ABSTRACT
This chapter then adds that throughout his career, Barth consistently acknowledges that the world extra muros ecclesiae may participate in this analogy between God and the Church as well. Contrary to popular opinion, Barth never rejected the traditional Christian concept of natural revelation per se. Instead, he simply renounced one common form of it, which assumes that creation’s praise of its Creator has a source and content which is completely independent of His self-revelation in Jesus Christ. Because of its potential to both secularise the Christian faith and thwart his efforts to overcome an anthropological basis for knowledge of God, Barth consistently denounced this version of the belief throughout his career. He varied only by being increasingly explicit about this judgement and making his own theology increasingly consistent with it. But Barth nevertheless always proposed an alternative, namely, that the heavens’ declaration of the glory of God is entirely dependent upon God’s revelation of His glory in Jesus Christ for its source, content and character. The fundamental elements of this alternative concept of revelatio naturalis were already in place by his lecture on The Christian’s Place in Society (1919). In the years which followed, Barth merely changed the specific framework which he used to explain it from the analogia crucis (1919–1924) to the analogia fidei (1924–1942) and then to his own analogy of being (1942–1968). And as he did, the concept not only acquired greater coherence, but he became increasingly open to it as well.
