I have had the privilege this semester of auditing a class at Princeton Seminary on Karl Barth's dogmatics and ethics of election. A recurring theme in the class discussion has to do with what, precisely, Barth means by the term "metaphysics." From his justly famous Epistle to the Romans and throughout his career, Barth made no secret of the fact that in his view, theology should be thoroughly purified of any metaphysical residue.
This view, both in Barth's own work and that of his followers, has been met with much confusion and consternation. I wish in this post to provide a perspective on this issue that will, hopefully, clear the air of some of the most persistent misunderstandings.
A caveat: though Barth's theology has been very influential on my own thought, both directly and through his interpreters, I am by no means a qualified Barth scholar. The following thoughts are first of all my own. I suspect some, perhaps most of Barth's followers would share my view, and perhaps Barth did, or would, as well. In any case I think that what I have to say is mostly congenial to Barth.
Part of the confusion about Barth's rejection of "metaphysics," I suspect, is that the word itself has often been used to mean, more or less, what we today call "philosophy." Before modern times, what we today would call "science" or "natural science" was called "natural philosophy." Philosophy, that is, was thought to include not only what we today would call "philosophical" issues, but also what we would consider scientific matters. Anything else, within philosophy, was considered "metaphysics."
Since Kant, if not earlier, modern philosophy has tended to reject certain ways of thinking, referred to as "metaphysics." But this metaphysics, I think, only included some of the things that were previously thought to be included under that word. In particular, what modern philosophy meant to reject under this label was any method of acquiring knowledge about transcendent realities (e.g., God, the soul, etc.) through investigation of and meditation on concrete, directly observable phenomena.
Into this context came Karl Barth. Of course, his thought would never have taken the precise form it did had it not been for his particular historical situation, and the influence of Kant (more directly, the Marburg "neo-Kantians" of the early 20th century) on his thought. Nevertheless, Barth did not simply accept one (modern) philosophical perspective as beyond question in such a way that it controlled his understanding of theology. Nor could he have done so, for reasons we shall now see.
Concerned as Barth was with re-claiming the Reformation principle of sola Scriptura, he was naturally happy to accept the philosophical perspective of much of modernity. Why should we care if we cannot know about God or the soul by our own efforts, if we can know these things in faith from God's self-revelation? In fact, insofar as philosophy takes away the metaphysical path, it might drive us to the only source left to us; in that, Barth might say, we should rejoice. This is to say, Barth did not simply accept certain philosophical perspectives as if we were (perhaps unfortunately) bound to limit ourselves to "only" knowing God through Scripture. If anything, the causal relation went in the other direction.
But if we cannot know God through metaphysics, this also means we do not know God via any philosophical path. Any such path would be, by definition, metaphysics. Here is where a lot of confusion arises in discussions about Barth and barthianisms. For if the problem arises, for Barth, when we think we know God through philosophy, does this not mean that we should reject philosophy tout court, at least when doing theology? One might be forgiven for thinking that that is, indeed, Barth's position. But if so, he obviously contradicts himself, seeing as how he draws on philosophical work (e.g., Kant, Hegel, Buber, and even Plato).
Therefore, many seem to think, Barth cannot really be rejecting philosophy as a way of knowing God. He must really mean that we should reject knowing God through ancient and medieval, Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, and opt for modern alternatives instead. And if so, he is, at best, somewhat arbitrary. Worse, if we do know God through philosophy after all, then the suspicion arises that when we change our philosophical perspective, we may believe in a different God. In any case, if we cannot avoid knowing God through some philosophy, then if we cannot know God this way, we are left with agnosticism. For these reasons, it is thought, we should resist the modern rejection of metaphysics with all our strength, with all due respect to Barth's unfortunate protestations.
However, this is not really Barth's position. That is, he does not conclude, and his view does not logically necessitate that he conclude, that philosophy is simply useless for theology, in spite of the fact that he was in deadly earnest when he insisted that we do not know God through philosophy, even of a modern sort. It seems to me that everything depends on how one uses philosophy in theology. It is, as it often is in Barth's thought, a matter of order.
What I want to suggest is that for Barth, philosophy definitely has a place in theology. The question is one of locating that "place" and taking care that philosophy stay in that place. And this "place" is, I think, in an absolutely subordinate place. What I mean is that, for Barth, we do not know God through philosophy. Rather, we know God in faith through God's self-revelation in Christ, as witnessed to in Holy Scripture. It is only subsequently that philosophy legitimately comes in as a way of explicating, explaining, elaborating, and understanding what we already know in this way. In fact, philosophy is unavoidable and indispensable for these tasks, the tasks of the academic theologian. For these tasks!--and no others.
Once this order is understood, one will necessarily conclude that there are distinguishable and, as it were, observable differences between good and bad ways of using philosophy in theological work. Insofar as philosophy does not merely explain what is known through faith but adds to it, subtracts from it, or otherwise distorts it, something has gone wrong. This is metaphysics. And we can know when this happens because we know the content of faith from elsewhere, before we turn to philosophy.
It seems to me that more people should be able to get on board with this understanding of the order than merely "Barthians." After all, if, as so many defenders of classical metaphysics seem to assume, there are discernable ways in which Platonism or Aristotelianism are superior or even indispensable philosophical tools for rightly understanding the faith, this can only be something we know if we know what the faith is in such a way as to make sense of this claim. If we do not, it is nonsense. Those who hold to an ecclesiology that entails the conclusion that the ancient and medieval "doctors" of the Church cannot have been wrong in any way, of course, will probably not accept this order. However, it seems to me that most of those who have this kind of "high" ecclesiology still insist on making arguments which seem to assume this order or something like it.
If we accept this order of things, we can understand how it might be the case that certain philosophical ideas assumed by the early Church (most notably simplicity and impassibility) really did add to the faith and/or distort it in discernable ways. For example, the idea of impassibility caused problems for Christology in that it became necessary to deny that the divine Son suffered when the man Jesus did, in spite of the fact that according to the orthodox view there was no other subject of the union, or to make paradoxical formulations like that he "suffered impassibly." In any case, these are things that must be argued, and the order gives us a way of understanding the conditions under which we can argue about them.
Finally, I think this allows us to be freer and less anxious with regard to questions concerning which philosophy or philosophies we adopt in the theological task. For that reason alone it is worth considering.
