Never Doubt Thomas

The Catholic Aquinas as Evangelical and Protestant

Francis J. Beckwith

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781481307246
• eBook ISBN: 9781481307260
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Theologian, philosopher, teacher. There are few religious figures more Catholic than Saint Thomas Aquinas, a man credited with helping to shape Catholicism of the second millennium. In Never Doubt Thomas, Francis J. Beckwith employs his own spiritual journey from Catholicism to Evangelicalism and then back to Catholicism to reveal the signal importance of Aquinas not only for Catholics but also for Protestants.

Beckwith begins by outlining Aquinas' history and philosophy, noting misconceptions and inaccurate caricatures of Thomist traditions. He explores the legitimacy of a "Protestant" Aquinas by examining Aquinas' views on natural law and natural theology in light of several Protestant critiques. Not only did Aquinas' presentation of natural law assume some of the very inadequacies Protestant critics have leveled against it, Aquinas did not, as is often supposed, believe that one must first prove God's existence through human reasoning before having faith in God. Rather, Aquinas held that one may know God through reason and employ it to understand more fully the truths of faith. Beckwith also uses Aquinas' preambles of faith--what a person can know about God before fully believing in Him--to argue for a pluralist Aquinas, explaining how followers of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam can all worship the same God, yet adhere to different faiths.

Beckwith turns to Aquinas' doctrine of creation to question theories of Intelligent Design, before, finally, coming to the heart of the matter: in what sense can Aquinas be considered an Evangelical? Aquinas' views on justification are often depicted by some Evangelicals as discontinuous with those articulated in the Council of Trent. Beckwith counters this assessment, revealing not only that Aquinas' doctrine fully aligns with the tenets laid out by the Council, but also that this doctrine is more Evangelical than critics care to admit.

Beckwith's careful reading makes it hard to doubt that Thomas Aquinas is a theologian, philosopher, and teacher for the universal church--Catholic, Protestant, and Evangelical.

1

Why Thomas Today

For even as it is better to enlighten than merely to shine, so is it better to give to others the fruits of one’s contemplation than merely to contemplate.

St. Thomas Aquinas1

This is not an ordinary book about the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1225–1274). It is a book on how the work of Aquinas illuminates certain contemporary questions that are important to many serious believers across a variety of Christians traditions, including Protestant and Catholic. This book is also unusual insofar as it is born of the author’s own journey from Catholic to Protestant and back again.2

My earliest recollection of hearing of the work of Aquinas was in 1973, when I was a twelve-year-old student at St. Viator Catholic Elementary School in Las Vegas, Nevada, the city in which I grew up. But it was not in the classroom that I first heard of Aquinas. It was across the street at the Parish Community Center, which was hosting a four-day retreat led by three Dominican Catholic priests from the Bay Area. My parents had encouraged me to attend, since they were concerned that my newfound interest in Evangelical Protestantism (by way of a Jesus People congregation in downtown Vegas) was drawing me away from the Catholic Church in which they had me baptized as an infant. As best as I can recall, I had apparently made a nuisance of myself in my seventh-grade religion class, frequently asking the teacher, Sister Bernardus, pointed questions about the Bible, Christ, and belief in God that she did not seem particularly interested in sparring over. I can easily imagine my Italian mother telling my father, “Perhaps the visiting Dominicans can help.”

Carrying my Bible to each session, I had come prepared to do theological battle. So every evening, after many of the attendees had departed, I peppered the priests with a variety of questions. One priest in particular (whose name I do not remember) seemed eager to engage me. Looking back, I see him as remarkably patient and kind, especially given my take-no-prisoners apologetic case for the Evangelical Protestant understanding of the Bible and salvation that I had been appropriating over the previous six months. He suggested, among other things, that I did not know how to read Scripture (he was right, by the way) and recommended that I consult the works of a Dominican named St. Thomas Aquinas. Sadly, I did not take his advice. But I left that evening with great admiration (and envy) for the wonderful combination of deep spirituality and intellectual sophistication that I saw in those men. Although I found myself drifting away from the Church of my baptism, I was strangely warmed by what I saw in those Dominican priests.

Years later, while in college at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), I would encounter Aquinas yet again, this time in the works of the Evangelical philosopher Norman L. Geisler. While at a Christian bookstore, I came across, by happenstance, a book of Geisler’s entitled Philosophy of Religion.3 It addressed, among other things, some of the perennial questions in philosophy of religion, such as the relationship between faith and reason, the existence of God, the problem of evil, and the nature of religious language. Geisler, who had earned his PhD at Loyola University of Chicago, offered a conspicuously Thomistic approach to these questions, even though he was an Evangelical. I was completely mesmerized by this approach and soon came to consider myself a Thomist of sorts, though a Protestant one. It took me a couple of years, after I was in graduate school, to realize that Thomism was a distinctly minority view in the Evangelical world. But for me, it really did not matter. Aquinas just seemed to make sense.

