History of Philosophy and Christian Thought - Lesson 36

Dr. Ronald Nash

History of Philosophy and Christian Thought
th620-36

Aquinas and Faith

Lesson Transcript

[00:00:02] Thomas Aquinas comes along. He studies at a number of places. He studies in what is today Germany, studies at the University of Paris, studies in Italy. And he's heavily influenced by Aristotle because of who was teachers were. And then he finally goes to the University of Paris to teach. Aquinas develops a number of ways to combat the Latin Vera lists. And this this opposition becomes foundational, becomes basic to what we call tome ism, which is the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. Now, what I'm going to develop here, I'm going to talk about a gust acquaintances view of faith and reason, because it has a direct relationship to this horrible double theory of truth. Aquinas says the following There can never be a contradiction between faith and reason. If something is true in science, then it must be true in theology. And if something is true in philosophy, then it must also be true in theology. There can be no double theory of truth, to which we must say a man. Brother, these guys are heretics. Now, here's how. Here's what Aquinas did with faith and reason. He defined the two words differently than Augustine. Augustine defined faith. He. Augustine defined faith as in direct knowledge. Anything that you come to know on the authority of someone else is faith. That's Augustine. For Augustine, reason is direct knowledge. Okay, here's what Aquinas did. He defined reason as Now it seems like this is similar to Augustine's position, but it really is not. He defined reason as whatever a human being can come to know without assistance from God. Let's just right here no help from God. Humanly speaking. Now, Aquinas was no fool. He knew that obviously God's assistance in human knowledge is always possible. But what he's referring to here is, is this reason basically means science.

[00:02:44] Anything that humans can come to know without dependance. Every one of these sentences is important. Reason is whatever a human being can come to know without any dependance upon special revelation. No special revelation. That means no Bible. And among Catholics, no church tradition. Okay, No special revelation. What is faith? Faith is whatever we come to know through special revelation. Faith is whatever we come to know based upon what God has revealed in the Bible. And as Catholics are prone to say in church tradition and so on. And so this gives us not science, but this gives us theology. Read the book carefully. Okay. Read the book carefully. Now, I think the best way to understand acquaintances view of faith and reason is in terms of two step ladders. Call this the two ladder approach to human knowledge. Okay, here's the first step ladder. It is reason. It is whatever we can know on our own without dependance upon special revelation. This is science. This is also. I should have said this earlier. This is also philosophy. There are limits to what human beings can know on our own. Human knowledge can only take us so far. And the highest that philosophy can take us is to. Is to the knowledge of God's existence. Philosophy can prove to us that God exists, and that's the highest that philosophy or human knowledge can go. If you want to know more than the mere fact that God exists, then you've got to switch ladders. You've got to switch to the ladder of faith, which gives us theology, which is dependent upon special revelation. Now, listen to me. There's an element. There are there are important moments of truth in this. Moments of truth with which. All of us should agree.

[00:05:04] If you grant certain assumptions, let's assume that human thinking, human reasoning can take us all the way to the existence of God. We can quibble about that on some other context. All right. Maybe in the apologetics course or something else. But if philosophy can prove that God exists, then what about the rest of the information we need about God? Here are examples of things that we cannot get through Human philosophy. What is God like? What is God's nature? Aquinas said. We can only know God's attributes through special revelation. What about salvation? How can we achieve the forgiveness of sins and deliverance only through special revelation? That's theology. That's not philosophy. Now, there's a whole lot there that's worth thinking. Although, you know, if you care about my opinions, I think it is kind of problematic that philosophy can actually. Let me put it this way. Years ago. Yeah. Years ago, I thought it was problematic as to what philosophy could do with respect to God's existence. I have now a whole lot more respect for a lot of things I think that do enable philosophers to provide really good arguments for God's existence. I also think and here you might want to quibble with me, and you're free to do that because you know I'm not dogmatic. I do think that philosophy can help us understand a great deal about the nature of God, and maybe I can talk about that someday. I do talk about it in your intro text. That is, we really can know that God is a perfect being, that God is holy, then we can certainly know a whole lot of things about God's knowledge such that God knows that two plus two equals four. Okay, But now let me just bring this to a close and let me see if I can remember this without access, without cheating and looking at the book.

