This project—what we now designate as Submetaphysics—did not begin as a system of theology or a program of philosophy. It arose from a moment of epistemic rupture: a recognition that modern discourse about knowledge, truth, and meaning had become unmoored from any stable referent. What began as an analysis of competing modes of inference—deduction, induction, and abduction—quickly revealed deeper structural fractures in how reality itself is approached. These fractures were not merely methodological; they were ontological.
At the center of this reorientation stands a decisive insight:
Truth is not an epistemic construct; it is an ontological category.
But this must be understood carefully—not as an abstract affirmation of “being” in general, nor as a neutral metaphysical statement. This order is not an innovation, but a rediscovery—not speculative, but structurally necessary. Ontology must precede epistemology because the stability of referents is a necessary precondition for meaningful knowledge claims. Without ontological grounding, epistemology floats without anchor. It is the only order in which meaning remains coherent, truth retains referential integrity, and speech retains moral accountability. Truth is relationally grounded in the transcendent Creator, who not only upholds the order of reality but defines its coherence, intelligibility, and moral weight. In secular models, ontology and epistemology chase each other in circles. In the biblical model, God breaks the loop—He gives both the world and the Word.
Therefore, truth is not simply discovered like a static object, nor constructed by linguistic consensus. It is disclosed—revealed through covenantal relationship with the One who is. It carries ontological status because it reflects what truly is; it carries moral authority because it proceeds from the One who alone has the right to define what is. Therefore, our orientation to truth cannot be neutral. It is relational, moral, and covenantal.
This recognition demands a reordering of inquiry itself. We reject the modern tendency to treat ontology, epistemology, and semiotics as parallel, adjacent, or dialectically entangled disciplines—expecting their tension to yield meaning. Instead, we affirm their intrinsic hierarchy, rooted in divine being:
Ontology precedes epistemology, just as being precedes belief, and divine speech precedes human reasoning.
Apologetics cannot defend what ontology has not first established.
Inference must be judged not merely by coherence or utility, but by its correspondence to relationally grounded being.
From this reordering arises the need for a new discipline—a frame beneath frames:
Submetaphysics: the ontological grammar beneath all inquiry, accountable to the Creator.
This framework rests upon two irreducible ontological commitments: first, that God exists as absolute, self-revealing, moral Creator; second, that man, though fallen, retains an ontological imprint of divine design—a moral structure capable of response. These are not neutral axioms but revelational presuppositions. The first is ontological: God's self-existence, prerogatives, and communicative authority. The second is anthropological: that the human moral agent, while epistemically impaired, is not morally inert but structurally accountable. All analysis flows from this binary: the Creator who reveals, and the creature who suppresses, responds, or aligns.
Submetaphysics refers to the relational and ontological preconditions for all meaningful metaphysical and epistemological inquiry. It does not begin by asking, “What exists?” but rather, “How do categories of existence arise, and how do they become intelligible in the first place?”
It examines the ground beneath metaphysics—not in abstraction, but in relation to the Transcendent Being who reveals, names, and sustains all things. Submetaphysics recasts the classical categories of substance, form, and act through the lens of reality, relational distinction, and moral personality.
Unlike secular systems that begin with autonomous reason, empirical coherence, or linguistic convention, submetaphysics begins with relational alignment to the Creator. It holds that all intelligibility presupposes a morally accountable posture toward the One who makes reality known. In this model, knowing is not fundamentally cognitive—it is covenantal.
Thus, submetaphysics is not a rejection of metaphysics, but its necessary foundation. It reminds us that metaphysical categories—being, substance, truth, law—are not neutral. They are relationally charged, because they are grounded in a Person. They carry moral weight because they are revealed, not invented.
Submetaphysics is the recovery of that reality.
What follows is not a deduction from within an autonomous epistemic space, but a declaration of the necessary ontological conditions that make knowledge and meaning possible in this model. A central contribution of this framework is the recovery of a neglected but necessary sequence: truth is not first an epistemological question, but an ontological one. In both secular philosophy and much of theological discourse, ontology and epistemology are often treated as mutually informing—or even interchangeable. This model corrects that flattening.
Once the relational nature of reality is acknowledged, hierarchy necessarily follows:
The One who is (ontology) determines what can be known (epistemology), and only then what can be signified (semiotics).
Truth is not merely derived from being—it is an ontological category in its own right, grounded in the aseity of God: the self-existent One from whom all being and meaning ultimately flow. Because God alone is self-existent, only He holds the prerogative to both instantiate ontic realities and define their ontological types. Any attempt to bring something into being (ontically) or to define its nature (ontologically) apart from God's prerogative constitutes a violation of the moral and ontological order He alone sustains.
