LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 2016, Page 155

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IV. THEOLOGICAL DOCUMENTS­­—COMMISSION ON THEOLOGY AND CHURCH RELATIONS

“Doctrines of the Gospel, if it be the Word of God, cannot be so.”60 Similarly,
Matthew Tindal (1657–1733) rejected the content of any revelation “that will
not suffer us to judge its Dictates by our Reason,” and so concluded that true
Christianity must be merely “a Republication, or Restoration of the Religion of
Nature.”61 One of the most concise summaries of the contents of this religion
of nature, or natural religion, is found in the autobiography of America’s most
famous Deist, Benjamin Franklin:
I never was without some religious principles. I never doubted, for instance, the existence of the Deity; that he made the
world, and govern’d it by his Providence; that the most acceptable service of God was the doing good to man; that our souls are
immortal; and that all crime will be punished, and virtue rewarded, either here or hereafter. These I esteem’d the essentials of
every religion.62
These were deemed by Deists to be the “essentials of every religion” precisely because they summarized that knowledge of God which man might
acquire naturally and without any aid of special revelation.
In significant respects, however, the Enlightenment project with regard
to natural revelation, natural knowledge, and natural theology does not
“develop” the conclusions of the orthodox dogmaticians, but those of their
opponents Flacius and Sozzini. Illustrative of this is the thought of John Locke
(1632–1704), as formulated in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, one
of the foundational texts of Enlightenment empiricism. Though for reasons
other than those of Flacius, Locke too would reject the belief that man possesses an innate knowledge of God. Indeed, in Locke’s influential view, man
possesses no innate knowledge at all; in his own famous formulation, the
human mind, before acquiring knowledge by means of sensory experience
is, “as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas.” 63 In
contrast to the nearly unanimous teaching of the Lutheran theologians—that
man can not only acquire some knowledge of God via the evidence of God’s
self-revelation in nature, but that he also possesses an innate knowledge of
God—Locke’s philosophy would allow only the former. The implication of
this rejection of innate knowledge, inherited and affirmed by Locke’s empiricist successors, was to limit the question of man’s natural knowledge to that
60

Toland, Christianity Not Mysterious, in Documents of the Christian Church, 346.

61
Matthew Tindal, Christianity as Old as the Creation, or the Gospel a Republication of the Religion
of Nature (1730), in Documents of the Christian Church, 345, 346.
62
Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, ed. H.S. Commager (New York:
Modern Library, 1950), 91, with the same points reiterated again at 106–7. Franklin’s summary
echoes more or less exactly the “common notions concerning religion” delineated by Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648), often described as the father of English Deism. For Herbert’s
original formulation, see his De veritate (London, 1633), 210–19.
63
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. A.C. Fraser, 2 vols (New York:
Dover, 1959), 1:121. In the same section he further clarifies that sensory experience is that upon
which “all our knowledge is founded” (1:122).

which might be acquired by sensory experience. And while Locke himself did
not deny the possibility of such an acquired knowledge, his more influential
later disciples would, thus ultimately echoing the conclusions not only of
Flacius but also of Sozzini (though, again, for different reasons).
These further conclusions become most evident in the thought of Scottish
philosopher David Hume (1711–1776), whose “criticisms of natural theology
are by far the most substantial in the English language and have been equaled
in importance, if at all, only by those of [Immanuel] Kant.”64 Though Hume’s
various objections to the enterprise of natural theology and the possibility of
a naturally acquired knowledge of God need not here be specifically detailed, they largely reduce to the argument that there is insufficient warrant for
believing that the “effects” in and of the natural world require a supernatural
or divine “cause,” let alone one that bears any resemblance to the deity posited
by classical theism.65 Thus he concludes bluntly that any inferences from the
evidence of nature to the existence of God are “uncertain and useless.”66 In this
conclusion Hume is later echoed by the equally influential German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who similarly asserted that “all attempts of
a merely speculative use of reason in regard to theology are entirely fruitless,”
and that “the principles of reason’s natural use do not lead at all to theology.”67
His rationale for so concluding likewise parallels that of Hume. Positing an
impenetrable barrier between the worlds of phenomena (the natural world
accessible to the senses) and noumena (transcendent realities which may exist
beyond man’s mental categories of space and time), Kant also restricts man’s
natural knowledge to knowledge of phenomena.68
In summary, then, while not ignoring the fact that some Enlightenment
thinkers would embrace but distort the Christian affirmation of a natural
knowledge of God—replacing the confession that such knowledge is true yet
insufficient with the assertion that such knowledge is not only sufficient but is
the only true knowledge of God—some of the most influential representatives
of Enlightenment thought, rather than “developing” the natural theology of
the dogmaticians, flatly rejected it. More pointedly, though, in denying both an
innate knowledge of God as well as any possibility of an acquired knowledge
of him, they denied what appears to be the clear teaching of Scripture itself.
64
Terrence Pendlhum, “Hume’s Criticisms of Natural Theology,” in In Defense of Natural Theology: A Post-Humean Assessment, ed. James F. Sennett and Douglas Groothuis (Downers Grove:
InterVarsity Press, 2005), 40. See also James F. Sennett and Douglas Groothuis, “Hume’s Legacy
and Natural Theology,” in the same volume (pp. 11–12) who rightly note that modern philosophical critiques of natural theology virtually all echo Hume.
65
The substance of Hume’s various objections are to be found in sections X and XI of An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, and throughout his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.
66
David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. C.W. Hendel (New York:
Liberal Arts Press, 1955), 151.
67
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 586.
68

See, e.g., Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 338–65.