[00:07:20] Augustine's I'm sorry, Aquinas says faith and reason are logically compatible. It is impossible that faith and reason can ever contradict each other. To which I say, Amen. That would get rid of a whole lot of stupid nonsense in the church. But Aquinas then also says this faith and reason are psychologically incompatible. In other words, with one exception, you cannot know the same truth by both faith and reason, by both philosophy and theology. If you know something by theology, then you cannot know it by reason or science or philosophy and vice versa. But there is one exception of that, and that one exception is the existence of God. The existence of God is the one thing that some people can know through philosophy. But if you've got other people who aren't trained in philosophy, then they can come to know that God exists through an act of faith in the teachings of the church or the teachings of the Bible or something like that. I like this approach that I take to Aquinas because I think, for one thing, it humanizes the man. It helps the reader understand that a lot of the technical moves that he made were really an exercise in Christian apologetics, moves that he made in order to defend medieval Christendom. And listen, Aquinas was orthodox. The real heresies in the Roman Catholic Church that made the Reformation necessary. Those heresies were still, to some extent in the future when Aquinas was alive. But, boy, when those heresies arrived, we needed a martin Luther. We really did. And, you know, on the basis of R.C. Sproles Authority, he thinks that in the context of Aquinas Day, we could look at him as an evangelical. I mean, after all, he mean the Bible's the word of God.

[00:09:42] It's infallible. It's without error. He never even used the word inerrant. He believed in all of the major doctrines of the Christian church. R.C. Sproul thinks that Aquinas taught salvation by grace through faith alone. And I must. Confess that I haven't read everything that Aquinas wrote. But anyway, I like this approach. What I want to do now is I want to take those two other errors taught by the Latin of terrorists and show you how Aquinas view of faith and reason. There's two stepladder model or picture or paradigm provided the basis for acquaintances refutation of the other two doctrines, which was the denial of creation and the denial of personal survival after death. Incidentally, do not ever underestimate the importance of the doctrine of creation. The doctrine of creation. Zaniolo is one of the great divides that separates theistic views of God from every other false view of God in the universe. It separates us from animists, pantheistic, pantheistic, polytheists. It just does. Then we have to separate among the theists. We have to find a way of separating Allah, the Muslim God. And there's been a whole lot of stuff in the newspapers recently about that. Franklin Graham has gotten some heat from liberals because he has dared to call publicly Islam an evil religion, an evil religion, a religion of hate, which has made some American Muslims angry. But so be it. What are you going to do? And I'll tell you, the president of Southern Baptist Seminary, where I teach, you know, every other every other week, Mohler, has been on national television and thrown in his two bits. And, you know, whenever chapel is going on in Louisville, Kentucky, there are at least two police cars in front of the chapel.

[00:12:08] Yes, sir, two police cars. And we have security police in the main administration building and so on. So let's take care of the doctrine of creation. But as we do this, I guess I'd better add one more thing to the context. You need to understand that. Among the things that Aquinas wanted to do was not only defend the Christian faith from Plotinus heresies which had crept into Islam and then and into Christendom, but he also wanted to defend Aristotle. Defending Aristotle has never been a part of my calling in life. And you can gather that from, you know, the way I the lesser time that I gave Aristotle. Aristotle was a genius. One of the major thinkers in the history of human ideas. But he's not a brother of mine. He's not a friend of mine, except with respect to the law of non contradiction and essential properties. He had that right. Now, what made the various denial of creation so serious was this the heads of the Catholic Church, that would be the whole Vatican ensemble and other things. They hated Aristotle. They were afraid of Aristotle. They knew that Aristotle had denied creation. And so here was Aquinas, a major thinker of the day. But he was viewed with suspicion by his Catholic colleagues who were ready to throw out. Let me come up with an original expression here. They were ready to throw out the the bit, the baby with the bathwater. Thank you. Thank you. The baby with the bathwater. So how can we defend Christendom Christianity from overthrow ism? But how can we also defend Aristotle? Now, the truth is that Aristotle did deny creation. Aristotle did teach that the world is eternal. Here is acquaintances way out, he said.

