The <i>Analogia Entis</i> for Reformed Theology: Retrieving Calvin's Implicit Metaphysics

Abstract The famous controversy between Emil Brunner and Karl Barth which led to Barth's ‘No!’ was driven by disagreements over how to read John Calvin: Barth and Brunner never agreed on whether Calvin had a doctrine of the analogy of being. This article rekindles the debate. It argues that Calvin implicitly frames the God‐world relationship in analogical terms because he systematically rejects both ontological monism and ontological dualism. Calvin's critique of any monism that collapses the distinction between God and creation presents itself especially in his engagement with the theologies of Michael Servetus and Andreas Osiander. His critique of any Gnostic dualism, moreover, governs the way he thinks about the effects of the Fall. He insists that the Fall brings about an existential separation from God, but no essential alienation. Because Calvin frames the relationship between God's Being and the world's being neither as univocal (monism) nor as equivocal (dualism), the article concludes ex negativo that Calvin's thought inhabits an analogical metaphysical framework. This conclusion is positively confirmed by Calvin's unwavering defense of Chalcedonian Christology, which models the relationship between God and humanity as non‐confused, yet non‐separated.