After earning an M.A. at Simon Greenleaf University in 1984, I went on to Fordham University in New York City for Ph.D. studies in philosophy.4 It was there that I took courses from Fr. W. Norris Clarke, S.J., and Fr. Gerald McCool, S.J., both of whom were leading scholars of Aquinas. Although my course work at Fordham focused primarily on the history of philosophy, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of science—which were important to the work of my doctoral dissertation on David Hume’s argument against miracles5—I left New York City a more convinced Thomist than when I had arrived, even though I was neither an Aquinas scholar nor a consistent Thomist. I was a selective Thomist, taking from the “Angelic Doctor” what I thought was helpful to my Evangelical faith but largely ignoring writings that would force me to think more critically about my commitments on subjects such as grace, the sacraments, and the nature of the church. I was, in the words of the late Ralph McInerny (1929–2010), a peeping Thomist,6 though in retrospect I would describe myself as a doting Thomist. I adored Aquinas, but I had not yet availed myself of his wider corpus.

Not only did I not consult Aquinas’ wider corpus, but my reading of the Angelic Doctor was sometimes not faithful to the text, even in those areas in which I saw him as a theological ally. In retrospect, I think this was a consequence of the way in which virtually all of the leading lights in non-Catholic Christian philosophy—such as Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, William Lane Craig, and Richard Swinburne—had taught a generation of aspiring Evangelical philosophers how they ought to practice the discipline. To be sure, these thinkers were for me (and countless others) wonderful intellectual role models, exhibiting a philosophical rigor and thoughtfulness that has profoundly influenced how the wider world of academic philosophy approaches questions involving the rationality of religious belief and Christian faith in particular. But when it came to understanding Aquinas—a figure whose philosophical commitments seem difficult to classify under the categories of contemporary analytic philosophy7—I was confounded8 by the dominant way in which these and most other Christian philosophers of religion generally conducted their business.9 For this reason, despite my training at Fordham and my own reading of Thomas and his numerous interpreters, I did not take notice of what I did not know until well into my career as a philosophy professor.

Consider, as an example, my early work on how certain Christian philosophers (and other Christian academics) deal with the apparent conflict between Darwinian evolution and the doctrine of creation. Some of these thinkers argue for the existence of an intelligent designer (or God) by trying to show that there are certain aspects of the natural world—for example, the information content of DNA, the bacterial flagellum—that cannot only not be accounted for by evolution but exhibit such a high level of specified complexity that they seem to have more in common with human-made artifacts—for example, computer programs, mousetraps—than they do with the other aspects of the natural world that can be accounted for by chance, scientific law, or both.10 Darwin’s theory of natural selection is just such an account. So, the intelligent design (ID) advocate reasons that if we can exclude chance and law, whatever remains must be the product of an intelligent designer, just as a detective investigating a card-counting scheme is able to infer the intervention of an agent from a player’s highly improbable winning hands. This is a view I flirted with but never fully embraced.11 What ultimately moved me against ID was its diminished understanding of God as creator, which was contrary to what had been taught by classical Christian theists like Aquinas.12 Here is what I mean. As a theist, I believe that God is creator of everything, including not only those natural objects that allegedly exhibit irreducible complexity, but also every other natural object as well as the chance and the law in which all objects in the universe operate. If, as St. Paul told his audience on Mars Hill, it is in God that “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28), and if, as the author of Hebrews notes, “before him no creature is hidden” (Heb 4:13), then to postulate God as a theory to shore up what science cannot for the time being answer is to treat God as if he were a part of the created order rather than the source or ground of the created order itself. And yet, there are some Christian philosophers—some of whom I count as dear friends—who claim that if Aquinas were with us today, he would be a defender of ID theory.13 I think they are mistaken, and I will explain why in chapter 4 of this book.

