The results of such searches also show us that Barth is dependent to a great extent on the manuals and handbooks of Protestant theology flowing out of the nineteenth century, such as those from Heinrich Heppe and Alexander Schweizer. But where Schweizer, for instance, views predestination as a "central dogma" in Calvinism in a generally positive light, Barth takes issue with the normative judgment on such matters.

So not only is Barth drawing off the scholarship of preceding generations, materially accepting their interpretation of the development of Protestant orthodoxy, but he is also dependent on an interpretation of these sources themselves as self-evident. Thus, when Barth summarizes Cocceius, we see a reading of Cocceius as dismissing wholesale the entirety of Protestant scholastic theology: "traditional dogmatics had started to move like a frozen stream of lava" (4.1, p. 55). Cocceius "anti-Scholasticus" becomes a seventeenth-century version of Calvin in the latter's storied rejection of the "scholastici."

The dynamic that we see at work here in Barth's interpretation of the development of Federal Theology, pitting Calvin as the paradigmatic norm against divergent streams of Protestant scholasticism, is also at play in his systemic and methodological rejection of natural law, natural theology, and natural revelation.

In a chapter from Rediscovering the Natural Law in Reformed Theological Ethics titled, "Karl Barth and the Displacement of Natural Law in Contemporary Protestant Thought," Stephen J. Grabill, a research scholar at the Acton Institute, traces the impact of the Barth-Brunner debate (itself recently republished by Wipf and Stock) on the development of twentieth-century Protestant ethics.

Grabill observes,

While the already weakened state of natural theology in the Reformed tradition was exacerbated by Barth’s assault on Protestant orthodoxy, it makes sense that during the period of Barthian hegemony (1934-1990) interest in related doctrines such as natural revelation and natural law would likewise atrophy given the logical thread connecting them to natural theology (21).

Noting a development in Barth's thought, which in the later period tended to give greater weight to issues related "to the structures of human existence, society, ethics, and natural moral norms," while never abandoning his rejection of natural law, Grabill argues that "the analyst give less priority to his statements in the 1934 debate and the 1937-1938 Gifford Lectures and more to the Church Dogmatics and the shorter political tracts written during World War II" (29).

In a review of Grabill's book hosted on the Center for Barth Studies website and critical of Grabill's engagement with Barth, W. Travis McMaken writes, "If the Reformed natural law tradition is to be rediscovered and rehabilitated after Barth, it will have to be done in deep conversation with Barth."

This judgment underscores the importance of Barth to contemporary theology and theological historiography. And while interpretations of Barth and his impact will surely continue to differ, there seems to be unanimous consensus that the Church Dogmatics represents Barth's comprehensive and mature theological expression.