Intellectual History, Metaphysics, Natural Theology, Philosophy, Theology

Lutheran Scholasticism and Aquinas

by Dave Seng

Scholasticism was the predominant system or method of theological and philosophical teaching during the middle ages, based largely on the Church Fathers and Aristotle. Classical and medieval writers using scholastic methodology wrote in a question and answer catechetical style. Although it has sometimes been forgotten, confessional Lutheranism has maintained a strong form of scholastic reasoning and apologetic methodology especially surrounding the doctrine of God and the classical arguments for His existence. For example, Luther approved of the cosmological argument. In fact, Luther, Melanchton, and Chemnitz reasserted the classical arguments for the existence of God as did the scholastic Lutheran thinkers Jakob Andreae, David Hollatz, Johann Gerhard, and Abraham Calovius among others. In the nineteenth century the confessional Lutheran, Ernst Hengstenberg promoted the classical approach to apologetics and so did Otto Zöckler who corresponded with Charles Darwin and defended classical Christian theism. In the early twentieth century, some of the leading proponents of classical Lutheran Scholasticism were theologians Leander Keyser, and Christoph Luthardt. As noted in Geisler’s essay (see below), the contemporary philosopher David Johnson is considered a Lutheran Thomist.

Lutheranism has a long history, of course, and has embraced other approaches to apologetics as well. I will not go into various methodologies here. I believe, along with Luther and the Lutheran Scholastics, that since reason is a minister to the Christian faith, it should be employed and used well, including the utilization of theistic reasoning and argumentation. The ministerial use of reason (Luther’s distinction) means that reason is a minister and support to Christian faith (which is also Aquinas’s position as well).

Further, Lutherans embrace the three ecumenical creeds (Apostle’s, Nicene, and Athanasian) which all begin with an affirmation of the existence of God. This makes sense, because, without a conception of God, miracles, the Bible, Christ’s atoning death, the Trinity, and virtually every other teaching of historic Christianity does not make sense. What good is it to argue from miracle that Jesus is the Son of God without the prior conviction that God is? Every major doctrine of the faith ultimately rests on our understanding of Almighty God.

The misunderstanding that many Lutherans have today—due largely to the errors of pietism and fideism—falsely teaches that Luther was opposed in all ways to the Christian development of the mind and natural reason. After all, he famously called reason “the devil’s whore.” Nonetheless, it should be remembered that Luther did promote the ministerial use of reason (philosophy) and his relationship to philosophy and apologetics needs to be carefully understood. It is true that Luther had both praise and disdain for Aristotle at times, and that he preferred Cicero in some cases (although not a Christian, Cicero promoted a cosmological argument for a divine creator in his The Nature of the Gods). As Luther developed, he became a critic of Nominalism and, later, further embraced his Augustinianism. A great book that addresses this aspect of Luther’s thought is Grace and Reason: A Study in The Theology of Luther, by B. A. Gerrish. It is not the case that Luther threw out the use of philosophy or rejected the idea that reason is not a support or minister to faith.

Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225 – 1274) is considered one of, if not the, greatest of scholastic theologians. I believe that Lutherans can learn much from St. Thomas. Among his intellectual accomplishments, Aquinas built upon the inductive and realist theories of Aristotle. Although Aquinas was a Christian Aristotelian, he successfully synthesized much of Augustine and gave us the great “classical” arguments for the existence of God such as a version of the cosmological argument (that the cosmos is a contingent being and depends on God for its existence), and the teleological argument (the cosmos exhibits design and was planned and designed by God), among others. Much of Aquinas’s arguments can be summarized this way: We know from experience that the world is contingent and it depends on something outside of itself for being or existence. Further, the order, harmony, and rationality of the cosmos must be the product of a mind or creator.

This is far too short of a summary of Aquinas and the Lutheran scholastics, but it must stand for now. In other ways, Aquinas comes very close to a Lutheran understanding of Sola Scripture (Scripture alone as authoritative for the Christian). After all, Aquinas was writing before the council of Trent. I do not want to make Aquinas into a kind of pre-Reformation Lutheran because that would not be fair to him. Lutherans do accept, however, that which is Scripturally true and accurate throughout Christian history. This is because truth endures across time and place. Lutherans have always wanted to keep, preserve, and care for the best of our Western Christian heritage.

