The Next Few Weeks

I’ll be in Florida all of next week, so I will probably not be posting anything.
However, I do have plans of things to discuss in the weeks following.  As you can probably tell by the amount of information on Aquinas on this blog, I really like his stuff.  Also, I think Aquinas’s philosophical theology is [...]

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Who Needs the Forms?

The whole realist/nominalist argument among the Medieval philosophers often seems arcane and pedantic to us post-moderns.  I mean, who cares if the form is in the thing or somewhere else?  The whole idea of a form in things is way too “spooky.” Reality is given to us; we don’t need forms right?  Well, without answering [...]

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Medieval Architecture and the Summae: Theology’s Aesthetic Counterpart

The Middle Ages fashioned summae in stone and stained glass as well as in theology.  In the twelfth century a new architecture (what would later be called pejoratively “Gothic” in contrast to the earlier “Roman” style) produced a building out of freedom and synthesis.  Sharp arches pointed toward heaven and, since the arches could sustain [...]

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St. Thomas in Protestant Thought

The Protestant Reformation was, among other things, a reaction to the late Medieval church and a return to the Church Fathers.  The sixteenth-century Reformers were highly critical of the doctrine of faith espoused by their Catholic contemporaries, the Schoolmen (the Catholic theologians at the various universities). By and large, later generations of Protestants seem simply [...]

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Congar on Essentialism in Aquinas

Any attempt to present him [Thomas] as an ‘essentialist, that is, as being conscious of and as affirming first of all the common divine essence, and only secondarily the Persons in that essence, would be to betray the balance of his theology.  Such an interpretation should no longer be possible since the appearance of the [...]

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Aquinas and the God of the Bible

Roger Olson is one among many scholars who follow in line with Karl Barth’s critique of Medieval (particularly St. Thomas) concepts of natural theology and their effect on the doctrine of God.  Olson notes that Thomas’s “portrait of God seems quite foreign to the God of the scriptural narrative, who genuinely grieves and sorrows and [...]

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Dumb Generalities

Some have most likely heard, as have I, that one huge problem with the Medieval period is that they considered there to be only one type of being.  The theory goes that from Jon Scotus Eriugena to Meister Eckhart there was no adequate distinction of being as it should be distinguished between Creator and creature. [...]

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Christ the Medium

Wolfhart Pannenberg, in his book Metaphysics and the Idea of God, concludes that Jesus is the solution to the over-abstraction of the concept of God by modern philosophy.  Jesus is concrete.  He is real and actually existed in history as the Principium of all creation.  Pannenberg did not say anything new by employing this argument [...]

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Borrowed Truth

As I read it is becoming more clear to me that folks like Van Til, Schaeffer, and Bahnsen did not invent the idea that Modern Philosophy has borrowed turf from Christianity.  Van Til was critical of Medieval Philosophy for being too rationalistic but Ettiene Gilson in his The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy argues that Modern [...]

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Historical Survey: Chrysostom and the Origenist Controversy (IV)

John, later named Chrysostom (”Golden Mouth”), was born in Antioch during the reign of emperor Constans which fell in the years 340-350.  He was trained in rhetoric by the renowned pagan Libanios.  In 371 John was appointed as an official reader in the Antioch church by bishop Meletios and having soon thereafter learned of plans [...]

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