Can Theology Do Without Metaphysics?
Why We Need Classical Metaphysics to Help Us Preserve Classical Orthodoxy
Note: I have been giving this question a great deal of thought as I continue to work on the third volume of the Great Tradition trilogy on metaphysics. The central problem in writing a systematic theology today is modernity’s rejection of the classical metaphysics with which creedal orthodoxy is bound up. Modern metaphysics is inhospitable to metaphysical realism, proofs for the existence of God, and classical theism. Can we take our starting point within modernity and still do orthodox theology? Is the Christian doctrine of creation compatible with nominalism, mechanism, and materialism? Does Chalcedon’s two natures doctrine make sense without a concept of “natures” as distinct from bodies? Have any major theological traditions succeeded in being both orthodox and modern? Below are my current musings sparked by such questions.
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The death of Immanuel Kant in 1804 was a watershed in the history of Western philosophy, theology, jurisprudence, political theory and ethics. After Kant, the classical heritage of Plato and Aristotle, the founders of the wisdom tradition called metaphysics, ceased to be foundational for Western thinking about the nature of the good, God, right, politics, and morals. Modernity triumphed over Christendom.
Classical metaphysics made the West unique among the cultures of the world because an account of reality arose in Western Christendom in which the highest human wisdom was creatively fused with the Divine wisdom of the Incarnation as described in the Bible to form a distinctively Christian metaphysics.
The classical metaphysics of premodern Western culture sought to articulate what C. S. Lewis called “the Dao,” that is, the natural law that many cultures have recognized as built in to the fabric of reality. This natural law or wisdom has functioned as the foundation of cultures from Egypt to China to Israel. Positive law is an elaboration of it. Religion reinforces it. Political arrangements are judged by it. Morals are based on it.
Although many cultures recognize in varying degrees the claims exerted by reality on human behavior, it was only in the West that metaphysics arose as a rational explication of these claims. This occurred as a result of the fusion of Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Biblical theology. Although a deep knowledge of metaphysics has always been limited to a few, highly educated, individuals, it was preserved and passed down through the centuries by the central institutions of Western culture – the church and the university – because of its importance for the culture as a whole.
The medieval university consisted of a faculty of arts which sought wisdom through the study of the liberal arts culminating in metaphysics. Metaphysics thus served as the foundation of the three faculties of law, theology, and medicine. These faculties depended on a true account of reality in order to remain in contact with the real world rather than degenerating into a parody of reason in which the human imagination was allowed to float free of the real world. Medicine detached from reality would not cure disease. Law detached from reality would lead to tragic utopianism and/or anarchy. Theology detached from reality would lose touch with the one, true, living, God. Scientific knowledge must bow to reality and be shaped by it or else it becomes merely a parody of science, a “science” that is reduced to an instrument of ideology – something we see increasingly today and call “political correctness.”
Historically, metaphysics functioned as a unifying science by integrating the empirical and the intelligible realms of reality. It describes how the different levels of reality intersect and interact. In what way, for example, are the natures of things dependent on and shaped by universals? Metaphysics is necessary if one believes that the cosmos we experience depends for its existence and coherence on a super-sensible reality that is prior to the sensible world. But apart from such a belief classical metaphysics appears unnecessary. This explains why it is widely assumed today that metaphysics has been superseded by science. Scientism is the doctrine that all objective knowledge is derived from empirical science. (Everything else, including philosophy, religion, and morality is mere subjective opinion.) Scientism follows naturally from the view that nothing but empirical reality is objectively real.
Plato contributed the key premise for metaphysics. He solved the problem of why the identity of things persists over time even though all is in flux with his theory of the Forms or Ideas. He said that reality consists of two levels, one that we can access with our five senses and one that we can access only with the intellect. A true metaphysics unites the two realms in a synthesis of the intelligible and the empirical. This is as true of Aristotelian as of Platonic systems. We must remember that Platonism in late antiquity was an already ancient tradition that included insights from Aristotle and the Stoics, as well as being based on the texts of Plato himself.
During the first five centuries of church history, the Platonic tradition was integrated with biblical revelation and the result was the Christian Platonism of Augustine. Augustine’s thought, in turn, served as the foundation of medieval scholasticism and, thus, of Christendom itself. Historic Christian orthodoxy is a metaphysical account of reality, that is, an account of God and all things in relation to God. Christian theology unifies knowledge of the world derived from metaphysical analysis with special revelation.