At times, I have gone back and forth regarding my assessment of Aquinas. On occasion, I found his doctrine of God challenging and probably read too many critiques of Thomism, particularly from William Lane Craig. I keep coming back to Aquinas, however. One of the things that keep me coming back to Aquinas is his Aristotelian epistemology which is essentially correct. The mind has an innate, a priori capacity or potentiality to know, without which it would be impossible to know even first principles. It is a first principle that being is that which is, and that which is can be known. Regarding God as the foundation or ground of being, Dr. Mortimer Adler explains,

“Aquinas, for example, conceives “being taken simply as including all perfection of being”; and in the Judeo-Christian tradition, ‘being’ without qualification is taken as the most proper name for God. When Moses asked God His name, he received as answer: “I AM THAT I AM … Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.” Used in this sense, ‘being’ becomes the riches of terms—the one which has the greatest amplitude of meaning.” (Syntopicon, Vol. I, Great Books of the Western World, S.V. Being.)

Here are a couple of essays that explain how Aquinas has been received in general Protestantism. I wish I could find more from the Lutheran side. The first is from Norman Geisler, who argues that evangelicals can learn a lot from Aquinas, and Carl Russell Trueman who reviews the book, Aquinas Among the Protestants. If someone knows of a Lutheran source which speaks to this topic, please post in the comments below, I would really appreciate it. I am attempting to do my own research on Thomism and the Lutheran Scholastics.

I’d like to thank Lutheran scholars Dr. Adam Francisco and Dr. Joshua Pagan for their email correspondence which served as an inspiration for this post.

Does Thomism Lead to Catholicism, Norman Geisler

Thomas Aquinas, Not Just for Catholics Anymore, Carl Russell Trueman

Intellectual History, Logic, Metaphysics, Natural Theology, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science

The Pre-Socratics: What Have We Learned?

by Dave Seng

For this post, we will conclude our series on the pre-Socratics and the problem of the one and the many.

Part one can be found here, part two here, and part three here.

I want to provide a short summary of what we have learned about the metaphysical thinking of the pre-Socratics and provide a short note about what I have in mind for the next couple of essays.

In our recent series exploring the intellectual contributions of the pre-Socratics, we focused on the ancient problem of the one and the many (what I will call the one-many problem, OMP). The OMP is the underlying theme of Western metaphysics. When philosophers examine the intelligible along with the sensible, the definite and infinite, the universal and particular, the nature of change, or the role of the state and the individual, the question of the OMP is always underneath the inquiry.

As we have seen, the OMP is central to Being, Nonbeing, Becoming, and the nature of change in the physical world. In this sense, metaphysics is closely related to physics. (One of the best books on this topic is Roger Trigg’s Beyond Matter: Why Science Needs Metaphysics.)

We also learned that the OMP is a question that relates to the nature, character, and origin of the cosmos. The earliest philosophers where exploring the metaphysical foundations of the universe as they looked for the source of Being and the nature of Becoming in our world. The field of metaphysics seeks to discover, explicate, and lay out the most basic principles and properties of the world (and all of Being) and the pre-Socratics were the first ones to apply reason and develop this method. Since it is impossible to deny that something such as the universe is, the next question is, “is it one or many?” Errors occur when either unity or the many is made primary. We also saw that the pre-Socratics were the first to apply the laws of logic, such as the law of identity and the law of noncontradiction, to the nature of reality (the Being-Becoming relationship) and discovered the metaphysical emphasis of the laws of logic. The OMP only makes sense in a world governed by logic, order, and uniformity in the natural world and the pre-Socratics understood this point. It is also the reason Aristotle focuses so much of his attention on it in his Physics.

Although it not always explicit in every philosopher, the OMP is the underlying central metaphysical concern of much of Western intellectual history. In the next couple of essays, we will discover how the OMP leads Plato to the discovery of form and how it enlightens Aristotle in his doctrines of immanent form, change, act, and potency.

Metaphysics, Natural Theology, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science

The Nature of Reality and The One and The Many, Part Three

by Dave Seng

Part one of the series can be found here.

Part two of the series can be found here.

It is impossible that what is, can also be what is not. (Restatement of the Law of Noncontradiction.)

