Theopedia

Metaphysics

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies being as such — what it means for something to exist, and what kinds of things there ultimately are. Aristotle, who gave the field its name, treated it as “first philosophy,” concerned with substance, cause, and the ten most basic categories under which anything real can be described.1 Because Christian theology speaks of God, the world, and the soul, it has never been able to ignore metaphysics; Reformed theology’s own answer has been to use philosophy as a servant tested against Scripture, never as a master over it.2

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession has no chapter devoted to philosophy or metaphysics as such, but two of its opening statements bear directly on how far a philosophical discipline may reach into Christian doctrine. General revelation — “the light of nature, and the works of creation and providence” that metaphysics itself reflects on — is real but limited: it is sufficient “to leave men inexcusable,” but “not sufficient to give that knowledge of God and his will which is necessary unto salvation.”3 And Scripture alone supplies “the whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life,” either “expressly set down or necessarily contained” in it, “unto which nothing at any time is to be added.”4 Metaphysics can describe created being and, from it, draw limited inferences about a Creator; it cannot supply doctrine Scripture does not itself teach or contain.

Historical Development

The early church did not adopt any one Greek philosophical system wholesale. It worked eclectically, testing every philosophy it engaged against revelation and taking over only what served the truth of God — rejecting Gnosticism and condemning Origen’s speculative excesses alike.2 Aristotle’s own metaphysics had argued that the world’s eternal motion required an eternal, immaterial first substance, which he identified with God — but Aristotle also held the universe itself to be eternal, whereas Christian theology confesses that God made the world from nothing. A God who merely shapes coexistent, eternal matter rather than creating it is, in Athanasius’s phrase, a “Greek” thought, not a Christian one.5 That difference showed up in how far Christian writers were willing to press metaphysical categories onto God at all. Augustine judged that calling God a “substance” (substantia) is only ever an improper way of speaking, since the word properly names something that subsists and changes under its own accidents; essentia — being, without the implication of underlying change — suits God far better, since with God to be is already to be good, powerful, and wise, not merely to possess those qualities as add-ons.6 Boethius likewise joined metaphysics and theology as sciences of the immaterial while insisting that ordinary categories of being, substance included, are all “changed” the moment they are applied to God.6

The Reformed scholastics inherited this same caution. Bartholomäus Keckermann held that metaphysics, the science of “being” in general, properly concerns only created things; God is supra ens, beyond being, and is called a being at all only because human understanding cannot rise higher. Johann Alsted distinguished metaphysics from natural theology outright: metaphysics is “a most general wisdom” that “has no business treating God, who is a most singular being,” and “the ambit of philosophy does not contain theology.”7 Calvin, for his part, called philosophy an “outstanding gift of God” and the Reformers, after early wariness of Scholasticism, returned to using it much as the fathers had — selectively, and always subject to Scripture’s own testing.2

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t reasoning about God’s being from a general concept of “being” collapse the distinction between Creator and creature? This objection, developed by Albrecht Ritschl, Wilhelm Herrmann, and Hermann Cremer and carried forward by later theologians such as Robert Jenson and Bruce McCormack, holds that inferring what God must be like from created being’s own limitations, rather than from God’s historical acts or the incarnation, makes God only a larger instance of the same kind of thing creatures are.8 But the historical record does not bear this out: writers like Augustine, Boethius, and the Reformed scholastics insisted precisely on the opposite point, that God is not “one more instance of being” alongside creatures, and where a causal argument from created being to God is made at all, it proceeds only in a qualified, analogical way, not by treating “being” as a genus that includes both God and the world.[^duby-208]

Doesn’t grounding God’s being independently of his acts in history rob him of the freedom to condescend to his creatures, especially in the incarnation? Jenson pressed this concern by arguing God must be “identified with,” not merely “identified by,” events like the exodus and the resurrection, so that God is constituted by his own future rather than complete in himself beforehand; McCormack argued similarly that the Son must suffer in his divine nature on the cross, or else a “metaphysical gap” opens between who God is in himself and who God is for us.9 Duby’s response is that it is exactly the opposite move — describing God in his self-sufficient completeness, independent of the created order — that keeps theology from reducing God to just another part of reality’s total structure; a doctrine of God that neglects his aseity risks exactly the error it means to avoid.10

Wasn’t the whole classical, “Aristotelian” doctrine of God built on philosophy rather than on the Bible? The objection is sometimes put sharply: did the church, across its Eastern, Western, and Reformation branches, really build the ecumenical creeds and confessions “not on the rock of Holy Scripture but on the flimsy reed of Aristotelian metaphysics”?11 The historical evidence runs the other way. Doctrines often blamed on an admixture of Greek philosophy — the Logos, the Trinity, the first and second Adam — are found, in substance if not always in so many words, already in Scripture itself; the church used philosophical vocabulary to state what revelation had already given it, not to import content revelation lacked.2

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Steven J. Duby, God in Himself: Scripture, Metaphysics, and the Task of Christian Theology, Studies in Christian Doctrine and Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019), chap. 4, “Theology and Metaphysics Revisited,” 198. ↩

  2. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 6, “Faith.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  3. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 1. ↩

  4. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 6. ↩

  5. Duby, God in Himself, chap. 4, 198-99. ↩

  6. Duby, God in Himself, chap. 4, 199-200. ↩ ↩2

  7. Duby, God in Himself, chap. 4, 207-8. ↩

  8. Duby, God in Himself, chap. 4, 194-97. ↩

  9. Duby, God in Himself, chap. 4, 196-97. ↩

  10. Duby, God in Himself, chap. 4, 208-9. ↩

  11. Craig A. Carter, Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), “Do We Worship the God of the Bible?” ↩