At the end of the day all theological discourse must reduce to some reality. If the reality isn’t ultimately Jesus Christ, and the triune God He mediates, then you, by definition do not have a genuinely Christian theology. People can spend all their days, all their energies recovering natural law, natural theology so on and so forth, merely because they think this provides for the orthodox way of Protestant theology that history has to offer. Ultimately, though, Christian theology isn’t judged by a historicism like this, for that is what this mode is operating from. Christian theology, instead, is judged by its canon provided for by a person, by the Son of Man, the Son of God, Jesus Christ. He is God’s history for the world. Insofar that theologians attempt to think God from alternative ad hoc histories, of the sort conceived from a ‘pure nature,’ they are no longer operating from within the strictures of God’s primordial and thus delimiting (to His) life for the world in Jesus Christ. Such theologians are merely operating out of the fancies of their collective intellectual wits. It might satisfy their sense of identity within a self-perceived history, and the community attached to that, but it certainly does not achieve peace with God, in the sense that it has corollary with God’s freedom to be for the world in the way He has freely chosen to do that, to be that, in Jesus Christ. TF Torrance summarizes what I’m after well as he synopsizes the spirit of Barth’s theology:
Because Jesus Christ is the Way, as well as the Truth and the Life, theological thought is limited and bounded and directed by this historical reality in whom we meet the Truth of God. That prohibits theological thought from wandering at will across open country, from straying over history in general or from occupying itself with some other history, rather than this concrete history in the centre of all history. Thus theological thought is distinguished from every empty conceptual thought, from every science of pure possibility, and from every kind of merely formal thinking, by being mastered and determined by the special history of Jesus Christ.1
Currently, there is an orgy of so-called Protestant theologians frothing at the idea and practice of recovering Post Reformed orthodox theology. This is a theology funded by a commitment to the Aristotelian, Thomist faith of Catholicism; one that is funded by a pure nature, and the idea that abstract creation just is correlate with God’s economy to be for the world apart from Christ (thus the abstraction). These theologians are more concerned with retrieving an abstract orthodoxy than they are with constructively engaging with the reality of Holy Scripture—to be clear, the reality res of Holy Scripture, according to Jesus (cf Jn 5.39), is in fact, Jesus Christ. For these Protestant theologians, who are supposedly committed to the Protestant ‘Scripture principle,’ you’d think that the magisterium of the Holy Catholic Church was in fact the standard for orthodoxy rather than the reality of Holy Scripture. It is rather disastrous to watch this all unfold.
1 Thomas F. Torrance, Karl Barth: An Introduction to His Early Theology 1910-1931, 196.