The movement of Thomas' Summa

It has been argued that Thomas' Summa is an Eschatological Foundationalism (Jenson, ST I).  That is a wonderful description and I would like to own it for my own project.  I've been reading the Summa for the greater part of the last seven years.   I think I am starting to see a structure and movement to it:

• Eschatological Foundationalism:   Borrowing from good neo-Platonic sources, we come from God and move back towards him. God is the telos of our existence. Our knowledge is rooted in this eschatological movement.
• Theology Proper:  Thomas then discusses the nature and names of God.
• Creation and Anthropology:  at the risk of oversimplifying hundreds of pages of difficult argumentation, Thomas is following the standard systematics approach.
• Ethics (part 1):  Thomas' approach at this point might appear different from modern systematics in that he deals with ethics in the middle of his project.  Rather, Thomas' approach is normal:  most systematics dealt with ethics (or at least an exposition of the Decalogue) in the middle of the project.
• Habits:  This is where I am now in my reading.  It's interesting that Thomas deals with habitus and virtu prior to the rest of the meatier theology (salvation in Christ, sacraments, church).  I wonder why that is.  I have a tentative answer:  habitus is our putting on the grace of Christ.  It's interesting that this comes logically prior, at least on Thomas' scheme, to salvation in Christ.

Thomas Reid: A Clean Epistemology

Thomas Reid has suffered under Reformed apologetics.   Few people actually have read what he said, and the caricatures of him are easy to ridicule.  That he was to old Princeton Calvinism what Locke was to Jonathan Edwards, few can deny.  But many in the Van Tillian camp, seeing “autonomous reason” everywhere, have savaged Reid.  Given my background and my long debates with Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, Reid’s works were like a fresh walk on the Scottish moors (maybe somewhat literally, since Reid is Scottish).

For the past three years I’ve been somewhat a Hegelian.  Hegel has some interesting things, but that takes one down a different path.  Last Christmas I finished reading Living in the End Times by the neo-Hegelian atheist Slavoj Zizek.  While the book had many fine criticisms of liberal democracy, towards the end–if I may sound like an Evangelical at summer bible camp–I felt a darkness that I had not felt before: extreme melancholy and a “mental shadow.”  There might be something to that description.   In Joseph Farrell’s God, History, and Dialectic he described Hegel as a “Gnostic Magus.”

Make of that what you will, back to Reid.   Reading Reid was an intellectual liberation.   When I was dialoguing with those Anchoretic traditions, and I would come to a verse that seemed problematic (like where Isaiah 53 explicitly teaches penal substitution, as does 1 Peter 3), I would get several responses, all along the same lines:  1) “Remember, that’s just your interpretation.  You can’t posit that against the entire Patrum Consensus” or 2) “Given what we believe about anthropology, etc., the verse can’t mean that.”

You know what?  Maybe they are right, but something kept saying in the back of my head, “That’s not how you use words.   That is the most raw form of special pleading imaginable.”  Eventually mental systems break under such cracks.  Reid’s answer came like a summer rain:   God created my brain in such a way, assuming I don’t have a concussion or something, that he will not deceive me.  If I can use the laws of logic and grammar to understand what the Anchorite says about something difficult like “All of God, essence, energy and operation, are hyperousia,” then I can understand something simple as when the prophet Isaiah tells me that the Servant suffered for the sins of my people.

But someone can respond, “Well, how do you know your mental faculties are working accordingly?”   There are several responses:

1. I can return the question, “They must be working well enough for me to understand your question.”  This is also the most practically devastating response to criticisms of sola scriptura.  If I can’t understand the Bible outside the teaching authority of the church, then I can’t understand the Bible when the teaching authority of the church quotes Scripture to me.  Even if we deny the principle of sola Scriptura, yet when explicit appeal is made to Scripture to ground a given dogma, then such an appeal must be exegetically sustainable.
2. This was Reid’s answer:  Forgo the question right away.  Simply suppose he is merry.  If you find out he is serious, then suppose him mad.

Some notes on Reid

Thomas Reid was responding to the idealism of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume.   In a nutshell, and woefully oversimplifying what they believed, they said that in every act of memory there are two objects, one mental object in my head and the external, mediate object in real life.  One of the dangers of this thought is that the external object, when the process is pushed to the limit, is dropped, leaving only as real the internal objects.  A later post will review Reid’s response to this line of thought.

Charles Hodge and Properly Basic Beliefs

I am becoming more and  more impressed by Charles Hodge’s so-called “rationalism.”  Far from stultifying the gospel, Hodge’s position safeguards the reliability of “truth-speak” and if taken seriously today, adds another angle to the “convert” phenomenon.   A properly basic belief is one that doesn’t need another belief for justification.  I’m not so sure if Hodge is making that claim.  However, he does anticipate some of Plantinga’s positions by saying that God so constituted our nature to believe x, y, and z.  My aim in this post is to show from Hodge’s own words that our cognitive faculties are (1) reliable and (2) made so by God.  I will advance upon Hodge’s conclusions:  a commoner can read the Bible and get the general “gist” of it apart from an infallible interpreting body.  Secondly, to deny the above point attacks the image of God.   Thirdly,  to deny the above point is to reduce all to irrationality.   The practical application:  Those who deny this position often find themselves looking for “absolute” and infallible arbiters of the faith.    Such a position denies a key aspect of our imago dei.

