Thomas Aquinas, the Evangelical?

[Semper Fidelis]

216. Thomas Aquinas, the Evangelical? - Vatican Files

Until a few years ago, precisely because of his close identification with Roman Catholicism, few would have dreamed of seeing Thomas associated with a "Protestant" sensibility.

vaticanfiles.org

 

[RamistThomist]

This is pretty good. He does a good job with the secondary literature and does not make his arguments claim more than they do. He avoids hysterical overreactions but he does not think Thomas was a bible-thumpin Protestant, either.

 

[John The Baptist]

 

[RamistThomist]

We're due for another good Thomas thread.

 

[Polanus1561]

We're due for another good Thomas thread.

Aquinas may very well be the most mentioned Thomas on PB: behind Manton, Goodwinn, Watson and Boston.

 

[jacobcandler1689]

I just started the Summa (literally, twenty minutes ago!).

 

[Charles Johnson]

Aquinas is not my favorite theologian, but he's my favorite Romanist theologian.
That's like when they let you on the Jedi council, but don't grant you the rank of "master."

 

[John The Baptist]

‘They did not reject him as a hopelessly compromised theologian (the anti-Thomas temptation), nor elevate him as the chief parameter of Christian orthodoxy (the Roman Catholic temptation), but treated Thomas as an unavoidable conversation partner in the history of Christian thought to be read critically and generously in light of the Scripture Alone principle that the Protestant Reformation recovered for the whole church.’

This is gold…

 

[arapahoepark]

Aquinas is not my favorite theologian, but he's my favorite Romanist theologian.
That's like when they let you on the Jedi council, but don't grant you the rank of "master."

And we know how that played out...

 

[Charles Johnson]

And we know how that played out...

With a series of quality films?

 

[arapahoepark]

With a series of quality films?

I can make it work... Off the top of my head:
Aquinas as a young but brillant rower(?) of some sort in the Reforming Menance.
An impressionable monk in Attack of the Franciscans.
A seasoned but two faced monk in the Revenge of the Waldensians.

 

[Northern Crofter]

‘They did not reject him as a hopelessly compromised theologian (the anti-Thomas temptation), nor elevate him as the chief parameter of Christian orthodoxy (the Roman Catholic temptation), but treated Thomas as an unavoidable conversation partner in the history of Christian thought to be read critically and generously in light of the Scripture Alone principle that the Protestant Reformation recovered for the whole church.’

This is gold…

And this would be an interesting "What if" to hear argued: "...Scott Oliphint answers, “perhaps”,[12] when asked if Thomas would have joined the Reformation had he lived 250 later."

 

[No Other Name]

behind Manton, Goodwinn, Watson and Boston.

I am not sure this is still true. Hahaha

 

[Polanus1561]

Oops I meant ahead…

I am not sure this is still true. Hahaha

 

[John The Baptist]

“If the ‘five points’ are sufficient to define a Calvinist, Thomas Aquinas comes pretty close.”

Horton - For Calvinism
Page 28

Just gonna drop that right there

 

[Charles Johnson]

“If the ‘five points’ are sufficient to define a Calvinist, Thomas Aquinas comes pretty close.”

Horton - For Calvinism
Page 28

Just gonna drop that right there

I think most of us would agree that the five points are not anything close to sufficient for defining Reformed theology.

 

[John The Baptist]

I think most of us would agree that the five points are not anything close to sufficient for defining Reformed theology.

Of course

Edit:
In context, that was Horton’s point, that there was continuity between Calvin/other reformers and the medievals and Augustine, especially in the area of predestination.

Not so much definitions of grace, faith, and justification

 

[darrellmaurina]

I can make it work... Off the top of my head:
Aquinas as a young but brillant rower(?) of some sort in the Reforming Menance.
An impressionable monk in Attack of the Franciscans.
A seasoned but two faced monk in the Revenge of the Waldensians.

Totally off topic, but speaking as an Italian Calvinist (a very rare bird), and as someone who has actually attended a Waldensian church and has a whole bookshelf full of Waldensian books, I absolutely love this: "A seasoned but two-faced monk in the Revenge of the Waldensians."

Long live the Rev. Capt. Henri Arnaud and the memory of the Balsiglia di Val San Martino! (Google it -- a great deliverance for the Protestants against unimaginable odds, regarded at the time, in my view correctly so, as divine intervention.)

Those who know Waldensian history with at least three centuries of defending Scripture before the Reformation will understand the point. Sadly, that battle would never had been necessary if men like Aquinas had put soteriology before ecclesiology, but that's probably Arapahoepark's point -- Aquinas provided the theological justification for taking up the sword against "heretics" who rejected the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, even though a good case can be made that some of the "heretics" were far closer to Aquinas in theology than Aquinas himself was to what the Roman Catholic Church was quickly becoming as Aquinas' successors rejected the teachings of Peter Waldo, Jan Hus, and other reformers before the Reformation.

