Thomas Aquinas
Oliphint’s Chapters
The second instalment of the review of Oliphint's new book on Aquinas.The entire review is published in the Journal of IRBS Theological Seminary (2018): 163-93. It may be purchased at www.rbap.net. The last instalment next month, dv.
Oliphint’s Chapters
In his Introduction (Chapter 1) the author
outlines his ahistorical approach to Thomas (2-3) and sketches his life and
achievements. The titles of the two central chapters, ‘Foundation of Knowledge’
and ‘Foundation of Existence,’ give the game away. Oliphint pursues the
Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment foundationalist theme first by extracting
the Five Ways from Thomas’s context in the ST
and other writings, and then by treating them as free-standing ‘cosmological
arguments.’ They are seen as functioning as the foundation of both Thomas’s
metaphysics and of his epistemology, and hence of his Christian theology.
Oliphint does not attempt to
explain to his readers any of the context of the proofs of the existence of God
in the ST that we have been reminding
ourselves of. Rather he treats the Five Ways as if they were Aquinas’s sole
foundation of theology, and so as providing the sole foundation of the
rationality of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ. Rather inconsistently, however,
he does take advantage of Aquinas’s appeal to the Scriptures in his treatment
of natural theology, the biblical warrant of such rational theology (which he
takes to be disclosed particularly in John 1, Romans 1, Acts 17 and so on) and
his exegetical errors in understanding these passages. He does not stop to ask
by what authority these passages have the distinctive role they possess. Why
does it matter to Aquinas, a philosopher as Oliphint treats him, what Paul or
John or Luke thought? By the way, he does not reckon much to Thomas’s
expository skills: ‘He was no exegete’ (121).
When dealing with the First Way,
Oliphint notes that Exodus 3:14 is mentioned in the preface to their discussion
(ST 1a 2,3). Does this change things?
He comments:
The quotation
from Exodus is in no way meant to impinge on the purely philosophical process
in which Aquinas, following Aristotle, engages in this proof. It is not
sufficient simply to quote a Bible verse; Thomas should have argued and shown
how the content of revelation grounded his arguments. Instead, he bases them in
natural reason . . . (61)
The reader gets here a glimpse of Oliphint’s
view that in proving God’s existence Aquinas’s thinking ought to have been more
biblical, not merely philosophical, or perhaps not even philosophical at all,
but revelational. But Aquinas is in fact just that: ‘more biblical’ in that he
pays attention to what Luke reported (Acts 17), and Paul (Romans 1), and John
(John 1). Oliphint is strangely blind to the significance of the fact that before Aquinas’s Five Ways are set
forth, God is discussed from authoritative Scripture.
The fact that Oliphint follows
philosophers since Thomas who have treated the Five Ways in abstraction from
what Thomas has to say about Christian theology is a puzzle. Why does he do
this? My answer is that Oliphint sees the Five Ways through the eyes of the
business of apologetics as it has developed in the Enlightenment and beyond.
Yet I think it is fair to say that nowhere in his treatment of the proofs of
the existence of God does Aquinas hint at such apologetics. Oliphint’s
ahistorical approach extends to apologetics, which also has a history.
Thomas is undoubtedly interested
in the fact that the doctrine of God as revealed can also be demonstrated (scientia). In this he moves from
revealed theology to natural theology, except that, there being only one God,
the concept of God argued for in the proofs is in fact the God of revealed
theology. So as we have already seen, the two are exercises of scientia, of revealed theology as based
on Scripture, and of natural theology based on ‘natural reason.’ These two
projects are complementary, side by side, not linear, the one being the
exclusive foundation of the other. In his natural theology, Aquinas is engaged
in promoting theology, this time, the doctrine of God, not systematic Christian
theology as a whole, as capable of being established in demonstrative ways.
This would point to the Five Ways being a philosophical, demonstrative
business, from the effects of God’s activity discernible by reason and the
senses, to the conclusion that God must exist (based on Rom. 1:20). But the
conclusion, the concept of God that is instantiated, is identical with the God
and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. This is what may have confused the debate
that occurs of whether the Five Ways is a piece of theology or of philosophy.
