Catalina Lutheran Church Apologetics Forum

Our instructor is the holy God, Jesus, the Logos who is the guide of all humanity — Clement of Rome

[Recently, I have been asked why I am so interested in recovering a scholastic approach to classical theism for confessional Lutheranism.  After all, a generally Thomistic approach to Christian theism is antithetical to confessional Lutheranism, right?  Historically, that is not the case at all.  Because I believe that classical apologetics based on a posteriori reasons for God’s existence is the best approach, and not opposed to confessional Lutheranism, I decided to provide a few answers to this question below.[1] What I am attempting to explicate is what is known as classical apologetics or classical Christian theism more broadly.[2]]

Some have asked me, why am I studying Aquinas?  Here is my (mostly) short answer.  My interest in Aquinas’s thought is to better understand our Lutheran scholastic heritage.  Since Aquinas was the high point of late medieval scholasticism, he is the best place to start, and among the best natural theologians to have lived.  Aquinas’s thinking was very influential on the Lutheran Scholastics and formed the groundwork for classical theism and apologetics.  And, as an aside, but of interest to Lutherans, Aquinas’s doctrine of justification, because it was Biblically accurate, was condemned as a Protestant heresy at the Council of Trent).  I wrote more about Lutheran scholasticism and Aquinas here.  The classical theistic approach embodied in the scholastic method of philosophical theology needs to be recovered in confessional Lutheranism because it is an important part of our Lutheran intellectual heritage and provides the best foundation for apologetics.

In recent history, this classically theistic approach of historic Lutheranism has been forgotten or overlooked.  Classical theism is simply the approach or methodology used to establishing the existence of God as the primary source and creator of the cosmos through the ministerial use of reason.  The emphasis of this way of thinking is to underscore the existence of God as logically prior to any other truth claim.  The reason this is important is that it does little good to argue for the divine nature of special revelation, or that Jesus is the Son of God, or the miracle of the resurrection, without understanding who or what God is in the first place (one must establish the existence of God to argue that miracles are possible).  If the universe is not created and sustained by God, and we do not have a theistic universe in which we live, move, and have our being, there is no point to argue for God based on miracles or anything else.   

All the classical Christian statements of faith support this position.  Confessional Lutherans do not want to stray from the classic and historical definitions of the Christian faith found in the three ecumenical creeds (Apostle’s Creed, Nicene Creed, and Athanasian Creed), all of which begin with a statement of God’s existence.  Further, our Lutheran confessions support this methodology as well.  The confessional statements of Lutheranism all affirm the primacy of establishing a theistic universe in the very first articles of the Augsburg Confession, Apology of the Augsburg Confession, and The Smalcald Articles.

Finally, one of the most overlooked philosophers of the twentieth century, Mortimer Adler, spent most of his academic life exploring, questioning, and thinking about the existence of God and understood the logical ramifications for God’s existence.  He became a committed Christian theist in eighties after carefully reflecting on this question for an exceptionally long time.  He believed that the question of God’s existence was among the most important questions anyone could examine.  He wrote, “More consequences for thought and action follow from the affirmation or denial of God than from answering any other basic question” [3] Everything else follows from how one answers this most perennial and foundational question.  It affects how one views the world itself, how one does science (does science rest on a prior metaphysic?), how one chooses to live the life to which one is called, and how to treat others.  In short, it impacts our understanding of ethics, politics, law, science, economics, justice, and our notions of truth and reality.  What we think about God’s existence has very practical ramifications.  Dr. Adler is correct to point out that “The whole of human life is certainly affected by whether men regard themselves as the supreme beings of the universe or acknowledge a superior—a superhuman being whom they conceive as an object of fear or love, a force to be defied or a Lord to be obeyed.”[4]  The question of God’s existence is not only logically prior to doing apologetics but it is logically prior for anything else that we encounter in the world and life—which in summary, is the entire project classical scholastic philosophical theology.

For further reading:

In particular, I found Milton Valentine’s Natural Theology Or Rational Theism particularly helpful (it has been re-published by Just and Sinner Publications).  Valentine was the great 19^th century confessional Lutheran theologian who defended a robust natural theology and argued that Christian theism is the only rational worldview.  In addition, I would recommend the following:

N.L. Geisler, Christian Apologetics

Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles

—-, Summa Theologica

—-, On Being and Essence

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[1] A Posteriori: A posteriori knowledge is based upon actual observation; from the Latin “from what comes after.” It is the kind of knowledge that is gained only with the aid of sense experience.  Propositions like “Some cats are black” or “Andrew Jackson was the seventh president of the United States” are known A Posteriori.  Natural theology and cosmological reasoning for God’s existence are based on a posteriori reasoning as well.

[2] Classical Apologetics is so called because it was the apologetic method practiced by the first thinkers who studied and practiced the application of the ministerial use of reason to the defense of Christianity.  The earliest pioneers of classical apologetics were Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, and Thomas Aquinas among others.  The roots of classical apologetics can also be seen in second and third century apologists such as Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria.  But one can go further back to the New Testament itself in Romans 1 and can see that St. Paul often argued for the existence of God based on a posteriori reasoning.  Classical apologetics holds that there is a logically prior need to establish the existence of God before arguing for the truth of Christian claims such as the inspiration of holy scripture or the deity of Christ, etc.

[3] Mortimer Adler, ed., The Syntopicon: An Index to The Great Ideas, vol. 1, Great Books of The Western World (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., n.d.) 433.

[4] Ibid.