In Christianity, Neo-orthodoxy or Neoorthodoxy, also known as theology of crisis and dialectical theology,[1] was a theological movement developed in the aftermath of the First World War. The movement was largely a reaction against doctrines of 19th-century liberal theology and a reevaluation of the teachings of the Reformation.[2] Karl Barth is the leading figure associated with the movement. In the U.S., Reinhold Niebuhr was a leading exponent of neo-orthodoxy.[3] It is unrelated to Eastern Orthodoxy.
Neo-orthodoxy strongly emphasises the revelation of God by God as the source of Christian doctrine.[4] This is in contrast to natural theology, whose proponents include Thomas Aquinas, who states that knowledge of God can be gained through a combination of observation of nature and human reason; the issue remains a controversial topic within some circles of Christianity to this day.[5]
So far as theological content is concerned, Barth's argument runs like this. If the God whom we have actually come to know through Jesus Christ really is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in his own eternal and undivided Being, then what are we to make of an independent natural theology that terminates, not upon the Being of the Triune God—i.e., upon God as he really is in himself—but upon some Being of God in general? Natural theology by its very operation abstracts the existence of God from his act, so that if it does not begin with deism, it imposes deism upon theology.[6]
Emil Brunner, on the other hand, believed that natural theology still had an important, although not decisive, role. This led to a sharp disagreement between the two men, the first of several controversies that prevented the movement from acquiring a unified, homogeneous character.
Most neo-orthodox thinkers stressed the transcendence of God. Barth believed that the emphasis on the immanence of God had led human beings to imagine God to amount to nothing more than humanity writ large. He stressed the "infinite qualitative distinction" between the human and the divine, a reversion to older Protestant teachings on the nature of God and a rebuttal against the intellectual heritage of philosophical idealism. This led to a general devaluation of philosophical and metaphysical approaches to the faith, although some thinkers, notably Paul Tillich, attempted a median course between strict transcendence and ontologicalanalysis of the human condition, a stand that caused a further division in the movement.