The Waldensian Synod in Italy today has plenty of problems, but the same is true for most of Presbyterianism today. Few on the Puritan Board would want to be blamed for the nuttiness of the General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland, or the nonsense being preached today from John Calvin's pulpit in Geneva. Waldensian history is wonderful even if the present is pretty problematic. To be fair, even in Italy there are men -- including the man who in American politics would be the equivalent to the Senate Majority Leader, who is a Waldensian and a member of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's party -- who remain evangelical and are conservative believers and have taken stances on social issues that are far riskier in Italy than saying the same thing in American politics. PM Meloni's publicly professed Christianity seems to be much more a matter of "traditional Italian culture" and rejection of Islam and immigration than personal faith, but that's opened the door to people like Senator Lucio Malan whose socially conservative views have in the past been severely criticized by the major Italian parties, including the conservative parties that in Italy tend to be economically conservative, not socially conservative.

 

[RamistThomist]

quinas provided the theological justification for taking up the sword against "heretics" who rejected the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, even though a good case can be made that some of the "heretics" were far closer to Aquinas in theology than Aquinas himself was to what the Roman Catholic Church was quickly becoming as Aquinas' successors rejected the teachings of Peter Waldo, Jan Hus, and other reformers before the Reformation.

Augustine's works against the Donatists probably set the standard, especially with his notorious exegesis of "Compel them to come."

 

[darrellmaurina]

We probably agree, @RamistThomist. To be fair, however, Augustine lived in a world in which the question was not whether the civil government should support religion, but which religion the civil government should support. It's not irrelevant that after his death, the Arians who conquered Hippo (and the rest of North Africa) expelled the orthodox bishops and sent them away to the parts of Italy which were still under the control of Nicene Christianity. The sword of the state that Augustine wanted to use against the Donatists ended up being used against his successors by the Arians, who by any theological measure were much worse than the Donatists.

Neither Aquinas nor Augustine were innovating in their views that the sword of the state should be used to promote religion and punish unbelief. My understanding -- and I would need to go back and re-read primary sources to be sure that what I have read in secondary sources accurately reflects the primary sources -- was that Aquinas lumped the Waldensians in with other heretical groups that were gaining adherents in that mountainous region of what is now southeastern France and northwestern Italy. It's one thing to say the civil government should punish obviously heretical groups like the Cathars, which likely had non-Christian origins or even pre-Christian origins, or the Bogomils and similar groups that had an Eastern or Balkan ancestry and had been heavily influenced by Eastern Orthodoxy to use Christian language, but despite Christian-sounding language, had fundamentally heretical doctrines. It's another thing to say the state should punish a group whose main offense was not perceived to be heretical doctrine, but rather refusal to follow orders from Roman Catholic bishops that only ordained clergy should preach with any exceptions to be made only by a special license from the bishop.

What made the problem of the Waldensians difficult for Roman Catholics of their era was that the Waldensians claimed their beliefs to be based on exegesis of Scripture which was in the public possession of the church, though in Latin, not the vernacular, rather than some sort of semi-gnostic secret philosophy of the "perfect" in Cathar and Bogomil and Albigensian and other circles that claimed a "hidden" or "secret" knowledge. Many of the issues with which the Waldensians contested against the Roman Catholics, in the context of the 1100s and 1200s, were not yet settled doctrine or had only recently become standard Roman Catholic practice, so the Waldensians could make a credible case to the laypeople, in ways the Reformers could not do as easily three centuries later, that the Roman Catholics were deviating and innovating by changing what the church had traditionally believed. Making things more difficult for the Roman Catholics, Peter Waldo, prior to his break from Rome, had paid to have priests translate the Latin Bible into the vernacular Occitan dialect, which was mutually understandable to speakers of early Italian and early French, and the Waldensians used the text of their vernacular Bibles, a text which had been translated by men whose orthodoxy the church didn't have any reason to reject, to say, "This is what we have always believed as Christians, why are your priests teaching something different?"

To avoid misunderstandings, I'm not trying to make the case that was made by many of the Reformers in the 1500s and 1600s that the Waldensians predated Peter Waldo, even though that's what the Roman Catholics of the 1200s believed and what the Waldensians themselves believed until the 1800s when better historical research showed, among other things, that one of the key documents in possession of the library at Oxford had an erroneous date of 1100 when the same document circulating in handwritten copies in Italy had a date of 1400. I don't think a pre-1173 origin for Waldensianism can be proven and the most plausible conclusion, based on what evidence has survived centuries of persecution and massive destruction of documents, is that Peter Waldo founded the movement rather than joining a pre-existing movement.