In the medieval period Christian theologians regarded the special revelation of Scripture as the highest form of knowledge and as the high point of a metaphysical system in which the entirety of reality (including both the empirical and the intelligible) was integrated together in relation to the transcendent, Creator God. Etienne Gilson shows that in the system of Thomas Aquinas what can be known by reason alone (philosophy) is subordinated to the higher authority of special revelation, yet philosophy is useful in articulating the relation of things to God. The resulting synthesis of faith and reason is the high point in human intellectual achievement so far in history and its regrettable breakdown was the cause of the pathological condition known as modernity.
It cannot be stressed enough that the Enlightenment, not the Reformation, was the true rupture with classical tradition and historic Christian trinitarian and Christological orthodoxy. The Reformers had a decline narrative in which the church had been going downhill in the high to late middle ages and so they favored the “sounder scholastics” of whom Augustine, Peter Lombard and Thomas Aquinas were examples. Often the Protestant scholastics evaluated how sound a particular writer was on a particular point by comparing him to Augustine, which is a way of judging the tradition by its fidelity, or lack thereof, to its origins. The Christian Platonism of the Great Tradition was not rejected by the Reformation. Some extreme statements that seem to dismiss Aristotle can be found in Luther’s works, but these were moderated in Luther’s later work and corrected by his successors. Protestant scholasticism was a reform, not a rejection, of medieval scholasticism. Protestantism is essentially conservative rather than modern.
The Reformers sought to recover the sounder, older theology of the fathers and early scholastics. The Enlightenment, however, initiated a break with the classical metaphysics that the post-Reformation scholastics saw as integrally bound up with the trinitarian and Christological orthodoxy symbolized in the ecumenical creeds of the undivided church of the first five centuries. The crisis caused by the Enlightenment is still ongoing.
Kant followed Hume in rejecting the classical metaphysics that Christian theologians had developed by making use of the legitimate insights of Plato and Aristotle in a synthesis with the special revelation of Scripture. The influence of Hume and Kant was so strong that Western thought from that point onwards no longer took Christian metaphysics as its premise. It is impossible to overstate the damage this has caused. From then on philosophy, theology, jurisprudence, political theory and ethics developed on the assumption that the transcendent, Creator God either does not exist or cannot be known. Thus, the views of Lucretius and Epicurus, which had been rejected by the church fathers, superseded those of Augustine and Thomas in modernity. What we call “postmodernity” is the outworking of these destructive ideas.
After Kant Western thought followed two strategies. The first was to ignore metaphysics as if it could suspend itself in midair and ignore the question of the relation of its pronouncements to reality itself. Existentialism and Fundamentalism are examples of this strategy. The second was to invent new, revised, metaphysical systems, all of which tend toward pantheism and are therefore heretical from a Christian perspective. Process theology and Moltmann’s dynamic panentheism are examples of this strategy.
Nineteenth century liberal theology sought to accommodate itself to historicism and scientism. Therefore it denied miracles and tried to transform Christianity from a religion of sin and salvation into one of social and moral improvement. In reaction to liberalism, twentieth century fundamentalism attempted, under the biblicist slogan “no creed but the Bible,” to defend miracles and the gospel of forgiveness of sins. In Karl Barth’s theology we see a more sophisticated version of the attempt to defend traditional Christianity by replacing metaphysics with Christian doctrine. Liberalism sought a new, modern, metaphysics, while fundamentalism sought to do without metaphysics. Barth sought to use doctrine as a replacement for metaphysics.
These three approaches can be seen as a taxonomy of the basic options for any movement of Christianity that seeks to be modern. I want to suggest that all three options fail in the task of preserving historic, orthodox, Christianity and try to explain why. The implication of my argument is that Christian theology cannot be both orthodox and modern.
Let me say something about how the three options that have been pursued in the past two centuries for reconciling Christian theology with modernity.
1. Liberal Theology
First, we note that beginning with Hegel a large number of new metaphysical systems have emerged over the past two centuries. Examples of such systems include those of Hegel, Fichte, Schopenhauer, F. H. Bradley, and A. N. Whitehead. It must be recognized that they all differ from each other in important respects, but what I wish to point out here is that each one is an attempt to provide a viable alternative to classical metaphysics. All of them try to obey the “Prime Directive” of modernity, namely, that we can only have true knowledge of empirical reality by scientific means. Any statement about what lies beyond the reach of our five senses can only be personal opinion rather than knowledge. None of these systems of metaphysics have had much impact of Western culture because they do not challenge the scientism that says that metaphysics is not a science, but just personal opinions.
