Aquinas Among the Protestants

Manfred Svensson, David VanDrunen, Manfred Svensson, David VanDrunen

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781119265948, 9781119265894
• eBook ISBN: 9781119265986
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

AQUINAS AMONG THE PROTESTANTS

This major new book provides an introduction to Thomas Aquinas's influence on Protestantism. The editors, both noted commentators on Aquinas, bring together a group of influential scholars to demonstrate the ways that Anglican, Lutheran, and Reformed thinkers have analyzed and used Thomas through the centuries. Later chapters also explore how today's Protestants might appropriate the work of Aquinas to address a number of contemporary theological and philosophical issues.

The authors set the record straight and disavow the widespread impression that Aquinas is an irrelevant figure for the history of Protestant thought. This assumption has dominated not only Protestant historiography but also Roman Catholic accounts of the Reformation and Protestant intellectual life. The book opens the possibility for contemporary reception, engagement, and critique and even intra-Protestant relations and includes:

• Information on the fruitful appropriation of Aquinas in Anglican, Lutheran, and Reformed theologians over the centuries
• Important essays from leading scholars on the teachings of Aquinas
• New perspectives on Thomas Aquinas's position as a towering figure in the history of Christian thought

Aquinas Among the Protestants is a ground-breaking and interdenominational work for students and scholars of Thomas Aquinas and theology more generally.

Part I
The Protestant Reception of Aquinas

1
Deformation and Reformation: Thomas Aquinas and the Rise of Protestant Scholasticism

Jordan J. Ballor

A half‐millennium separates us from the reform movements of the sixteenth century. Our understanding of the sources of these diverse phenomena have developed over this time in significant and often contradictory ways. One recurring narrative of the Reformation period and beyond emphasizes the rupture and antinomy between Protestant reform movements and the medieval church and its traditions. The specifics of this narrative vary depending on a number of factors, including the confessional or ideological sympathies of the narrator, the significance placed on specific figures, ideas, or events, and the praise or blame credited to different factors. In general, however, such narratives involve the transition between a more‐or‐less unified world of the Middle Ages to a diverse and dynamic landscape in the aftermath of protest and reform efforts at the dawn of the early modern period. For either good or ill, the sixteenth century saw a substantial change to the world, in theological, social, and political terms.

As one recent historiographical account of this multifaceted phenomenon puts it, “the Reformation ended more than a thousand years of Christianity as a framework for shared intellectual life in the Latin West” (Gregory 2012, 45). Brad S. Gregory’s study emphasizes the discontinuity of this result with the intentions of the Reformers, but there is nevertheless a sharp rupture in the intellectual life of the West from the sixteenth century and beyond. For Gregory, the roots of this break can be traced back to earlier centuries, and it is only with the rise of figures like Martin Luther and John Calvin that these roots grow in size and strength to crack the intellectual consensus of the Middle Ages. For Gregory, the divergence between two basic traditions can be found in the disputes between the medieval thinkers Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus: “By predicating being of God and creatures univocally, Scotus brought both within the same conceptual framework” (Gregory 2012, 37). This thirteenth‐century development “would prove to be the first step toward the eventual domestication of God’s transcendence, a process in which the seventeenth‐century revolutions in philosophy and science would participate – not so much by way of dramatic departures as by improvising new parts on a stage that had been unexpectedly transformed by the doctrinal disagreements among Christians in the Reformation era” (Gregory 2012, 37–8). Gregory’s narrative is representative of a much longer line of scholarship that judges the Reformation to be a kind of deformation of the great medieval synthesis, a synthesis most often understood as epitomized in the life and thought of Thomas Aquinas.

Other accounts likewise emphasize the epochal shift represented in the sixteenth century, but read the evidence in diametrically opposed terms. David H. Hopper (2011) thus writes that the “otherworldly religious ethos” of the Middle Ages engendered its own kind of divine domestication, notably manifested in church teaching and practice related to merit, and that Luther’s challenges to teachings on repentance and indulgences overturned these deformations. As Hopper puts it, “the break with obsessive otherworldliness in Luther lies in his (re)discovery of the unnatural grace of a transcendent God revealed in the cross of Christ as testified to in the Christian Scriptures and in interaction as well with events of his time, interactions that lent weight in turn to his interpretation of Scripture” (2011, 69–70). On these kinds of accounts, the Protestant Reformation breaks the chains of human‐centered religion and decadent philosophizing characteristic of medieval scholastic theology.