Aquinas more than once says that
the Five Ways are exercises in nature and its relation to grace. That is to
say, grace builds on nature, it does not supplant it. Christianity is not
gnostic. This is rather different from Oliphint’s attitude to nature, as in
‘natural reason.’ Natural human gifts and powers are not primarily seen by him
as a gift of God to be relied on, but as an expression of mankind’s godless
rebellion. Its supposed neutrality (unexplained) is a mask. At this point
Oliphint seems prisoner of a fairly recent development in Reformed thought,
where nature is uniformly regarded as in tension with grace. There is talk of a
duality or dualism, a nature/grace dichotomy, and so on. These expressions are
the call sign of one of Abraham Kuyper’s tendencies, sharpened by Herman
Dooyeweerd, and exported to North America in several locations—Westminster
Theological Seminary in Philadelphia being one of them. But judged by the
historic Reformed attitude to nature, it is an innovation. This is how Oliphint
comes to accept the preposterous assertion that reliance on nature as a
theological source is ‘Arminian’ (e.g., 121). To earlier Reformed theology,
nature and grace were not antagonistic toward one another.
It is surprising that Oliphint
does not even note the place of Aquinas as a prime source of later medieval
scholasticism’s impact in the development of Reformed Orthodoxy. Sadly, he has
nothing to say about any of this. Nonetheless, students of their theology will
be aware of the fact that Reformed theologians in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries had positive things to say about natural theology which mirror to an
extent what we have seen in Thomas’s ST.
So it is that in the first chapter of his Institutes
of Elenctic Theology the Genevan theologian Francis Turretin (1623-87)
raises the issue of natural theology. He frames his discussion in terms rather
like Thomas. The Third Question of the First Topic is entitled ‘Whether natural
theology may be granted.’ This is equivalent to asking, ‘Is natural theology
permissible?’ Here Turretin is in controversy with the Socinians, who denied
it. He affirms it.
The orthodox, on
the contrary, uniformly teach that there is a natural theology, partly innate
(derived from the book of conscience by means of common notions [koinas ennoias]) and partly acquired
(drawn from the book of creatures discursively).[1]
He cites the time-honored texts, Romans
1:19-20, 2:14, Acts 14, and 17, and so on.
Turretin and Reformed theologians
more generally see natural theology warranted by these biblical passages as
referring to “some knowledge of God as Creator and preserver however imperfect,
corrupt and obscure; another [i.e., revealed theology] to have a full, entire
and clear knowledge of God as Redeemer and of the lawful worship due to him.”[2] In Romans, Turretin argues:
He [Paul] wants
to demonstrate that neither the Gentiles by nature (chap. 1) nor the Jews by
the law (ch. 2) could be justified (because all are sinners), but only by the
gospel revealed by Christ.[3]
Such a distinction between natural and
revealed theology is for the Reformed ultimately based on Calvin’s twofold
knowledge of God: God as Creator (in Book I of the Institutes) and then God as Redeemer in Christ. The Westminster
Confession’s references to the ‘the light of nature’ (1.1; 1.6; 10.4; 20.4; and
21.1; 21.7) and those of the 1689 Baptist Confession similarly (1.1; 1.6; 10.4;
20.2; 22.7), seem to be in line with Thomas’s understanding of John 1. Note
also Calvin on John 1:9, where he says:
[F]rom this
light the rays are diffused over all mankind as I have already said. For we
know that all men have this peculiar excellence which raises them above other
animals, that they are endued with reason and intelligence and that they carry
the distinction between right and wrong engraved on their conscience. There is
no man, therefore whom some perception of the eternal light does not reach.[4]
The Reformed came to adopt a way of
theological education that mirrored that of the Roman Catholic scholastics.
After all, many of them had encountered the Reformation having first been
trained as Roman Catholic educators.
Here is one explanation of how
Oliphint comes to be seriously awry in the way he treats the Five Ways as an
apologetic. At one point he mentions how, since their introduction, the Five
Ways have taken on a life of their own (55). This is certainly true. I believe
he himself understands them in this fashion, as exercises without any place in
the overall thought of Thomas himself or of the church, but as a species of
‘evidential apologetics.’ These are the products of natural reason, of
philosophy (12). Once the Five Ways were circulated there was nothing to stop
people changing the original purpose of these proofs, to demonstrate this
fundamental article of the faith, that God exists, by reason, and migrating
them to apologetics. This is what happened first in the era of the
Enlightenment, and then in the last century and in the current one. The
scriptural and Christian context of the Five Ways was excised; they were
extracted from this context and became timeless exhibits in the glass case of
‘Reason and Religion’ and ‘Proofs of God’s existence,’ as Oliphint points out.