As I dug deeper into St. Thomas and the classical tradition that he represents, I began to see that some of the other views attributed to Aquinas by certain Christian philosophers and theologians were off the mark as well. Some of these thinkers have been critical of what they believe are Aquinas’ beliefs about the natural moral law and natural theology, often concluding that the Angelic Doctor held to an exaggerated, and thus unbiblical, view of the power of human reason to know both morality (the natural law) and the divine nature (natural theology) apart from what God has revealed in Scripture. To buttress this analysis, some critics point to the fact that natural law arguments have failed to convince skeptics of traditional moral views, while other critics maintain that because Aquinas (allegedly) believed that faith in God requires that one first have a rational argument for God’s existence, true faith would be out of the reach of most ordinary people, and that seems inconsistent with the gospel message found in Scripture.14 But, as I argue in chapter 2, these claims are false, as much of what Aquinas himself says about human reason—especially in relation to natural law and natural theology—is consonant with what his critics say about the deficiencies of human reason.

On the other hand, there are some Christian philosophers and theologians—highly sympathetic to Aquinas’ views on the natural law and natural theology—who believe that his writings on the doctrine of justification are more Protestant than they are Catholic (or least they do not embrace the semi-Pelagianism these writers believe the Catholic Church affirmed at the Council of Trent, 1545–1563). These thinkers—all Evangelical followers of Aquinas—believe that if the Catholic Church had remained true to St. Thomas’ views on justification (or at least what these writers suppose them to be), there would have likely been no need for a Reformation. But, as I argue in chapter 5, Aquinas’ views are not only consistent with Trent, but consistent with what he inherited from his ecclesial predecessors (St. Augustine, Council of Orange) and with what the Catholic Church teaches in its modern catechism. Although Aquinas was no paleo-Lutheran, it is not difficult to imagine how a Protestant, enamored of Aquinas’ intellect and theological acumen, can read the Angelic Doctor as a kindred spirit, since his writings were untainted by the salvos and countersalvos of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. He was writing as a university teacher under the authority of a unified ecclesial body in which the issues that would divide the Western church nearly three centuries later were not yet in dispute. For this reason, reading Aquinas on justification is like being reintroduced to the question with fresh eyes. At least it was for me, when I was making my pilgrimage back to the church of my youth.

According to several of his biographers, as a small child, Aquinas often asked the question, “What is God?” As a mature scholar, he answers that question in a variety of places, including his two major works, Summa theologica and Summa contra gentiles. What stands out about Aquinas’ approach is that he believes we can know that God exists through our natural reason, but it is only by way of special revelation (or Scripture) that we can know particular things about God that unaided reason cannot know—for example, that God is triune and that he loves us. This distinction—between general revelation and special revelation—as I argue in chapter 3, is instructive in helping us answer in the affirmative what has become a controversial question (mostly) among Evangelical Protestants: “Do Christians, Muslims, and Jews worship the same God?” Oddly enough, many Evangelical friends of Aquinas—that is, Evangelicals who believe, like Aquinas, in the efficacy of natural theology15—answer this question in the negative. I argue in chapter 3, it cannot be the case that if two atheists who come to believe in the same God because of Aquinas’ arguments, and one of them later becomes a Christian and the other a Muslim, we should now say that they believe in two different Gods. This is because for Aquinas (and for all classical theists, Jews and Muslims included) there can in principle be only one divine nature that reason can deliver, regardless of what one may believe God has revealed specially through the Church, the Torah, the New Testament, or the Qur’an, even if those claims of revelation are inconsistent with each other. Given the acrimony toward Islam and Muslim immigrants that one finds in certain American Christian circles,16 perhaps Aquinas’ approach to the divine nature—a belief that traditional Muslims, Christians, and Jews hold in common—can lead to better understanding.

Who exactly was St. Thomas Aquinas?17 Other than perhaps St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430), he is the most influential theologian and philosopher in the history of the Christian faith, and one of the most important thinkers in the history of philosophy. In addition to his two most important works, the eight-hundred-page Summa contra gentiles (written between 1259 and 1265) and the three-thousand-page Summa theologica (written between 1265 and 1274, though never completed), Aquinas authored scores of treatises and commentaries on a wide range of topics including the philosophy of nature, metaphysics, the human soul, the nature of truth, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, The Sentences by Peter Lombard (1100–1160), and the Bible.

He was born around 1225 into an aristocratic family in Roccasecca, a city near Aquino on the Italian peninsula about halfway between Rome and Naples. In 1231, when he was five or six years old, his parents placed him in the Benedictine abbey in Monte Cassino, where he was educated and introduced to the monastic life. Eight years later Thomas was sent to study at the University of Naples, a secular institution founded by Frederick II, t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• 1. Why Thomas Today
• 2. Aquinas as Protestant
• 3. Aquinas as Pluralist
• 4. Aquinas as Theologian
• 5. Aquinas as Evangelical
• 6. The Aquinas Option
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index