Barth's treatment of creation and providence in the Church Dogmatics is notable for its effort to make those doctrines distinctively Christian, meaning by that doctrines that reflect the centrality of Jesus Christ for understanding God and world. The methodological and substantive effects of such a project on the doctrines of creation and providence are the focus of this chapter.

First and most obviously, the attempt to make creation and providence Christian doctrines is part of Barth's attack on natural theology. One should turn to Jesus Christ for one's understanding of a world created and ruled by God rather than draw conclusions about such matters from more general observation of the world and its natural and historical processes. One should not, then, assume that the world exists and search for its cause; this way leads to the philosopher’s God, the Creator as world-cause (CD III/1, pp. 6, 11). Nor should one form conclusions about the point or direction of God’s rule over the universe – about the providential arrangement of things – by following the lines of observable trajectories of historical events (CD III/3, pp. 20–3). Both ways of proceeding subordinate understanding of God for us in Jesus Christ to what one supposedly knows on independent grounds about God’s creation and rule of the world, rather than the other way round.