What Aquinas did was an important shift to say that the civil government should use the sword of the state to suppress any religious belief that is not in communion with Rome. That goes beyond Augustine, who believed the Donatists should be suppressed because they were in theological error on a number of points, not merely because they didn't accept the authority of the Roman Pontiff.

To his credit, despite all of his many other problems, the current head of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Francis, who knew a number of Waldensians while growing up in Argentina and whose family back in Italy lived in an area with significant Waldensian influence, chose to apologize to the Waldensians a few years ago. A lot of things might have gone very differently in the Middle Ages if the first Pope who met Peter Waldo and was impressed by him and kissed him had been followed by a successor who had Pope Francis' attitude, instead of excommunicating Peter Waldo for refusing to obey the orders of the Bishop of Lyons.

Aquinas' arguments for persecution of the Waldensians (and others in that era) need to be read in context, but he made a key shift that disagreement was Rome was enough to justify civil persecution. That goes beyond older Roman Catholic approaches and had severe consequences as the Inquisition gathered power and was able to say disobedience merited persecution even apart from provable heresy.

 

[Phil D.]

In historical context Augustine's support of using "force" against the Donatists was very heavily qualified. It is often claimed that he advocated and even originated the death penalty for religious offenses, which is patently untrue. I shared some of his writings on such matters in a previous thread.

 

[RamistThomist]

In historical context Augustine's support of using "force" against the Donatists was very heavily qualified. It is often claimed that he advocated and even originated the death penalty for religious offenses, which is patently untrue. I shared some of his writings on such matters in a previous thread.

I know. I do not believe Augustine advocated the death penalty against the Donatists, but only that he believed the state should prosecute them.

 

[Phil D.]

I know. I do not believe Augustine advocated the death penalty against the Donatists, but only that he believed the state should prosecute them.

Sure, I didn't mean to insinuate that you did. In any event, from what I have found Augustine's advocacy of punishing religious dissidents was almost always in connection with their commission of heinous crimes like maiming and killing orthodox clergy and burning orthodox churches. It wasn't a matter of simply punishing people with non-orthodox views.

Even ostensibly reputable sources make some stunningly false statements on the matter. For example, an article in Chamber's Encyclopedia claimed that Augustine's advocacy for punishing dissidents involved “chastisement…even to burning.” (London: 1874, 1:552) This claim is also made by the Pentecostal "historian" Rachel Hazeltine (How did it Happen?, 1958, p.281) When I chased it down, this was a horribly mangled misattribution of a statment by Augustine in yet another letter to a magistrate, named Dulcitius.

Now what are we to do, seeing how many, with the help of the Lord, find the way of peace, through your instrumentality? Surely, we neither can nor ought to hold them back from this impulse toward unity [i.e., the enforcement of relevant laws], through fear that some, utterly hard and cruel to themselves, may destroy themselves by their own will, not ours. Indeed, we should pray that all who carry the standard of Christ against Christ and boast of the Gospel against the Gospel may forsake their wrong way and rejoice with us in the unity of Christ.​

​

But since God, by an inscrutable yet just disposition in His will, has predestined some of them to the ultimate penalty, undoubtedly it is better for some of them to perish in their own fires, while an incomparably greater number are rescued and won over from that deadly schism and separation, than that all should equally burn in the fires of hell as punishment for their accursed dissention.​

​

...They [some Donatists] thought, as their reports show, that you had threatened to kill those who were arrested, not understanding that you spoke of the death they wanted to inflict on themselves. For you did not receive the right of life and death over them by any laws, nor was it laid down in the imperial decrees that they should be put to death when the execution of the decree was imposed on you. In thinking that their bishop should be addressed by letter you showed most humanely the restraint of mildness put on officials by the Catholic Church, even those appointed by the power of a Christian emperor to correct errors by fear or by persuasion. [W. Parsons, ed., St. Augustine, Letters, (Washington D.C.: 1981), 5:4]​

​

Here's how the Augustine historian A. Fitzgerald summarized things.

​

…Gaudentius [a Donatist] kept a low profile until about 420 when the tribune Dulcitius began a comprehensive enforcement of all anti-Donatist legislation…Gaudentius sent two letters to Dulcitius. In one he threatened to barricade himself and his faithful in his cathedral and set fire to the building if Dulcitius enforced his edicts. Dulcitius forwarded the letters to Augustine for reply…Gaudentius claimed Razias [a Jewish zealot - 2 Maccabees 14:37-46] as an example of how far one ought to go to avoid capture and contact with alien evil. To avoid contagion and forced idolatry, Razias tried several methods of suicide before he succeeded. Augustine repudiated Razias’ actions. [Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, (Grand Rapids: 1999), 375]​

​

In other words, it wasn't at all a matter of state execution by burning, but rather suicide/murder..!