Theology and Metaphysics

David Hart describes the work of theology, as opposed to the work of metaphysics, as follows: “Theology is not an art that abstracts from history toward eternity, from facts toward principles, but one that – under the pressure of the history it is called upon to interpret – finds the sphere of its narrative expanding into ever greater dimensions of the revealed, crossing the line between the creaturely and the divine (and so that between the ontic and the ontological) because that line is already crossed, not symbolically but in fact, in the concrete person and history of Jesus. In Christian terms it is possible to identify a realm of the immanent only because it appears as a distinct mode within the discourse of divine transcendence, as a sphere of being that declares God’s glory while, manifestly, not being God. Theological talk of the transcendent and immanent is meaningful because it occurs within a continuous account of what has happened within history, and not at the outward circumference of ‘reality.’”