ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Barth's opposition to natural theology in the context of the wider debate on the subject, and then question if Barth was forced to reconsider his position in the aftermath of the Shoah, in respect of his understanding of radical evil. The chapter considers the changing nature of Karl Barth's theology of revelation. Starting under Herrmann's influence with an existentialized variant of Schleiermacher's theology, we have seen that Barth gradually moved into a dynamic eschatological phase in which the relationship between world-historical events and revelation was a fluctuating one, before culminating in a thoroughgoing rejection of natural theology. As Stanley Hauerwas has put it in his own highly ironic Gifford Lectures, Barth's theology is a massive theological metaphysics that provides an alternative to the world in which Lord Gifford's understanding of natural theology seems reasonable.
