Notre Dame Law School NDLScholarship Natural Law Forum 1-1-1968 Karl Barth and Moral Natural Law: The Anatomy of Debate;Note Louis C. Midgley Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.law.nd.edu/nd_naturallaw_forum Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Midgley, Louis C., "Karl Barth and Moral Natural Law: The Anatomy of Debate;Note" (1968). Natural Law Forum. Paper 140. http://scholarship.law.nd.edu/nd_naturallaw_forum/140 This Note is brought to you for free and open access by NDLScholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in Natural Law Forum by an authorized administrator of NDLScholarship. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. NOTES KARL BARTH AND MORAL NATURAL LAW: THE ANATOMY OF A DEBATE Currently the most emphatic rejection of natural law ethical systems comes from Karl Barth, the Swiss neoorthodox theologian. He has always viewed moral natural law as (1) an example of a false natural theology, (2) a dangerous reliance on human reason, and (3) the unwarranted employment of a merely human philosophy in place of the revealed Word of God. He rejects all of these as tools in the formulation of Christian theology and social ethics. Where Cath- olics and, with qualifications, some Protestants believe that it is still possible for sinful man to reach God by the use of 'his human reason and therefore also possible to read the "natural" order of God in the "created" institutions surround- ing him, Barth has held that it is impossible to do either because God is hidden from man by the Fall; all of creation is infected by malice, and human under- standing is clouded by sin - there is really nothing left of the original creation.