Knowledge, then, is a relational participation in that divine disclosure. Meaning is a faithful representation of what God has made known.
This sequence— Ontology→Epistemology→Semiotics→Pragmatics —is not a convenience. It is a metaphysical necessity. To reverse or collapse it is to invite epistemic confusion and semiotic distortion. And this, we contend, is precisely what modern systems—whether secular or theological—have done. They have reduced truth to coherence, and meaning to use. The relational-submetaphysical model restores this order: truth is ontologically grounded—because it proceeds from the One who is. Knowledge is epistemically mediated—through relational encounter with the self-revealing Absolute. Meaning is semiotically expressed—in accordance with the order that the Creator of Order has revealed.
Diagram: Theistic-Ontological Grounding vs. Secular Drift
This visual contrasts a theologically anchored hierarchy of meaning with the fragmented, recursive architecture of secular intellectual frameworks.
In the upper sequence, reality is structured from the top down: One True
God (Alpha and Omega) → Ontology (what is) → Epistemology (how we know) → Semiotics (how meaning is conveyed) → Pragmatics (how it is communicated). This reflects the covenantal order of Scripture: truth is revealed, being is fixed, knowledge is relational, and language is grounded in typological substance and moral intent.
In the lower sequence, the Source is removed. Once the ontic Author is rejected, ontology becomes speculative, epistemology becomes autonomous, and semiotics and pragmatics collapse into manipulation and drift. The result is not plurality of thought, but the disintegration of meaning—a semantic free-float where disciplines orbit without gravity.
This diagram exposes the root of modern confusion: not intellectual complexity, but ontological severance. By restoring divine grounding, the framework recovers meaning from the origin downward—and realigns all subordinate disciplines under a theistic, typological order.
This is not merely a philosophical structure—it is a theological one. God’s being is not only the first cause, but the defining source of all intelligibility. We do not begin with human perception or inference. We begin with the One True God.
This framework proceeds with certain ontological presuppositions regarding the One True God—without which the entire structure would collapse. It affirms:
Aseity: God is self-existent, dependent on nothing; all other being is contingent upon Him.
Unity: God’s being is indivisible, internally coherent, and without composition.
Singularity: God is the only self-existent being—without ontological peer, rival, or analog.
Immutability: God does not change in essence, purpose, will, or moral character.
Infinity: God is without limit—not in spatial terms, but in being, power, knowledge, and moral perfection. His nature and prerogatives are boundless.
Absoluteness: God is not one being among others, but the necessary ontological reference point without whom no category—being, truth, or meaning—can hold.
These are incommunicable attributes: attributes unique to God and not shared (even analogically) with created beings. They reflect His ontological otherness.
Goodness: Goodness is not arbitrarily defined by divine will, but is necessarily grounded in God’s eternal nature. He is good in essence; all moral order reflects and flows from this essential goodness.
Revelation: God has freely chosen to disclose Himself—truthfully, relationally, and covenantally.
Lordship: God alone holds the prerogative to define, instantiate, govern, and judge all things.
These are communicable attributes: reflected analogically in moral agents (as image-bearers), though never exhaustively. They form the basis of relational participation.^
These are not speculative attributes. They are the ontological preconditions for intelligibility itself—making truth, knowledge, and meaning possible. Without them, the sequence Ontology → Epistemology → Semiotics collapses into relativism or coercive constructivism.
From that foundation it follows:
We can know truly only when we are rightly related to the One who is. Truth is not merely accessible—it is morally confrontational.It demands relational response. And only from within that posture can we signify rightly—can we use words, symbols, and categories that reflect the world as God has revealed it.
Being gives rise to knowing; knowing gives rise to meaning. This is the ontological architecture that submetaphysics recovers—and upon which all that follows will rest.
This framework affirms that while man is fallen, he is not epistemically nullified. Unlike Calvinist doctrines of total depravity, which assert the wholesale incapacity of fallen humanity to perceive or respond rightly to divine truth, this model upholds the enduring (though impaired) moral architecture of the imago Dei (image of God). The human person remains structurally responsive—possessing a suboperative moral capacity (the deontic–modal unit) and a conscience that still echoes divine obligation. The problem is not incapacity, but volitional suppression—to varying degrees. Thus, moral awareness remains ontologically embedded and phenomenologically accessible, though often selectively resisted. In this light, prevenient grace does not create new faculties but confronts the soul with truth it is structurally equipped to recognize. Moral blindness, then, is not the absence of moral structure, but a refusal of relational alignment.
All of these terms—deontic–modal unit, suppression, prevenient grace, and others—will be developed in greater depth throughout the framework.
