Theology without Metaphysics

Abstract

One of the central arguments of post-metaphysical theology is that language is inherently 'metaphysical' and consequently that it shoehorns objects into predetermined categories. Because God is beyond such categories, it follows that language cannot apply to God. Drawing on recent work in theology and philosophy of language, Kevin Hector develops an alternative account of language and its relation to God, demonstrating that one need not choose between fitting God into a metaphysical framework, on the one hand, and keeping God at a distance from language, on the other. Hector thus elaborates a 'therapeutic' response to metaphysics: given the extent to which metaphysical presuppositions about language have become embedded in common sense, he argues that metaphysics can be fully overcome only by defending an alternative account of language and its application to God, so as to strip such presuppositions of their apparent self-evidence and release us from their grip.

Multidisciplinary, Comparative, and Interactive: Toward a Global Philosophy of Religion

“…Schilbrack suggests that the stink of opprobrium sticks to robust evaluation because metaphysics is a discredited, repudiated form of philosophical inquiry, something unfit for a post‐metaphysical age. Using language and arguments developed by Kevin Hector (), Schilbrack isolates the two horns of the anti‐metaphysical critique: “essentialism” and “correspondentism” (155). Critics argue that metaphysicians and their partisans engage in essentialism when they ignore the gap separating what Kant calls the phenomena and the noumena.…”

Redeeming the Acquired Virtues

“…Christians will want in particular to resist any suggestion that developing, self‐correcting tradition is itself somehow to be understood as God incarnate, rather than at best as a participation in the finite self‐expression of a radically transcendent and infinite reality. To affirm that the incarnation means that God identifies without reservation with being‐for us is to deny that “there is any height or depth in which God is indifferent to the act of being‐with‐us” (Hector , 36). We need not be driven by convictions concerning the inadequacy of our concepts into the arms of a purely negative theology, but neither is it the case that God is exhausted either by our concepts or by our practices, however unfolded in time.…”

“…However, the “metaphysics” he seeks to avoid is one that equates the fundamental reality of things with our conceptions of them, thus inflicting violence on beings by forcing them into our conceptual framework. He does not eschew metaphysics if this simply involves claims about that which transcends nature, or claims about what things are really like (Hector , 3).…”