that relationship. Any attempt to describe the world, and from that description to illuminate God, apart from or prior to the truth of God’s being in Christ, is a priori a deceptive task that gives rise to a deceiving fruit.
Not everyone who has objected to natural theology in our day on these grounds—not even, perhaps Barth himself, ultimately—would necessarily wish to undercut the possibility of knowing God through the world that God has made. But the construal of that world’s theologically descriptive capacity has been profoundly altered by the suspicion now almost universally cast upon natural theology’s modern argument with sacra doctrina. Stanley Hauerwas, while building on Barth’s classic articulation of that suspicion, has for instance, sought some kind of descriptively based theological indicator within the phenomenologically rooted “witness” of Christian service in the world. Such witness, he claims, through its very coherence with God’s will in Christ, attests to the “way things really are.” This is a kind of adjustment towards that which he has earlier precluded, as Hauerwas himself admits when he speaks, following Barth, of a “recovery of natural theology as a Christological theme.”12 But it may go further even than he realizes. For if Hauerwas is right, and proper Christian witness provides a rational response to, and language to talk about, God’s self-revelation, then it becomes possible to recover the value of much of the human-centered discussion that provided the modernist project that seemed to render purposefully inadequate the world’s indication of God: will not the Christian life, in its depth of integrity, finally permit coherence to emerge, however odd such coherence might seem to those whose eyes are still not used to the light?
The issue here has to do with the contours of the perceived world—both its own outlines, as it were (assuming they exist in and of themselves somehow), and the powers of perception belonging to those who apprehend it. Just as pertinently, then, there has been, in the wake of Barth’s writing in particular, a desire to grapple with the very character of creation in its intrinsic and intrinsically ordered relationship to God, just because of the Christian claim that any truly “natural theology,” in its original sense, must be bound up with the metaphysics of God’s own self-revealing. In other words, the “rupture” between nature and revelation that seems to have overwhelmed natural theology in the modern era is perhaps itself wrongheaded and in need of reconceiving.
Analogy as Imitation
Natural theology has had its own recent resurgence in some circles of religious philosophy. The apologetic motive, frankly, is still very much at one with the seventeenth century’s, although the field has changed dramatically in the combat, with Christian belief clearly requiring (and having expected of it within the academy) a set of less-assertive claims. And so the claims of atheism are now met, not by offering “proof” as much as by saying that such a demand and response is in fact inappropriate and unnecessary. On offer instead are the alternatives of a kind of rational probabilism. These are given in theistic terms or even as aspects of particular Christian beliefs, or of a certain presuppositional logic of individual and communal faith that need not so much rely on “proof” or “evidence” as on a certain coherent reasonableness that has its place within the pluralistic realm of rational human life as a whole. By and large, contemporary natural theologians tend to side-step basic questions of induction and deduction, and so avoid the attacks of a Humean kind or the skepticism of the anti-Kantians. But in so doing, they have still left open the possibility of a weaker kind of “induction,” more akin to a devotional practice, whereby the things of this world can contribute and play a part in one’s deepening apprehension of God, without however needing to play an essential or foundational role.13 Even here, though, questions arise and thrust us back to earlier arguments and worries.
One of the more contentious areas of natural theology among Christian theologians in the last fifty years has centered on the question of “analogy,” and in particular whether there is and how we are to understand any analogy of creation’s reality with its Creator, that is, with God. It should be said that the very notion of an analogy of creation is rooted in a Christian (or at least Judeo-Christian) metaphysic. Even to discuss it as a possible way of understanding the nature of the world—or “nature” itself—is, for many, to locate natural theology in a pre-modern framework. Barth’s early rejection of such talk of analogy (particularly the form used, he thought, by Roman Catholic theologians), and his continuing reluctance to use it himself in any form, has proven a major point of debate. How can the creature, in its intrinsic rebellion against God, in its infinite qualitative distance from God, and in its exclusively defined character in relation to the pure graciousness of God in Christ, ever be an indicator, apart from the latter, of God in terms that could be truthful?
But the very notion of an “analogy”—of metaphysical “being” or of form or of reality—between creature and Creator orients the discussion in a way that Barth was perhaps not as sensitive to and even as appreciative of as he ought to have been. Creature and Creator demand, in their very utterance and use as words and concepts, the application of presuppositions, at least, that assert fundamental relationships that are described only on the basis of “revelation.” Indeed, the words cannot be deployed even apart from some kind of grammar, even narrative grammar, that must appropriate particular claims, in the Christian case, of Scripture. Why then the worry over their secularly imported status?
And so Thomas Aquinas, who represents a classic (if diversely interpreted) exponent of the notion of analogy in this case, speaks of the relationship in terms given to him by the Scriptures themselves: “wisdom,” for instance. And this is the question: how shall we understand the use the Scripture itself makes of a term like “wise” as applied both to creature (for which we have some habitual conception) and Creator, whose “wisdom” must indeed seem incongruous in every way with the word’s cultural usage? Whatever similarities exist between human and divine “wisdom,” Thomas writes, it cannot be a similarity of identity that is being expressed linguistically: “it should be said that the Creator and the creature are reduced to one, not by community of univocation but by community of analogy.” There are different kinds of analogy, Thomas goes on to explain. For instance, some things are “analogous” because they are both aspects, in different ways, of one reality (e.g., act and potency are both aspects of “being” and are thus analogous). But in the case of those aspects of God that we speak of in natural terms, the “analogy” has to do, he says, with the fact that one thing has caused the other: “one thing receives existence and meaning from the other, and such is the analogy of creature to the Creator: the creature does not have existence except to the extent that it has come down from the first being.” Thomas calls this kind of analogy “imitation,” a similarity between the thing caused and the Cause itself: “Hence the creature is not called a being except insofar as it imitated the first being; and it is the same concerning wisdom and all the other things that are said of the creature.”14
The notion that there is some resemblance between the thing caused and its cause is, in itself, not entirely clear. But it derives—and even Thomas’s language of “descent” does this literally—from scriptural claims, like that of Jas 1:17: “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights.” This notion, furthermore, has formed the basis even of developing modern Christian natural theology that, finally, Barth himself came to distrust so deeply. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Methodist commentator Adam Clarke provides an effusive catalogue, precisely of natural theology’s practitioners and their labors, on the basis of the “descending” analogy. While discussing, on Exodus 28, the fashioning of the priestly vestments for the Tabernacle’s service, Clarke follows a traditional exegetical move (dating even from pre-Christian Jewish commentary and taken up by the fathers) on this text by seeing the detailed ornament of the garments as depicting somehow—analogously—the beauteous wonder of creation, now also (analogously) represented through the creative artistry of the human craftsman:
This principle, that God is the author of all arts and sciences, is too little regarded: Every