This project proceeds from a fundamental conviction: inquiry is never morally neutral. Every question asked, every interpretation offered, and every use of language is already a positioning of the soul. Thought is not autonomous—it is accountable. This framework does not aim for symmetrical engagement with every academic discipline it critiques. Its method is not comparative but diagnostic—rooted in ontological primacy, not disciplinary parity. Because modern systems operate within fragmented epistemologies or internally referential semiotic loops, they lack the ontological access required to mount a critique against a model that confronts them from outside their horizon. Thus, what may appear as non-reciprocity is in fact epistemic integrity: this project does not borrow alien categories to justify its coherence, but exposes their insufficiency from a relational, propositional, and moral frame that they cannot match without abandoning their own.
From this flows the posture of the project, grounded in three orienting commitments:
Language exists not merely to express human thought, but to respond to divine self-disclosure. All categories—epistemic, ontological, semiotic—must be referenced back to God. To speak truly is not only to describe rightly, but to align relationally with the One who grounds all reality.
Clarity is not a luxury—it is a form of reverence. In a world where distinctions are blurred by confusion or manipulation, precision becomes moral. The difference between sign and referent, ontology and epistemology, appearance and essence, is not pedantic—it is protective. To misname is not merely to err—it is to mislead.
Every act of reasoning, speaking, or framing is covenantal. To imply, suggest, emphasize, or exclude is to locate oneself within a moral order. Language is not neutral. No argument is without consequence. Every articulation either participates in truth or departs from it.
This posture undergirds every subsequent critique and proposal. What follows is not offered in a spirit of suspicion, but of relational fidelity—not to a method, but to a Person. The tone may at times be severe, but only because the distortion of language is never merely academic. When words are corrupted, lives are misled.
This model seeks not only to diagnose such corruption, but to recover a path of coherence—where meaning, morality, and being converge once more under the lordship of Christ, the only begotten Son of the One True God.
Essays 1–6 focus on vertical Creator–creature analysis; Essays 7–10 shift to horizontal, creature–creature interaction. This progression traces a moral arc: from relational rupture, to ontological restoration, to communicative responsibility within a contested field of meaning.
From this point of departure, we introduce a family of conceptual tools—each designed to illuminate and critique secular frameworks at their deepest points of instability:
Truth is not merely a matter of correspondence between statements and facts. It is the outflow of a person’s alignment with Divine reality. Only within this relationship can propositions be rightly anchored.
This model distinguishes between the cataphatic concreteness of ontic tokens and the anaphatic boundaries of ontological types. While echoing Van Til’s ontological distinction, it extends it with relational and semiotic specificity: God alone defines not only what is instantiated (ontically) but what can be instantiated (ontologically)—assigning each entity its identity, scope, and moral significance within creation.
This framework analyzes tropes, codes, pseudo-types, and pseudo-tokens to expose how cultural systems manipulate meaning—and how Christ reclaims both identity and reality through the purification of corrupted signs.
Throughout this project, the term Relational Ontology serves as the primary designation for the framework being developed. It anchors all subordinate models—such as the Relational–Propositional Model of Truth, the DM Unit (Deontic–Modal), and the Reformation of Semiotics—in the central claim that being and meaning are rooted in the One True God’s relational nature.
Where context requires emphasis or contrast, the framework may also be referred to as:
Relational–Biblical, to highlight its departure from secular or autonomous models;
Reverent Relational Regeneration, particularly in moral or soteriological applications.
These are not competing systems, but thematic variations within a unified ontology—a framework in which truth, morality, and meaning are defined by covenantal alignment with the One True God.
This framework proceeds with conviction, but not hostility. It does not speak to impress, provoke, or triumph—but to reason plainly, expose gently, and restore reverently. Where the tone is strong, it arises from moral clarity, not contempt; from reverence, not superiority. Distortions are not named to condemn, but to awaken—to call the reader into deeper alignment with the truth that both confronts and restores.
Those willing to test every claim and consider every call are invited not merely to observe, but to respond.
Footnotes
*While this model draws on vocabulary from semiotics (token/type), theology (cataphatic/anaphatic), and metaphysics (ontic/ontological), these terms are not used loosely or interchangeably. Rather, they are realigned ontologically, converging around the same structural distinction between what is instantiated and what is divinely defined. This disciplinary synthesis reflects the model’s commitment to restoring semantic coherence under God’s prerogative. See also
Glossary
.
^While attributes like aseity or infinity are strictly incommunicable, others—such as revelation and lordship—are functionally communicable: not in their divine origin or authority, but in their relational extension. That is, creatures may participate in or mirror these attributes through delegated roles, moral alignment, and covenantal response.
