"Natural Theology": The Term Barmen's First Thesis Was Built to Reject

The First Thesis of the Barmen Declaration makes a claim that can sound, on first reading, almost too obvious to need stating: "Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear." Its second half, however, does real and pointed theological work: it explicitly rejects "the false doctrine" that the church could recognize "other events and powers, figures and truths, as God's revelation" alongside and independent of Jesus Christ. Understanding what this rejects requires understanding the theological concept behind it: natural theology.

What Natural Theology Traditionally Means

Natural theology, in its broadest and most historically uncontroversial sense, refers to what can be known about God through reason and observation of the created world apart from special revelation in Scripture — the kind of general revelation the Belgic Confession's own "two books" image describes, in which creation itself testifies to God's power and wisdom. In this traditional sense, natural theology has a long and largely uncontested place in Christian thought, including in the Reformed tradition Barmen's own authors, in several cases, otherwise stood within.

What Barmen's First Thesis Was Actually Targeting

Barmen's rejection was not aimed at this traditional, modest natural theology. It was aimed at something considerably more dangerous unfolding in real time within the German church of the early 1930s: the "German Christian" movement's willingness to treat contemporary historical and political events — specifically, the rise of German nationalism, the figure of Adolf Hitler, and the ideology of the National Socialist movement — as themselves a form of divine revelation, a fresh word from God alongside, and in practice frequently superseding, Scripture's own testimony to Christ.

This was natural theology pushed to an extreme its traditional defenders had never intended: not merely observing that creation testifies generally to God's existence and character, but claiming that a specific contemporary political and racial movement constituted an additional, authoritative channel of divine revelation, on par with or even displacing Scripture's testimony to Jesus Christ as God's definitive Word.

Karl Barth's Theological Concern

Karl Barth, the primary theological architect behind Barmen's First Thesis, had already been engaged for several years in a significant theological dispute with fellow Reformed theologian Emil Brunner over the proper scope and danger of natural theology more broadly, arguing that any theological method granting independent authority to sources of knowledge about God outside Christ and Scripture created an opening that dangerous ideologies could, and eventually would, exploit. The rise of the German Christian movement's explicit theological claims about Hitler and German nationalism as bearers of divine revelation gave Barth's warnings a concrete, urgent political application his earlier academic dispute with Brunner had lacked.

Why the Precise Rejection Mattered

This is why Barmen's First Thesis is worded with such careful precision: it is not a blanket rejection of all natural knowledge of God, which would have placed it outside the mainstream of the very Reformed and Lutheran traditions its authors represented. It is a specific rejection of granting independent revelatory authority to any source — including, most urgently, contemporary political events and ideological movements — that could compete with or supplement Scripture's singular testimony to Jesus Christ as the one Word of God the church must hear and obey.

A Term Worth Understanding Precisely

Getting this distinction right matters for understanding Barmen's actual theological claim, which was narrower and more carefully targeted than a casual reading might suggest — the same kind of precise, technical theological work that characterizes another carefully coined technical term from this same modern confessional era, coined to meet an equally specific and equally urgent set of circumstances its authors judged required nothing less than complete doctrinal clarity.

Continue exploring: the same modern era's own distinctive doctrinal contribution, Wesley's Christian perfection and the Lausanne Covenant's term, unreached people groups.