Abstract
In developing a practical metaphysical foundation for the good life in a fallen world, Keith Ward provides more than an interesting argument for reconceiving reality as soaked with the divine. By developing a robust argument for a scripturally informed metaphysics, Ward offers a vision of ultimate reality that is structured by objective moral purpose through our sharing in the divine nature.
In this account, the metaphysical nature of moral purpose organizes our quest for goodness and the elimination of evil and grounds the objectivity of moral values. The difficulty, of course, is how to justify such a metaphysical conception of normativity once the post-Wittgensteinian turn towards non-realist linguistic idealism has captured imaginations.
Undeterred by this challenge, Ward engages in a scripturally inspired pragmatic reading of the history of Christian dogma which is as much focused on what makes sense to people in our time as it is on the demands of consonance with the conciliar history of the elucidation of Christian doctrine. As a pragmatic reading it is able to interpret the traditions of defining Christian doctrine as not infallible, but rather as the best attempts possible at the time to express the mysteries of the faith. Consequently, while these attempts should be respected as often constitutive of Christian self-understanding, they should also be critically engaged with in order to provide comprehensible interpretations of divine mysteries accessible for us today.
In this Anglican spirit, Ward departs from the readings of Christian doctrine offered by post-liberal analytical Thomists and others, and in their place offers a metaphysical interpretation of doctrine that is orchestrated by the New Testament motif of the reconciliation of all things in Christ. Drawing on an analogy with mental consciousness, he both envisages the perfection and simplicity of God in dynamic and creative terms and reconceives, in a weaker sense, fundamental Aristotelian–Thomist metaphysical properties traditionally applied to God: eternal, infinite and changeless. This weaker re-description upholds the uniqueness of God, reconceived now in the idealism of personalist metaphysics, and enables him to elucidate divine simplicity through the intrinsic connectedness of the divine properties.
If, for Ward, analytical Thomism leads to unnecessary metaphysical impasses, an unbalanced privileging of negative theology, in some quarters, justifies these dead ends by baptizing logical contradictions in the ineffability of the apophatic way. To counteract these problems, he recalibrates the balance between negative and positive theology by underlining the importance of the referential nature of ordinary language – the silence of the divine mystery is communicated through the Word made flesh in Jesus.
The revelation of God encoded in sacred Scriptures thus provides the hermeneutical key to overcoming the descriptive metaphysics of naturalism that has become dominant in many quarters today. Despite this Christian particularity, the metaphysical account offered by Ward in this and his many other writings opens up an illuminating normative vision of reality that is broadly acceptable to most religions and ethical traditions, even under the modern conditions of pluralism.