Do you believe that all of reality came from one source? If you do, you are in agreement with one of the oldest cosmological and metaphysical theories of all intellectual history. You also might find yourself in agreement with the pre-Socratic monists who believed that Being is unified into one essential metaphysical scheme. If you disagree with the monists, however, you too might find yourself at home with the pre-Socratic pluralists whose understanding of reality also enjoys an ancient provenance. At this point, we will not answer this important conversation but I do hope to point out some things that we can learn from it. First, the question itself, whether reality ultimately came from one source, is one in nature, or is simply a collection of random diverse things, is still alive and with us today. We see this in debates about the fine-tuning of the universe (mostly from physicists), and various intelligent design theorists (generally from biology), who point to a theistic God as the source of reality, and those who would fall into a similar category as the pluralists who point out the diversity, randomness, and chaotic aspects of the natural world. The great question of the one and the many just will not go away. The other thing we can learn about this conversation is how it centers on what the ancient philosophers called Being (the nature of all reality). As we will see in future posts an important reformulation of the question of the one and the many has come to be known as Being (the one) and Becoming (the many). We can use the terms interchangeably. Everything we discussed in parts one and two about the problem of the one and the many can be applied to the concepts Being and Becoming. This brings us to the important discussion between Heraclitus and Parmenides.

We will begin with Parmenides. Parmenides (ca. 475) was a philosopher who lived in Italy, founded the Eleatic school of philosophy, and taught that it is rationally necessary that reality be one and immutable. Parmenides went as far as to deny motion and change, teaching that such things are an illusion. Being (the principle which unites all reality) must be one. If Being is one, it can not change, and it can not be many. Being can not include nonbeing or becoming as that would be a defect in Being. For Parmenides, change involves imperfection, temporality, and mutability. Change in particular things must be counted among the many (the diversity of all things around us). If change is imperfect, according to Parmenides, it can not be one. If all reality is essentially one, change must be illusory. Parmenides is famous for such pronouncements as “It is necessary to say and think what is. For Being is, and Not-Being is not” and “whatever is, is.” Essentially, Parmenides utterly denied the reality of the sensible world along with all plurality and motion. As radical as Parmenides sounds, there might be an element of truth in his position. He was, after all, making a statement about reality and the essential nature of things. Most philosophers think things have an essential nature that makes them the kind of things they are. A cat has an essential nature that makes it different from a cephalopod. If the essential nature of a cat changes, it is no longer a cat but something else. This is known logically to us by way of the logical laws of identity and the law of noncontradiction (here we notice the metaphysical implications of the laws of logic). Something can not be what it is and something else in the same way and the same relationship. Essence, essential being, is what it is. This has to be for things to make conceptual sense to us.

On the other hand, it would seem foolish to deny that things change. After all, cars, airplanes, and great Blue Whales (among other things) are all capable of traversing large amounts of land, airspace, and water. We understand that movement, motion, growth, and change are part of everyday experience and it does not seem reasonable to deny this aspect of reality. This brings us to Heraclitus (ca 500 B. C.) who taught that all things are in a state of flux governed by a divine, cosmic Law. Several of Heraclitus’s statements have been preserved. He is known for saying things like, “the sun is new every day,” “we are and we are not,” and in reply to Parmenides, “whatever is, is changing.” He is probably most famous for the phrase, “you can not step twice into the same river.” The idea is that once you put your foot into a river, different water will be flowing by the time you put your other foot into it. For Heraclitus, all reality is constantly changing, dynamic, and in flux. It is important to realize that, Heraclitus too, is making a statement about reality. As we move and do things throughout our day, we are changing. As all things exist in time, everything we experience is in a different segment or time frame. In some sense, things are constantly changing.

The tension remains, however, that if everything is in a state of becoming as Heraclitus taught, what is it that perdures when things change? Things do not change into nothingness because nothing (or non-being) is not a thing. Nothing in the physical cosmos can violate the law of conservation. On the other hand, if things have an essential nature and are not completely changing, then rational communication, law and justice, and science are possible. These are important metaphysical concerns that are sometimes overlooked by scientists and others working in the social and behavioral sciences.

This is the difficulty—the tension between Being and Becoming—that was given to Plato to address in his day and has become a central part of the Western intellectual tradition and how we understand that nature of the world around us. The tension is still with us today and the conversation is still alive. In our next post, we will see how Plato attempted to answer the question of Being and Becoming and then we will look at how Aristotle answered the problem.