Toward an Ecumenical Metaphysics? A Response to Reviewers of Christ the Logos of Creation

Abstract After a series of promising ecumenical meetings in 1929 and 1931 with the Jesuit Erich Przywara, who advocated an analogical understanding of the relationship between God and world – doing so in part to ward off the danger posed by modern forms of pantheism – Karl Barth abruptly threw down the gauntlet and presented a serious obstacle to Reformed‐Catholic dialogue. In the preface to the Church Dogmatics , he called the analogia entis “the invention of Antichrist and the chief reason, all others being trivial, for not being Catholic.” But was it really? Was it not, in fact, something all Christians could agree about: that creation says something about God, as Paul says in Romans, but only analogically (Rom. 1:20; cf. Wis. 13:5); and that while God is in creation in the way that an artist is in his or her work, God is ultimately beyond it, dwelling in “unapproachable light” (1 Tim. 6:16)? In this article, the author of Christ the Logos of Creation: An Essay in Analogical Metaphysics responds to reviews by Andrew Davison, Angela Franks, Keith Johson, Cambria Kaltwasser, Shao Kai Tseng, and Archie Spencer – in the hope that, a century after Barth’s famous verdict, now that we know much more about Barth’s and Przywara’s concerns, a new verdict can be reached and a new way forward can be found – in the direction of a Christocentric ecumenical metaphysics.