Classical metaphysics sought to integrate two levels, the empirical level known by sense experience and the intelligible realm known by the intellect. But Classical Christian metaphysics added a third and more fundamental level of reality. It affirmed the material cosmos as known by the five senses and also the intelligible realm of angels and heaven. But, in addition, it also affirmed the existence of a God who stands above and apart from the material and spiritual realms, who is the Cause of all and eternal. Modern metaphysics rejects the reality of the intelligible realm by denying universals and also rejects the knowability of the transcendent God.
God, in the classical, Christian conception is the one, simple, immutable, eternal, self-existent, perfect, First Cause of the universe, who was dimly perceived by the philosophers, who revealed himself to Israel, and who is most fully known in Jesus Christ.
Classical Christian theology brings the sensible and intelligible realms into relation to God, who is not a part of either the material cosmos or the spiritual realm. God is transcendent of both and therefore immanent to both. To confuse God with creation is as bad as separating God from creation.
Modern liberal theology rejects the theology of the the Bible and reverts to the pantheism and polytheism of the nations around Israel, which the Old Testament was given to correct. The theological systems of John Cobb, W. Pannenberg, and J. Moltmann all speak of God, but they draw him down from his lofty heights of transcendence and portray him as a god who is a part of, or identical with, the cosmos.
God might be the one out of whom the cosmos is made or the soul of the world. Or God might be reinterpreted as the laws driving history forward. But such a God does not have aseity and is not eternal. Instead the cosmos is self-existent and eternal. The attributes of God in classical theism are thus transferred to the cosmos and the God of the Bible, bereft of his metaphysical attributes, is lowered to the level of the gods of ancient mythology.
2. Fundamentalist Theology
The fundamentalist theology of the early twentieth century had good intentions. It arose as a reaction to the liberal theology of the nineteenth century and it wanted to defend biblical Christianity. It wanted to preserve miracles, heaven and hell, biblical authority, and the character of Christianity as a religion of sin and salvation.
The problem with fundamentalism was that its critique of liberal theology did not go deep enough to expose the Enlightenment roots of the problem. It recognized that liberal theology had gone off the rails when it denied the virgin birth or saw contradictions in Scripture. But why had liberal theology veered so far off from orthodoxy?
Fundamentalists framed the issue in terms of prooftexts and biblical interpretation. They saw it as a “Battle for the Bible” in which if only they could get their opponents to accept the authority of the Bible as inspired and inerrant they could prove that miracles should be accepted and that traditional doctrinal formulations like original sin should be affirmed.
But the issue ran deeper than the authority of the Bible. Even if you could prove that the Bible teaches the virgin birth, a person committed to philosophical naturalism would automatically assume that literal virgin births are impossible. So if the Bible teaches a virgin birth then it must be using the concept as a symbol of some other meaning that is compatible with a naturalistic metaphysics. Given the metaphysical premise, this hermeneutical move logically follows.
What the fundamentalists never quite understood was that biblical exegesis is always done on the basis of certain metaphysical assumptions. They did not grasp the need to reform the erroneous metaphysical assumptions of modernity on the basis of special revelation. They never quite caught up to the historic orthodox tradition that existed from the fourth to eighteenth centuries! So, contemporary Evangelicalism falls short of the Protestant orthodoxy that produced the great confessions of the Reformation.
Fundamentalist biblicism ignores the distinction between the doctrines of the immanent and economic Trinity and tends, therefore, to read historical development back into the being of the Triune God. The actions of God in speaking and acting in history to judge and save his people are taken as descriptive of God in Himself. A good example of this tendency is the tendency of Grudem, Ware, and others to read the Son’s subordination to the Father in the economy back into the eternal Trinity. Another example would be social trinitarianism, which projects human concepts of personhood onto God in Himself. Yet another example would be Open Theism, with it concept of a mutable god. The result is an overly-anthropomorphic view of God in which God is understood as a being in time and space, rather than as a transcendent being able to produce effects in time and space. The mystery is rationalized and the result is theistic personalism rather than classical theism.
Theistic personalism turns God into a person like us differing only in degree. He operates as part of the cosmos. Historic Christian orthodoxy sees God as personal but also as transcendent of the cosmos. He causes all things from outside the cosmos as the mysterious One who speaks and acts but who is utterly unlike us creatures.
