Mining the Gold of Contemporary Theo-normative Visionings while Avoiding the Fool’s Gold of Ontotheological Caricatures
Abstract
This essay unfolds from the vantage point of panSEMIOentheism—a theological and metaphysical orientation that affirms God’s presence as manifest in signs, wonders, and logoi, constituting a cosmos of symbolic mediation and participatory meaning. Within this frame, theology is not merely discursive reasoning about God but a semiotic engagement with divine self-disclosure.
Against this background, the essay critiques the over-application of the ontotheological fallacy by contemporary thinkers such as Heidegger, John Milbank, and Metropolitan Kallistos Ware. While their normative theological instincts—emphasizing apophasis, personalism, and participatory metaphysics—are deeply aligned with the gold standards of the Christian tradition, their genealogical and historical accounts often fall into caricature. The reductive portrayals of scholasticism or Scotus, in particular, obscure the theological richness and complexity of their actual positions.
Instead of rejecting metaphysical theology wholesale, this essay calls for a refined retrieval: a mining of the tradition’s semiotic ore, attentive to both symbolic disclosure and historical nuance. It honors the likes of Maximus, Eriugena, Bonaventure, Scotus, Peirce, McCord Adams, and Ingham as witnesses to a theo-logic of participatory signification. Ultimately, the work invites theologians to distinguish between the fool’s gold of genealogical oversimplification and the true gold of theo-normative visioning—a vision that is metaphysically coherent, historically faithful, and spiritually luminous.
Mining the Gold of Contemporary Theo-normative Visionings while Avoiding the Fool’s Gold of Ontotheological Caricatures
While there is certainly such a thing as the ontotheological fallacy, I doubt it has been committed anywhere near as often as the ontotheological caricature, where critiques can become what they resist.
There are modern theologians whose theological instincts consistently embody the best normative approaches of the Christian tradition and who, in their constructive visionings, both employ and urge normative methods that are deeply in continuity with the gold standards of our tradition. When it comes to both how we ought to talk about and walk with God, their theologies are exemplary.
The dispositions and propositions of theologians who would most resonate with my own panSEMIOentheism—which emphasizes the revelatory and symbolic (manifestations, signs, and wonders)—include the Cappadocians, Christian Neoplatonists, Maximus, Damascene, Eriugena, Anselm, Abelard, Bonaventure, Scotus, the German Idealists, Peirce, Bulgakov, Maritain, Lonergan, Clarke, Bracken, Gelpi, Marilyn McCord Adams, Mary Beth Ingham, and Amos Yong.
Other thinkers whose normative urgings are similarly exemplary include the late Metropolitan Kallistos Ware and John Milbank. Like (a charitably interpreted) Heidegger, they advocate salient personalist and existential correctives that help clear the ontotheological ground. Unlike Ware and Milbank, Heidegger couldn’t offer a constructive vision that’s suitably rational, supra-rational, and trans-rational, because he couldn’t fight his way out of his wet anti-rational paper bag—that is, radical apophaticism—having sawed off the very epistemological limb in which his fragile, half-hatched, phenomenological eggs were nested.
While Heidegger’s alethic disclosure model might, at first glance, resemble Peirce’s infinite semiosis, you can’t kick its epistemic tires because all he left were its rims; and when you raise its interpretive hood, there’s no semiotic engine.
Despite their impressive theological instincts and constructive brilliance, both Ware and Milbank fall prey to a kind of ontotheological caricature in their critiques of Western theology. Their "ready–fire–aim" treatment of scholasticism (in Ware’s case) and of late scholasticism, particularly Scotus (in Milbank’s case), results in historical and interpretive portrayals that are thin, brittle, and often misleading. Ironically, the very theologians they reduce to foils for their arguments are themselves more nuanced than the depictions allow. Nevertheless, the normative theological visions that Ware and Milbank advocate—rooted deeply in apophatic reverence, participatory metaphysics, and ecclesial embodiment—remain among the richest and most compelling contributions to the modern theological landscape.
