In recent years, several voices have begun advocating for ‘Christian Platonism’ as the only consistent pro-Nicene metaphysic. At the forefront of this movement is Hans Boersma, who proposes a Christian Platonist ‘sacramental ontology’ in which all creation participates in Christ as a divine ‘embodiment.’ While I am sympathetic to the need for a realist Christian metaphysic, I find that Boersma’s sacramental ontology collapses the Creator/creature distinction and veers into panentheism. In this essay I argue divine conceptualism, which one finds consistently throughout the reformed tradition, provides a better and more consistent Christian metaphysic than sacramental ontology. Divine conceptualism provides a realist, anti-nominalist and anti-materialist metaphysic while safeguarding the Creator-creature distinction and avoiding the panentheist pitfalls of sacramental ontology.
Christian Platonists, including Hans Boersma, frequently propose the following dichotomy: either one becomes a Christian Platonist (that is, adopts sacramental ontology), or one is a nominalist and therefore bound to be a naturalist and relativist, whether one acknowledges it or not. While this dichotomy may hold when Christian Platonism is defined negatively (as anti-modernism), it quickly fails when Boersma’s positive articulation of sacramental ontology is examined. There are numerous scholars, both contemporary and historical, who affirm a pro-Nicene philosophical realism and yet do not follow Boersma’s sacramental ontology. For example, scholars who maintain the divine conceptualism prominent in the reformed tradition provide a compelling example of a realist, pro-Nicene metaphysic which maintains and advances biblical categories in distinction from Boersma’s Christian Platonism. Thus, I argue that Boersma’s sacramental ontology fails and that reformed divine conceptualism provides a more solid way forward for a Christian metaphysic which undergirds Nicene orthodoxy.
One key implication of the metaphysical question is hermeneutics. Hermeneutics are grounded on metaphysics. If one adopts a sacramental ontology, allegorical hermeneutics necessarily follow. Since on a sacramental metaphysic Christ is mystically present in all things, the goal of interpretation when such a metaphysic is adopted is to encounter the mystical presence of Christ both in the world and the text of Scripture. By contrast, a divine conceptualist account lends itself toward a hermeneutic aimed at understanding authorially-intended meaning, since this metaphysic grounds its realism on the correspondence between divine ideas and existing entities. Thus, if a divine conceptualist metaphysic is preferable to sacramental ontology, a hermeneutic aimed at the literal sense likewise ought to be preferred over an allegorical one.