis: God is not to be found by looking more deeply into human culture, conscience or religious feeling, however sincere, but only where God has chosen to be found, in Jesus Christ as attested by scripture, address to humanity from wholly outside humanity's own resources. Neo-orthodoxy's name records that stance as a return, not an innovation, a claim to recover the Reformation's own sense that revelation comes as address rather than discovery; its later name, dialectical theology, records the same claim from the other side, the irreducible gap, or dialectic, between the God who speaks and the humanity that can only listen.