Neo-Orthodoxy

Neo-Orthodoxy is a twentieth-century Protestant theological movement, centered chiefly on Karl Barth and Emil Brunner in Europe, that reacted against nineteenth-century liberal theology’s “pantheizing theology of immanence” while still denying that Scripture simply is, in itself, God’s word.¹ On this view, the Bible is a human witness to revelation that “becomes” the Word of God only in a personal, existential encounter, rather than being God’s own word, in a fixed and propositional sense, apart from that encounter.²

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession of Faith predates neo-orthodoxy by more than two centuries and names no such movement, but its opening chapter states the position neo-orthodoxy’s central claim about Scripture runs directly against. Scripture, the confession states, is “the only sufficient, certain, and infallible rule of all saving knowledge, faith, and obedience.”³ Its authority

dependeth not upon the testimony of any man or church, but wholly upon God (who is truth itself), the author thereof; therefore it is to be received because it is the Word of God.⁴

Michael Kruger groups Barth, Brunner, and Rudolf Bultmann together as “dialectical theologians” holding what he calls a “classical existential approach,” while noting that they differ from one another in how far they take it.² On Kruger’s account, Barth held that Scripture is not the word of God per se but merely a witness to the word of God in Jesus Christ; revelation is not a propositional statement about God but an event (Ereignis), something that “happens” to an individual.² Barth writes: “Again it is quite impossible that there should be a direct identity between the human word of Holy Scripture and the Word of God.”² Brunner went further still, allowing God to speak his “single, never contradictory word” through what Brunner took to be the Bible’s own contradictory accounts, pointing to Luke and Matthew as an example.² Where the confession states that Scripture simply is the Word of God, neo-orthodoxy’s central claim is that Scripture only becomes God’s word contingently, in the encounter itself.

This view of revelation carries directly into the doctrine of the canon. Because canonicity depends, on this account, on whether the church “hears God speaking” in a given book rather than on anything inherent to the text itself, Barth affirmed the church’s received sixty-six books while still holding that the decision was not irrevocable and could in principle be revised.² Brunner “takes advantage of this door… and walks right through it”:²

The question of the canon has never, in principle, been definitely answered, but is continually being reopened. Just as the church of the second, third, and fourth centuries had the right to decide … what was “Apostolic” and what was not, on their own responsibility as believers, so in the same way every church, at every period in the history of the church, possesses the same right and the same duty.²

Historical Development

Reaction against nineteenth-century liberal theology

Louis Berkhof traces Barth’s own theology to a reaction against the “pantheizing theology of immanence, inspired by Hegel and Schleiermacher,” under which God’s transcendence had been “soft-pedaled, ignored, or explicitly denied” and special revelation set aside in favor of finding God in nature, history, or human religious experience.¹ Against this trend, Berkhof writes, “Barth now raises his voice and points out that God is not to be found in nature, in history, or in human experience of any kind, but only in the special revelation that has reached us in the Bible,” though Berkhof notes that in his strong statements about the hidden God, Barth “uses the language of Luther rather than of Calvin.”¹

European and American reception

Writing in 1936, the liberal American historical theologian A. C. McGiffert Jr. credited the writings of Brunner and Barth with generating fresh European interest in Calvin, though he judged their work had not yet found much of a following in America itself.⁵ McGiffert observed a related but separate trend already underway among American theologians: formerly liberal figures such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Douglas Horton were returning to traditional conceptions of original sin and its effects, a group McGiffert labeled “religious realists.”⁵ Assessing American Reformed theology’s prospects two decades later, in 1959, the Presbyterian theologian John Gerstner judged the outlook bleak. He argued that neo-orthodoxy, “while professing to uphold the Reformation, re-interpreted it” in a way that made maintaining the classic Reformed faith highly difficult, alongside an ecumenical theology he judged had papered over real doctrinal differences.⁶ Evangelical reception was similarly wary: Carl F. H. Henry judged fellow evangelical Bernard Ramm’s growing openness to Barth’s thought, including Ramm’s rejection of propositional revelation, a “capitulation to Barthian thought” that brought Ramm too close to neo-orthodoxy for Henry’s own sense of where the evangelical movement should go.⁷

Objections and Responses

Neo-orthodoxy’s existential model rightly recognizes that the church’s reception of Scripture is part of how the canon is authenticated. Kruger credits this much: “There is undoubtedly an existential component to how the canon is authenticated, and it is important to be reminded of that reality (though there is not only an existential component).”⁸ He credits Barth, following Calvin, for holding that “the Bible constitutes itself the Canon. It is the Canon because it imposed itself upon the church as such,”⁸ and for recognizing that the canon has a genuine impact on the community that receives it, even while maintaining “residual concerns about Barth’s doctrine of Scripture.”⁹

If Scripture’s authority depends on an ongoing existential experience, the canon’s own boundaries become permanently unsettled. Carl F. H. Henry objected:

On the Barthian view, the idea of a fixed scriptural canon collapses. Only isolated fragments of the Bible that “impose” themselves become the Word of God, and these cease to be the Word of God when not self-imposing. What is Word of God for some need not be Word of God for others, or can be, or not, at different times and places.¹⁰

A canon determined this way, Kruger concludes, is “reduced to a human-determined document that bears no real authority in and of itself.”¹¹

If Scripture does not bear authority in itself, the church’s own authority begins to rival Scripture’s. Kruger notes that Stanley Grenz and John Franke draw out this same “Barthian” move explicitly, denying that either Scripture or tradition is “inherently authoritative” on its own and treating both instead as equally “contingent on the work of the Spirit.”¹¹ On Kruger’s assessment, this leaves it unclear how such a model can sustain a canon capable of functioning as an authority over the church at all.¹²

Related Doctrines

References

Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1969), 16. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), chap. 1, “The Church’s Book.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 1. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 4. ↩
Kenneth J. Stewart, “Hardier than Supposed: The Resurgence of Calvinism Across the 20th Century,” Themelios 50, no. 2 (2025): 296. ↩ ↩²
Stewart, “Hardier than Supposed,” 285. ↩
Ryan Reed, “The House Divided: An Assessment of the American Neo-Evangelicals’ Doctrine of Scripture,” Themelios 49, no. 1 (2024): 156. ↩
Kruger, chap. 1. ↩ ↩²
Kruger, chap. 3, “My Sheep Hear My Voice.” ↩
Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority, 6 vols. (Waco, TX: Word, 1979), 259-60, quoted in Kruger, chap. 1. ↩
Kruger, chap. 1. ↩ ↩²
Kruger, chap. 1. ↩