Supplement: Genealogical Misfires, Normative Riches—A Theological Recomposition
I. Ontotheological Fallacy vs. Ontotheological Caricature
Heidegger's critique of metaphysical theology targets attempts to conceptualize God as a highest being—an ens summum within a metaphysical system. But many theologians—the Cappadocians, Dionysius, Maximus, Aquinas, Bonaventure, Scotus—never commit this fallacy.
Modern critics like Milbank and Ware sometimes overapply this critique, issuing ontotheological caricatures of complex traditions. In doing so, their critiques can become what they resist.
II. Milbank and Scotus: Theological Biography as Theobiographical Caricature
Milbank’s narrative of Scotus as the father of univocity, voluntarism, and metaphysical flattening functions as a theological biography—or more precisely, a theobiographical narrative. It presents a moralized genealogy, not a dispassionate history.
However, scholars like Mary Beth Ingham and Marilyn McCord Adams argue that:
• Scotus' univocity is semantic, not ontological.
• His metaphysics is grounded in divine goodness and the primacy of Christ.
• His ontology emphasizes freedom and affective participation.
Thus, Milbank's portrayal is better read as a symbolic drama of metaphysical decline, not a literal account.
III. Normative vs. Constructive Theology
Normative theology refers to how theology ought to be done—its methodological integrity, metaphysical coherence, and liturgical grounding. Constructive visioning is the speculative articulation of theology’s content, embedded in particular metaphysical or cultural idioms.
According to Bernard Lonergan’s functional specialties:
• Normative theology aligns with "Systematics"
• Constructive visioning aligns with "Communications"
A natural theology fits within "Foundations"; a theology of nature helps shape theological idiom and public imagination, thus residing in "Communications."
IV. Ware, Milbank, and Heidegger: Structural Convergences and Divergences
All three thinkers offer apophatic correctives to metaphysical overreach:
• Heidegger critiques ontotheology and Western metaphysics, proposing aletheia (disclosure) and Being beyond being.
• Ware critiques scholasticism in favor of mystical theosis and liturgical ontology.
• Milbank critiques univocity and nominalism to recover participatory ecclesial metaphysics.
But each also risks reductive caricature:
• Heidegger’s radical apophaticism leaves no epistemic engine.
• Ware flattens centuries of Latin theology.
• Milbank turns Scotus into a dramatic foil.
Nonetheless, each affirms a deeply theological instinct for mystery, participation, and symbolic mediation.
V. From Apophasis to Pansemiotic Participation
panSEMIOentheism emphasizes:
• Symbolic realism: signs, wonders, and logoi as manifestations of God.
• Participatory metaphysics: drawing from Maximus, Eriugena, Bonaventure, Scotus, Peirce, and Adams.
• Christic theophany: the Logos as the form of revelation, intelligibility, and eschatological participation.
Semiotics, then, becomes the grammar of grace.
VI. Historical Continuity and Theological Retrieval
Anchors in this theological trajectory include:
• The Cappadocians: Trinitarian participation
• Dionysius and Maximus: symbolic hierarchy, logoi
• Damascene and Eriugena: visible theology and liturgical metaphysics
• Anselm, Abelard, Bonaventure, Scotus: rational mysticism, affective epistemology
• German Idealists & Peirce: mediated immediacy, semiotic realism
• Bulgakov and Maritain: Christic metaphysics, integral humanism
• Lonergan, Clarke, Bracken, Gelpi: dynamic metaphysical method
• McCord Adams & Ingham: dignity-based metaphysics and participatory theodicy
• Amos Yong: Pentecostal cosmology and Spirit-logic
These figures resist reduction and invite wonder.
VII. Conclusion: The Irony and Gift of Misapplied Critiques
The irony is sharp: those who critique ontotheological distortions often perpetrate ontotheological caricatures. Yet their constructive theological instincts remain rich:
• Their critiques open space for reverence and symbol
• Their normative visions reconnect theology to tradition’s gold
• Their failures are historical, not methodological
The challenge is to retrieve without reducing, and to correct without caricature.