📖 Biblical Definition
While Scripture does not use the term "metaphysics," it makes definitive metaphysical claims. God is the ultimate reality — self-existent, eternal, and the ground of all being: "I AM WHO I AM" (Exodus 3:14). All things were created by Him and through Him and for Him, and in Him all things hold together (Colossians 1:16-17). Biblical metaphysics is theistic realism: there is an objective reality created and sustained by a personal God, and that reality is knowable because God has revealed it. The material world is real (not illusion), the spiritual world is real (not superstition), and both are under God's sovereign rule.
📜 Webster 1828 Definition
The science of the principles and causes of all things existing.
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METAPHYS'ICS, n. [Gr. meta, after, and physika, physics.] The science of the principles and causes of all things existing; the science which investigates the first principles of nature and thought. Note: Webster rightly understood metaphysics as the pursuit of first principles — the foundational questions about what exists, why, and how we know it. For the Christian, Scripture provides the authoritative answers to these questions.
📖 Key Scripture
• Exodus 3:14 — "God said to Moses, 'I AM WHO I AM.'"
• Colossians 1:16-17 — "By him all things were created... and in him all things hold together."
• Acts 17:28 — "In him we live and move and have our being."
• Hebrews 11:3 — "By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God."
⚠️ Modern Corruption
Metaphysics has been hijacked by New Age spiritualism and anti-realist philosophy.
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Modern culture has corrupted metaphysics in two directions. Popular culture associates the word with crystals, chakras, and New Age bookstores — turning the rigorous study of ultimate reality into mystical self-help nonsense. Meanwhile, academic philosophy has largely abandoned metaphysics through positivism and postmodernism, declaring that questions about ultimate reality are either meaningless or unanswerable. Both errors deny what Scripture affirms: that reality has a definite structure established by God, that this structure is knowable, and that the fundamental question of metaphysics — "What is ultimately real?" — has a definitive answer: the triune God who reveals Himself in Scripture.
Usage
• "Biblical metaphysics begins where all sound philosophy must: with the self-existent God who declares 'I AM WHO I AM' as the ground of all reality."
• "The New Age bookstore labeled 'Metaphysics' sells the opposite — not the study of ultimate reality but flight from it into subjective fantasy."