3. Barthian Theology
Karl Barth’s profound and powerful dogmatics has seemed to a large number of conservative theologians over the past fifty years to be a better alternative to liberalism than fundamentalism. But Barth did not recover classical metaphysics and tried to be (as Bruce McCormack rightly puts it) both orthodox and modern simultaneously. In my view, Barth’s magnificent attempt to reconcile Christian orthodoxy with post-metaphysical modernity must be judged to be a failure in the end.
Many resist this conclusion. Nothing appeals to the majority of conservative theologians more than the idea that they might be able to preserve historic orthodoxy while also making themselves acceptable to a late-modern academy that is in the grip of historicism and scientism. Whereas fundamentalism accepted exile from the centers of cultural influence, the appeal of Barthianism was that it offered a chance to do serious theology within the great centers of cultural influence.
However, it is critical to understand why Barth’s project ultimately fails. It was not because he wanted to replace pagan metaphysical doctrines with specifically Christian doctrine. That was right and proper. The problem was that he rejected the true insights of the pagan philosophers along with the false ones. He was not willing to challenge the influence of Hume and Kant and recover the premodern classical metaphysics that integrated philosophical reason into revelation. True philosophy was swept away with false philosophy; the Egyptian gold was refused rather than plundered.
As a result, his theology never quite makes contact with empirical reality because it never regained the premodern confidence in the ability of the human reason to know the created order and reason from it to the existence of a First Cause. Barth’s neglect of the metaphysical proofs for the existence of God is typical of modern theology, but fatal to the quest to re-describe reality theologically in two ways. One is that it leaves his theology hanging in midair and the second is that it leads to the mistake of reading the economic activities of God into the immanent Trinity. The missions and the processions are not distinguished from each other properly.
Barth wanted all his dogmatics to be Christologically based. But he could not see that classical orthodoxy had a doctrine of creation that was Christologically based and known partly through reason and partly through revelation. He saw the classical proofs as an assertion of human autonomous reason rather than as a reverent bowing before the Logos. A correct understanding of the eternal pre-existence of the Son as the eternal Word of the Father is crucial for a proper doctrine of creation.
Barth’s problem was not so much that he wanted to derive his dogmatics from Christology. It was more that his focus on the incarnate Son rather than the pre-existent Son led him to read the narrative Christology of the New Testament back into the eternal Trinity. Ironically, he ended up making the same kind of mistake as the fundamentalists did by historicizing God. Barth’s thought is complicated but one reason it is so is not because it is so profound, but rather because it tries to paper over a basic incoherency. It is trying to hold together an orthodox doctrine of God as one, simple, perfect, self-existent, immutable God with a narrative Christology from which his entire doctrine of God is derived. The base is inadequate to to support the superstructure. He needed to recover the classical doctrine of creation as including natural theology.
It seems to me that the trajectory of his thought thus is developed logically in the work of Jungel, Pannenberg, Moltmann, and Jenson. They do not corrupt his thought; they extend it. Despite the heroic (and partially successful) efforts of George Hunsinger and Paul Molnar to interpret Barth as a continuation of the Great Tradition of Christian orthodoxy, the trajectory of his thought as developed in the next generation shows that he never escaped the gravitational pull of modernity.
Conclusion
What can we take away from all of this? It seems to me that three points stand out as most important:
Christian theology is not merely a narrative we tell each other to express our experience of God. Rather, it is a metaphysical description of reality, that is, of God and all things in relation to God. It deals with objective truth, not merely subjective opinion.
Since metaphysical realism is a deduction from biblical revelation and necessary for an adequate statement of Christian orthodoxy, we must go back before the Enlightenment to the period of Protestant scholastic orthodoxy to pick up the thread of the Great Tradition and build further on the foundations of the tradition handed down to us from the church fathers, medieval schoolmen, and Protestant reformers.
Evangelicalism, as the heir of fundamentalism, has failed us and so we need a revival of historic Protestantism. We need “Evangelical Protestantism” not merely “Evangelicalism.”
Theological liberalism, reactionary fundamentalism, and neo-orthodox Barthianism involve various degrees of compromise with modernity. But we should read the signs of the times and conclude that modernity has run its course and is now in the process of self-destruction. Those who marry the spirit of the age will soon find themselves widowed.
We are entering into a period of Ressourcement in which premodern exegesis, doctrine, and metaphysics are being recovered and used to reinvigorate twenty-first theology. The recovery of Christian metaphysics is a massive task that will require the efforts of many historical and systematic theologians in the decades ahead. But it will be worthwhile because ultimately a theology without classical metaphysics can never be classical orthodoxy.