[00:14:48] He said the truth of creation can only be known through theology. For those listening by the tape, I'm giving some pretty weird body language here. All right. You'd think that I'm a Baptist talking about the final judgment, but I do that. I can put myself into the thinking of another person. The only way you can know the doctrine of creation ex nihilo is through theology, is through special revelation, is through the Bible. Now, it is true that Aristotle denied creation, but his real mistake, his real mistake was not the error so much. His real mistake was where he placed our knowledge of creation on this two letters, on this two letter paradigm. Aristotle believed that philosophy could prove that the world was eternal, the world was eternal. So what Aquinas says is this Aristotle. Aristotle put the doctrine of creation in the wrong place. Down here, philosophy cannot prove, cannot. This is a Aquinas philosophy cannot prove that the world had a beginning in time. The only way anybody can come to know that the world had a beginning in time is through faith, theology and dependance upon special revelation. It's this higher ladder. So at the most, Aristotle's mistake here amounts to the fact that he simply didn't know about special revelation. He didn't know that human beings had access to important truths like this in any other way. And can't we forgive him for that? Or so Aquinas acted. Okay, so that's how we get rid of this and still leave Aristotle room for respect and influence within medieval Catholicism. If something and the upper ladder is true, and for a Christian that means it is taught in the Bible, or for a medieval Christian, it means it's taught by the church, then it must be consistent with what's on the lower ladder.

[00:17:21] Okay, now let's apply that to Galileo. All right. And Galileo's claim that the Sun. Now, I know Copernicus first taught this, but Galileo taught it and got an enormous trouble with the Catholic Church. Galileo taught that the sun is the center of the solar system. So what did the church do? The church said no. The Bible teaches that the Earth is the center of the solar system. Therefore, Galileo must be wrong. All right. How long did it take the Catholic Church to recognize that the sun was the center of the solar system? Well, probably until the day after Galileo died, which didn't help him at all. And so then what did the church do? They said they said the Bible doesn't teach that the Earth is the center of the solar system because there can be no contradiction. Okay. Now, what does Rudolf Boltzmann Have you studied him yet? Hmm? Rudolf Borman. He's dead, of course. But his writings. Bullmann says that the Bible really did teach that the world is flat. This is Borgman and has four corners, and the Earth is the center of the solar system. So for Bullmann, you've got a contradiction. And so what we modern Christians must do. There go my hips again, which means I'm talking nonsense. What we modern Christians must do is recognize that the astronomy of the Bible is a myth. And so we must de mythologize what the Bible teaches about. And of course, that's just nonsense, because the alternative to a guy like Boltzmann is this. You simply recognize that the Bible is describing things like this and what we call phenomenal language. It. Describes the way things appear to a human being on planet Earth. There are alternatives to that kind of hyper radicalism that you find in a boatman.

[00:19:31] The Bible does not teach that the world is flat and has four four corners. I mean, I heard just the other day Dan Rather and, you know, for many Americans, people like Dan Rather are are are holy men who are inerrant and everything they say. Dan Rather talked about the four corners of the earth and nobody got up the next day and said. Dan Rather believes the world is flat and has four corners. No. Saint Bonaventure argued that philosophy cannot only prove the existence of God. It can also prove that the world had a beginning and time. I am inclined to think that Bonaventure is right here. Okay. But of course, remember that Bonaventure was an Augustinian. Now, finally, this distinction between faith and reason wasn't necessary for regarding the doctrine of personal survival after death. Because I've already told you what Aquinas did there. He took that famous passage in the Animal Book three and interpreted it to mean that the act of intellect is a separate part of every human being who has ever lived. So you have an active intellect, and I have an act of intellect, and they're different, But each of them is immortal. That was Aquinas, his way of handling that last bit of business. Okay, Remember what the words said. The act of intellect is immortal and separable, and without it, nothing thinks. And Aquinas said, Just read it as it is. Read it literally. You've got an act of intellect. And that is the immortal part of a human being. See, that's how he. So Aquinas says, Aristotle really did believe in immortality. Only it wasn't the soul that's immortal. It's the act of intellect, for what it's worth.