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Nor were they unaware of this fact. The manner in which both Hume and Kant
attempted to mute the implications of their conclusions is therefore revealing.
Each explicitly frames what might otherwise appear to be a clear denial of
long-held tenets of Christianity as, to the contrary, a defense of Christianity.
Hume, for example, notes that he is especially “pleased with the method of
reasoning here delivered, as I think it may serve to confound those dangerous
friends or disguised enemies to the Christian religion who have undertaken to
defend it by the principles of human reason.” His rationale for thus thinking,
he explains, is that “[o]ur most holy religion is founded on faith, not on reason;
and it is a sure method of exposing it to put it to such a trial as it is by no means
fitted to endure.”69 Though there is little doubt that Hume’s pious claim to be
defending the priority of faith over reason is disingenuous and self-serving, it
is precisely the same claim forwarded also by Kant, who claimed that he “had
to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.”70

because this view of natural theology ignores the truth that the
only possible access to God is faith.73

By framing their rejections of the natural knowledge of God as defenses
of faith, both Hume and Kant made their conclusions attractive even to those
otherwise hostile to the Enlightenment’s often reductionist treatment of religious knowledge. Partially for this reason, the church’s long consensus on
natural knowledge began to dissolve, resulting in the subject becoming “one
of the great crisis points of theological discussion” in the twentieth century.71
It is thus to the twentieth-century discussion that some attention is now given.

Much more influential in this regard, however, is the early twentiethcentury Reformed theologian who consciously developed his thought in
antithesis to the “liberal” theology culminating in figures such as Bultmann:
Karl Barth (1886–1968). Though championing a “neo-orthodoxy” in opposition to the liberalism of his European contemporaries, Barth was not only out
of step with the “old” orthodoxy; he was of one mind with many of his own
opponents on the question of natural knowledge, and ostensibly for the same
reasons. Not unlike Bultmann’s appeal to Luther, for example, Barth will claim
that “the Reformation and the teaching of the Reformation churches stand in
an antithesis to ‘Natural Theology’.”74
Critics of Barth’s position, though, have rightly noted problems with
such a claim. The first is simply that Barth himself was well aware that the
reformers in fact endorse a natural knowledge of God, and even a minimal
place for a natural theology; thus he can only appeal to “the principle of the
Reformation rather than to its execution, to a theoretical Reformation rather
than the one that actually took place, to what the Reformed Churches ought to
have done rather than to what they did in fact do.”75 As a result,
When Barth says, “[a]s a Reformed theologian I am subject to an
ordinance which would keep me away from ‘Natural Theology’
even if my personal opinions inclined me to it,” we must conclude that he speaks as a new brand of Reformed theologian.76

B. The “Reformed Objection”
Immediately noteworthy in many of the most prominent modern rejections of the natural knowledge of God are their echoes of Hume’s and Kant’s
claims to do so only in the interests of faith. Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976)
provides one example of this pitting of faith against knowledge in his famous
attempt to “demythologize” Christianity. In denying both natural and
supernatural (i.e., miraculous) evidence as revelation capable of providing
knowledge of God, Bultmann claims that he merely upholds Paul’s and
Luther’s confession of justification by faith alone. His program, he argues, is
nothing other than the “application of the doctrine of justification by faith to
the sphere of knowledge.”72 Thus he can also assert:
For Protestant theology, such a natural theology is impossible.
Not only, nor even primarily, because philosophical criticism has
shown the impossibility of giving a proof of God, but especially
69

Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 139–40; emphases in original.

70

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 117. Such pious sounding claims have sometimes prompted
the imputation of a distinctly Lutheran bent to Kant’s philosophy, as, e.g., in the claim that
“Kant began where Luther began,” and that “his conclusion in The Critique of Pure Reason (1781)
would seem to be pure Luther.” David M. Hockenbery, “Introduction,” in The Devil’s Whore:
Reason and Philosophy in the Lutheran Tradition, ed. Jennifer Hockenbery Dragseth (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 2011), 8.

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Moreover, even those speaking in defense of Barth on this point are
willing to acknowledge that it is not so much the reformers who stand behind
Barth’s position; instead, “Kant remains in the background.”77 Thus, even
in his treatment of Romans 1:20, the text most frequently cited in support of
man’s natural knowledge of God, Barth lays particular stress on God’s invisibility: “What is clearly seen to be indisputable reality is the invisibility of

73
Rudolf Bultmann, “The Problem of ‘Natural Theology’,” in Faith and Understanding: I, ed.
R.W. Funk, trans. L.P. Smith (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 313.
74
Karl Barth, The Knowledge of God and the Service of God according to the Teaching of the Reformation, trans. J.L.M. Haire and Ian Henderson (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938), 8.
75
Barr, Biblical Faith and Natural Theology, 8. Barth’s contemporary, the Lutheran theologian
Hermann Sasse, presses this point even further. Speaking of Barth’s rejection of natural theology, he observes that “neither Lutheran nor Reformed theology has been able to adopt it, and
this for the simple reason that the so-called Thomism, which the Reformers are supposed to
have retained, was already present in the New Testament.” Hermann Sasse, Here We Stand:
Nature and Character of the Lutheran Faith, trans. Theodore G. Tappert (Adelaide: Lutheran Publishing House, 1979), 166.
76

Michael Sudduth, The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology (Farney: Ashgate, 2009), 46.

71

Barr, Biblical Faith and Natural Theology, 6.

72

Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus Christ and Mythology (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), 84.

77
Stanley Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology
(Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2001), 144.

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