metaphysics and history

A follow-up to my recent post on Adam Roberts’s new novel Lake of Darkness. I said in that post that Adam is a metaphysical writer, and that’s something that fascinates me about his fiction. But metaphysics is not my native tongue; I am able to grasp most prominent metaphysical concepts, but not easily, and I don’t employ them comfortably.

One interesting development in Christian theology in recent years has been a resurgence in metaphysical argument after a long period in which theology was governed and directed by an attention to salvation history. David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God has been perhaps the most important and influential book in this regard; I think I see Hart’s influence in the decision by Katherine Sonderegger to begin her systematic theology with The Doctrine of God – God conceived within the conceptual frame of classical metaphysics – before moving on to the specifically Christian understanding of God as Triune. I find this development interesting; but for me personally it is not welcome. I am not a metaphysical thinker but a historical thinker, and in trying to grasp the Christian Gospel, salvation history is where I begin and end. I am strongly more sympathetic with a (Lutheran or Barthian) theology that starts with the Cross and works backward and forward from that.

So I read a book like Lake of Darkness with delight, but its theological framework is essentially alien to my way of thinking about God. I can appreciate and enjoy – and I do, very much – but as a kind of outsider; again, like someone speaking a laboriously acquired second or third language. “No ideas but in things,” William Carlos Williams said; for me, it’s “No ideas but in people and events.” And no theology except the Theology of the Cross.