These two contrasting and representative contemporary examples illustrate some of the challenges in attempting to understand accurately the complexities and implications of the momentous events of the sixteenth century. Each account manifests in its own way an update and particularization of older lines of scholarship and interpretation. The confessional or ideological investment that many have in making sure the narrative both places the right people on the proper sides and credits and debits these figures accordingly makes it difficult to get behind modern accretions and intellectual overlays imposed on historical source material. The interpretive significance of individual figures like Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, Martin Luther, and John Calvin, for instance, is at least to some extent a modern innovation, as the introduction and other contributions to this volume indicate. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries mark a shift in the historical understanding in this regard, and it is here that Thomas Aquinas becomes perhaps the primary touchstone for understanding medieval theology and Luther and Calvin become the chief codifiers of the Protestant reformations.

This is not to say that such figures were not of enormous significance in their own times and afterward. But it is to say that the placing of such figures into a binary, for or against, of historical judgment both constricts and simplifies our historical understanding. It constricts it by reducing the number of significant figures to a handful of the great thinkers of history. And it simplifies our understanding by casting these already stylized and often decontextualized figures into a simple account of villains and heroes.

Coming to better terms with the legacy of Thomas Aquinas among Protestants in the early modern period requires understanding of the varied contexts of the development of Protestant thought, including Protestant narratives of deformation and reformation, the reformers’ diverse interactions with and formation in medieval scholastic traditions, and the complex developments of Protestant scholastic theology in the sixteenth and into the seventeenth centuries. Contrary to simplistic depictions of early Protestantism as a radical disjunction with medieval traditions, the reception of Thomas Aquinas among Protestants is indicative of the Reformation as a multifaceted intellectual and institutional phenomenon.

Early Protestant Narratives of Deformation and Reformation

The diverse Protestant narratives of decline at the time of the Reformation provide an important context for understanding the broader reception of medieval theology, including that of Thomas Aquinas.

Perhaps the first major Protestant attempt to systematically explore the history leading up to the sixteenth‐century events was the Chronicon Carionis, inaugurated by Johannes Carion (1499–1537), and subsequently continued by Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560) before reaching its final form under the auspices of Caspar Peucer (1525–1602). Carion’s original work, a universal history from ancient times up through accounts of the successive Christian emperors, was amplified and rendered into Latin by Melanchthon. Peucer would add accounts, continuing the chronicle up to the reign of Charles V. Although the Chronicon largely focuses on civil power, it gives occasional and periodic attention to specifically religious or theological matters, particularly as these concern overlap in disputes between ecclesial and civil power (see Prietz 2014).

At a notable point in the Chronicon (book 4) there is a discussion of the intellectual contexts of the rise of papal power, pointing specifically to medieval scholasticism. Here the narrative describes Peter Lombard as the originator of scholasticism, which enhanced the authority of the pope by focusing on extrabiblical sources. The complexities of scholastic discourse were increased by Lombard’s interpreters, Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus, who, “having contended with each other in subtleties, so filled the church with questions, some fatuous, some impious, some insoluble, and at the same time so corrupted and defiled philosophy, that they imposed on more recent writers, William of Ockham and others, the necessity of disagreeing with them” (Melanchthon and Peucer 1572, 440, as quoted by Gaetano 2010). These scholastic subtleties led to “remarkable conflicts,” which were only finally ended with the advent of the “light of restored doctrine” (Melanchthon and Peucer 1572, 440). According to the Chronicon, this scholastic doctrine obscured the teaching of Scripture, confusing it with the disputes of the Platonists and the Aristotelians over ethics, physics, and metaphysics. Scholastic teaching also corrupted papal laws, inextricably confusing them ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Reception, Critique, and Use of Aquinas in Protestant Thought
• Part I: The Protestant Reception of Aquinas
• Part II: Constructive Engagement
• Index
• End User License Agreement