“The heart is more deceitful than all else
And is desperately sick;
Who can understand it?
“I, the Lord, search the heart,
I test the mind,
Even to give to each man according to his ways,
According to the results of his deeds. –Jeremiah 17:9–10
This is going to be a very brief screed on the inscrutable reality of sin and evil. As the prophet Jeremiah speaks for Yahweh, or as Yahweh speaks directly through Jeremiah, something is quite clear about the human fallen heart: i.e., it is beyond our comprehension. The only commentary or explicator provided for its depths comes in the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. It was this that was required in order for the ‘desperately sick’ and ‘deceitful’ heart to be dealt with. Just as with the torture and evil happenings that befell Job, God never explained the background behind it all to Job. Via dramatic irony the reader understands that it was the devil who was given permission by Yahweh to “slay” Job, but Job didn’t know that while in the midst of it all. I bring Job up merely as an analogy for the depths of sin and evil, and the way God explains it to us; He doesn’t. Even so, what can be gleaned from this is that sin and evil have an inexplicable core-depth to it that the human mind could never grasp; God alone has real knowledge of good and evil; God alone is good, as Jesus said of His life in the triune Monarxia. Yahweh’s engagement with evil, with sin as a subset, is to become human, be put to death for all of humanity, and by so doing reverse the dissolving effects of evil and sin into the nothingness-reprobate status that it entails.
The above has many implications. One of those implications has to do with the impact that the dissolvent of sin and evil has upon the intellect. According to Scripture its effect is so far reaching that it kills humanity; that is, it kills humanity’s capacity to be in right relationship with Yahweh; to have a real knowledge of the triune God; to even have the capacity or desire to follow God. We know from Jesus, particularly in the Gospel of John, that the fallen heart loves the darkness rather than the light. That is to say, the human fallen heart is ensconced within the darkness and loves it that way. Without an outside “intervention” or intrusion we would stay captive to our greatest affections, even as those find their source in a heart always already inward curved.
The aforementioned is why I reject any form of a so-called natural theology. The noetic-ontic effects of sin in an evil world are so deep and dread that the fallen human’s knowledge of God is always and only contingent upon a person’s participation within God’s life as that is mediated through the vicarious-priestly humanity of Jesus Christ. This is a purely biblical theological account. When you have folks within Protestantism, especially those who claim to be the Reformed orthodox or Lutheran, claiming that a natural theology, natural law is in play for developing a Christian theology, you know that they are relying on an extrabiblical account of things. You know that they are relying on some type of intellectualist anthropology (typically, Thomist) wherein they maintain that while humanity is totally depraved, some small spark of the intellect, which is the essence of what it means to be human, just as it is the ultimate essence for God to be God (as the Big Brain in the Sky), has remained untouched. It is in this small space of a spark that they reason even a fallen humanity, through a naked reason, has enough inherent intellectual power to rightly think Godness; to think the categories of God’s life. But biblically this cannot be sustained. This, at its very reduction, is why Barth forever rejected natural theology, particularly as that was juxtaposed with his in-person and Roman Catholic correspondent, Erich Przywara.