He mentions their uses by modern evangelicals such as Norman Geisler, R. C.
Sproul, John Gerstner, and others (55-56).
Oliphint’s understanding is not
intended to praise Thomas, but the reverse. Having been re-located in this way,
more significant is his assessment of the Five Ways and their place in
apologetics. Oliphint’s own interest in them is largely due to them together
forming a distinct apologetic strategy, one that he is resolutely opposed to,
and not as part of understanding Aquinas’s rather complex thought, even though
Aquinas and not apologetics is the topic of his book (56). But Aquinas ought
not to be tarred with this Enlightenment brush. It is a failure of Oliphint’s
ahistorical approach. Oliphint’s understanding of apologetics is also
ahistorical.
Oliphint concurs in this
extracting of the Five Ways from their original context in Thomas, not
recognizing their place as demonstrations, at a tangent from the development in
dogmatics, of the articles of the Christian faith, as we saw earlier. He does
this to make his critique of Thomas more pointed. He exaggerates the importance
of the Five Ways, as in “Thomas thinks that natural reason forms the
foundational structure of which revelation is the superstructure, in part
because of his understanding of certain biblical passages” (13). There is no
evidence for this in the ST. Such
foundationalism is too simplistic a model for Thomas’s understanding of the
connections between faith and reason.
Revelation affords truths about
God not available via natural reason alone. We have seen that, for Aquinas,
revelation functions as the source of the articles of the faith, knowable by
certitude, by reliance upon authority. And how could Thomas discuss and justify
natural theology foundationally at the same time while relying on the articles
of the faith?
By grace we have
a more perfect knowledge of God than we have by natural reason. The light of
grace strengthens the intellectual light and at the same time prophetic visions
provide us with God-given images which are better suited to express divine
things than those we receive naturally from the sensible world. Moreover God
has given us sensible signs and spoken words to show us something of the
divine, as at the baptism of Christ when the Holy Spirit appeared in the form
of a dove and the voice of the Father was heard saying This is my beloved Son. (ST,
1a 12.13)
Oliphint’s sharp critique of Thomas in
Chapters 2 and 3 of his book pivots on his own neo-Calvinist apologetics, even
though Aquinas (not apologetics) is the ostensible topic of his book (55-56).
Once the Five Ways were relocated
they fared differently according to the different ways in which they are used.
It is a fact that they pre-date the skepticism of David Hume, as also the
philosophy of Immanuel Kant (124). But considered as contributions to Christian
natural theology, either Roman Catholic or Reformed, they are more timeless,
having an abiding place in these theological outlooks. We must never forget
that. Once Oliphint has divested the Five Ways of their medieval apparatus and
complexity, though seemingly being largely unaware of this treatment of them,
then (as far as I can see) there remains little or nothing of Oliphint’s
treatment of Aquinas that would not be applicable to a treatment of the
context-less cosmological arguments of a modern collection of such arguments,
or of their textbook discussion.[5]
It is fair enough to comment on a
Great Thinker with one’s own interests in mind, but one cannot necessarily form
an estimate of such a thinker’s greatness from doing so. I shall try to make
some comments on the author’s treatment of topics in Chapters 2 and 3, even
though they are often beside the point as far as an understanding of Aquinas is
concerned.
[1] Francis
Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology,
trans. George Musgrave Giger, ed. James T. Dennison, Jr. (Phillipsburg, NJ:
P&R Publishing, 1992), 1.3.4 (1:6).
[2] Turretin, Institutes, 1.4.6 (1:11).
[3] Turretin, Institutes, 1.3.6 (1:7).
[4] John Calvin, Commentary on the Gospel of John
(CTS, repr. Baker Book House, 1979), 38.
[5] It is testimony
to the strength of this contextless emphasis that the contemporary scholar of
Aquinas, Brian Davies, can edit a contemporary guide and anthology, The Philosophy of Religion, (Oxford:
O.U.P, 2000), in which he devotes a section to cosmological arguments, one of
which is a Way of Thomas, without supplying any original context.