“Any doctrine [and Hodge is using this word in the technical sense of philosophic and/or scientific beliefs], therefore, which contradicts the facts of consciousness, or the laws of belief which God has impressed upon our nature, must be false” (I: 215).
“Our knowledge of mind, therefore, as a thinking substance, is the first and most certain, and the most indestructible of all forms of knowledge; because it is involved in self-knowledge…which is the indispensable condition of all knowledge” (I: 277).

It is interesting to note his reference to self-knowledge.  One is reminded of Calvin’s duplex cognito dei.

But What About an Infallible Interpreter?
Usually someone posits the Pope or the Fathers/Councils.   But if we examine what is papal infallibility, it’s only been used a handful of times.  This does us no good when we need to “infallibly interpret Scriptures.”  If we expand it more broadly, then we have to ask why Honorius wasn’t infallible.  The Fathers aren’t more helpful.  First of all, who and when are we talking of?  The pre-Nicene Fathers do very little exegesis and most of it is simply paraphrasing Scripture (anyone who is  trained in textual criticism knows exactly what I mean).   Nicene guys like Athanasius do a bit more, but most of it is clustered around a few Christological passages.  Of course, I agree with his conclusions, but some of the exegesis is painful.    There are others, like Gregory’s Moralia, but this suffers from the arbitrariness of allegorical interpretation.
At the end of the day, though, one has to come to grips with this proposition:  most of the time, Jerome and Augustine excepted, these guys are simply asserting their conclusion.  This is not exegesis and it really isn’t interpretation.  Even worse, as hinted above, these guys only deal with a small fraction of the biblical text (Chrysostom excepted).  So if you say that I need an infallible interpreter, then please point me to the rest of the infallibly interpreted passages!  There are other problems with these claims, but I will leave it a that.

If you reject this…

Then ultimately you are left with the position that “words don’t mean what words mean.”  To which I will respond, “How then may I really know what you and the Fathers are saying?”

Hodge and Simplicity Virtualiter

Takes the teeth out of the claim that Protestants are necessarily crippled by their view of Absolute Divine Simplicity:

…[S]tart with the revelation that God has made of himself in the constitution of our own nature and in his holy word.  This method leads to the conclusion that God can think and act, that in him essence and attributes are not identical (I: 564).

It’s also interesting to note Hodge’s comment about God constituting our nature in a certain way.  Shades of Thomas Reid.

To say, as the schoolmen, and so many even of Protestant theologians, ancient and modern, were accustomed to say, that the divine attributes differ only in name, or in our conceptions, or in their effects, is to destroy all true knowledge of God…If in God knowledge is identical with eternity, knowledge with power, power with ubiquity, and ubiquity with holiness, then we are using words without meaning (I: 371-372).
The attributes of God, therefore, are not merely different conceptions in our minds, but different modes in which God reveals himself to his creatures…just as our several faculties are different modes in which the inscrutable substance self reveals itself in our consciousness and acts (I: 374).

So what do we mean by simplicity?  Rome has a thorough, if ultimately chaotic, answer to this question.   Orthodoxy has an outstanding response to Rome, but nothing in terms of a constructive view of Simplicity.  Following Turretin, Hodge writes,
The attributes are to be distinguished not realiter, but virtualiter; that is, there is a real foundation in the divine nature for the several attributes attributed to him (I: 370).
What does virtualiter mean?

Richard Muller defines it as “literally, i.e., with virtue or power” (Muller 371).

It’s interesting that Muller mentioned “power.”  This corresponds with Radde-Galwitz’s interpretation of Gregory of Nyssa.  Alluding to Michel Barnes he notes that divine power is the causal capacity rooted in the divine nature; inseparable from the divine nature and gives rise to the divine energies (183; Barnes).  Further, each “Good” (or attribute, in our case) entails another.
Works Cited:
Hodge, Charles.  Systematic Theology, volume 1.
Muller, Richard.  Dictionary of Greek and Latin Theological Terms
Radde-Galwitz, Andrew.  Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and the Transformation of Divine Simplicity.

Some thoughts on republicanism

I am an unashamed monarchist.   I was thinking about the origins of the term Republic.   It is res publica, public things.   Without endorsing what is known as American politics, this idea provides a good template for society.   Government--and rule--is public.  Those who get something out of society have a duty to contribute to society.  This totally revamps social welfare.  Far from "gutting it" like many conservatives, this acknowledges a place for it but also puts an obligation on the recipient:  you also must give back to society.  As John Milbank has argued, ruling is sharing.