On Theology (eBook)

PART 2

The Thomist Controversy

11

Letter to a Friend about the Thomist Challenge

Since around 2014, the evangelical theological world has been subjected to controversy originating from a group of writers including James Dolezal who have claimed that many American Evangelicals hold defective doctrines of the Trinity, God’s simplicity, his eternity, and his changelessness. The argument of these writers is that the evangelicals in question (myself among them) fail to conform to the definitions, arguments, and conclusions of Thomas Aquinas. In effect, the Dolezal group has charged these evangelicals with heterodoxy for their failure to agree with Aquinas.

In defending myself and others against these charges, I wrote a few short letters, journal entries, and essays, which I include below. I am not interested in pursuing the controversy further, but these pieces indicate the gist of my thinking about these matters. These essays were not written in a particular sequence, to be read in a particular order. There is overlap among them, which I have not attempted to smooth out.

DEAR ______,

You know, there’s this line in The Godfather, part 3, where Michael Corleone, played by Al Pacino, tears his hair and says something like, “Just when I think I’ve gotten out, they pull me back in!” He was talking about the Mafia, but I have similar feelings about academic theology. I retired to get away from all that. Then several times since, I’ve been assaulted with stuff about Dolezal and Helm (not to mention Swain and Allen!) about the Trinity, divine timelessness, and all.

No way am I going to analyze all the titles you’ve linked below. But in general I think that Scott Oliphint has the better argument.

What has happened is, I think, something like this: When I was in seminary, Van Til taught us to be skeptical of medieval and post-reformation scholasticism. Aquinas was a bad guy, for the most part. We were encouraged to be BIBLICAL, like the Reformers. Vos and Clowney picked it up from there: everything we do in theology must have an exegetical basis, and the chief theological categories are REDEMPTIVE-HISTORICAL, not logical, philosophical, or even ethical.

I emerged from this liking Aquinas and the scholastics a bit more than Van Til did, with an overall orientation closer to Edmund Clowney, but with more emphasis than Clowney on “application.” I called it “Something Close to Biblicism.”1 I found I could defend such things as simplicity, eternal generation, and divine timelessness from my biblical model. But I could not stop there. Scripture is given to us, not so that we can produce an abstract metaphysical account of everything, but for doctrine, correction, reproof, and instruction in righteousness that we may be complete and thoroughly furnished unto good works.

The Trinitarian metaphysic of Scripture is a background to its main gospel message, that the Son of God came to be WITH US, to die in our place, and to rise again.

And to me it is as “plain as a pikestaff,” as CVT used to say, that though God transcends time, he is completely able to enter the temporal world he has created and to reveal himself there unambiguously. He has done this, and we owe our salvation to that fact (John 1:14). He is “outside the box,” but he is also “inside the box,” for the box is his creation, and he is everywhere in the world he has made. Really present (Ps. 139). Outside time, but also inside time.

What has happened lately is that a lot of confessional/historically oriented people have failed to appreciate Van Til or to appreciate the Vos/Clowney model. They have gone back to an essentially scholastic position and have called it “classical theism.” Even worse, they have claimed, evidently, that when Scripture speaks of “God with us,” it is speaking non-literally, anthropomorphically, etc. What is literal in their view is that God is outside history, outside time, etc., and when it says God is in history, that is somehow bracketed.

I think that’s biblically wrong. I think I can defend the proposition that the biblical God is outside time (and I defended that years ago against the process thinkers and open theists). But it is just as plain from Scripture—plainer in fact—that God comes INTO time and becomes an actor in history. That is, in fact, the heart of the gospel. Terms like “nonliteral” and “anthropomorphic” have their uses. I think whatever we say about God transcends our literal understanding in some measure. But if it is in some way “anthropomorphic” to say that God became flesh, it is at least as anthropomorphic to say that “God transcends time.” But it is not right to put brackets around “God became flesh” and to suggest that it is much more adequate to say that “God transcends time.” Where does Scripture justify that kind of relative judgment? If the former expression reflects the weakness of our understanding, certainly the latter expression does too, at least as much. Or are we back to the Clark controversy where we must debate the meaning of “incomprehensibility”?

There is more analysis, more thinking to be done. But there is something deeply wrong with accommodating the God of the Bible to the Prime Mover of Aristotle and Aquinas.

12

Calvinism, Arminianism, and Thomism

This is a letter to myself, from my journal of Sunday, December 27, 2020.

I’m thinking that a lot of theological controversies arise out of confusion over the distinction between God’s transcendence and his immanence. As CVT pointed out, neo-orthodoxy made a terrible mistake in these categories, which I illustrated by the Frame square. I’ve also argued that recent Reformed Thomism neglects divine immanence, relegating it to “figurative” status, even though it is the heart of the gospel message. But I’m now inclined to think this distinction also illumines the historic difference between Calvinism and Arminianism. The difference between these is essentially this: Calvinism is impressed with God’s transcendence and doesn’t think much about his immanence. Arminianism does the reverse.

Some Calvinists get upset when you say that human beings must “choose” Christ. Yes, God’s choice precedes theirs. But he does not choose them without decreeing that they will choose him. “Choose you this day …” Human choice is vitally important.

Arminians, on the other hand, seem to deny Eph. 1:11, that God works everything according to his eternal plan (cf. Rom. 8:28).

Reformed Thomists don’t like the idea that God “responds” to events in the creation. But what about prayer?

A more comprehensive view of the truth is: (1) God brings everything to pass by an eternal decree. (2) Part of that decree is that God himself will play a role in history itself. (3) In his immanent role, he decrees to interact with finite events, so that he does one thing on Monday, something else on Tuesday. (4) His attitudes toward creation and parts of it respond to events (which of course are among the events decreed), so that when one thing happens, he responds in grace, e.g., and, when another thing happens, he responds in judgment. (5) It probably is not prudent, in the current theological situation, to say that God “changes” in his immanent relations. But it is not prudent to deny it either. We await a better vocabulary, and a more collegial theological society.

13

Why I Am Not a Thomist

Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) was an enormously influential scholar, a philosopher, theologian, and canon lawyer, and eventually declared a saint and a “doctor” of the Roman Catholic Church. He is one of the most influential thinkers of all time, possibly the most influential among Christian thinkers. But none of this entails that he was always right.

Over the years of my own theological study, I have taken a serious interest in Aquinas. I studied him as part of my college philosophy major. Then at Westminster Theological Seminary I took a course from Cornelius Van Til in medieval philosophy (focused on Aquinas’s Summa Theologica and Thomist scholar Etienne Gilson’s The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy1). At Yale University I had a course taught by George Lindbeck on “The Natural Theology of Thomas Aquinas,” and we read much of Aquinas’s Summa Theologica. When I returned as a teacher to Westminster, I continued to read Aquinas and to share my conclusions with the students. One of the first elective courses I taught at Westminster was “The Aseity of God,” in which I explored much of Aquinas’s thought on this subject and compared him with others like Van Til. More recently I published my own History of Western Philosophy and Theology,2 which contained a ten-page analysis of Aquinas as part of a chapter which dealt with the whole medieval period and compared Aquinas with a number of other thinkers.

Like most scholars who have studied Aquinas, I have gained a great admiration for the academic quality of his work. Though he lived less than fifty years, he produced large amounts of tightly reasoned books and articles that have deeply influenced later thinkers. He exegeted the Bible, commented on previous theologians and philosophers, and produced original ideas of high quality. His arguments are intricate and elaborate. One of his...