ABSTRACT
Modern theology on the whole accepts that philosophy has its own legitimacy, its own autonomy, apart from faith. Philosophy articulates categories of being in general, or else of what it is to know in general, but speaks only obscurely, if at all, of God. Theology reserves to itself the knowledge of God as a loving creator who has also redeemed the human race. But various currents of ‘liberal theology’ seek to articulate this knowledge in terms of philosophically derived categories of being and knowing, the legitimacy of which liberal theology has forfeited the right to adjudicate. In the case, by contrast, of various currents of neo-orthodoxy, an attempt is made to articulate this knowledge in terms of categories proper to theology itself: usually this means granting a methodological priority to the full revelation of God in Christ, with all its narrative specificity, over the seemingly more general and abstract acknowledgement of God as creator. And yet what often remains unclear here is the degree to which these theological categories are permitted to disturb a philosophical account of what it is to be, to know and to act, without reference to God. In the case of Karl Barth, a broad acceptance of a post-Kantian understanding of philosophy is turned to neo-orthodox advantage, in that he can insist that natural reason discloses nothing of God and yet that this opens the way to a renewed and, indeed, now more radical recognition that only God discloses God in the contingency of events as acknowledged not by reason but by faith.
