Karl Barth, Herman Bavinck, and Analogical Metaphysics: A Reformed Response to John Betz

Abstract This article is a response to John Betz's Christ, the Logos of Creation . Agreeing with Betz's assessment that Karl Barth misunderstood the Catholic tradition of analogia entis handed down from Thomas Aquinas to Erich Przywara, I will argue that the heart of what Betz calls Barth's ‘prophetic point’ lies in Barth's repudiation of the pantheistic/immanentistic implications of the radical intellectualism of early‐modern rationalism and post‐Kantian idealism. After a brief survey of the developments of analogical metaphysics in historic Protestantism, I turn to the Dutch neo‐Calvinist dogmatician Herman Bavinck to illustrate the viability of analogical metaphysics in modern Protestant theology. Bavinck's explicit indebtedness to the Thomistic tradition in his development of analogical metaphysics as an ‘orthodox yet modern’, Reformed and catholic response to both modern pantheistic/immanentistic metaphysics and anti‐metaphysical trends in theology and philosophy serves to demonstrate my thesis that confessional modern Protestantism is in fact aligned with the tradition of Thomas and Przywara in fundamental ways.