Schaeffer v. Aquinas

On recommendation of Dr. Mohler, I picked up GK Chesterton's biography of Thomas Aquinas . I have become more interested in getting at least a sense of the history of philosophy. In Francis Schaeffer's opening lines of How Should We Then Live, he says,

"There is a flow to history and culture. This flow is rooted and has its wellspring in the thoughts of people."

It is by understanding this flow that we can better understand how and why modern man thinks as he does. In this understanding, we can better give him Christ. Schaeffer says in the Forward to Escape From Reason,

"If we are to communicate the Christian faith effectively, therefore, we must know and understand the thought-forms of our own generation." Volume 1, Page 207

Schaeffer's concern is that evangelical Christians have not taken the time to understand the flow of thought and so we have not been as effective as we might have been.

"Christians have tended to despise the concept of philosophy. This has been one of the weaknesses of evangelical, orthodox Christianity - we have been proud to despise philosophy, and we have been exceedingly proud in despising the intellect." Page 279 Francis Schaeffer Volume 1, He Is There and He Is Not Silent

Schaeffer begans his book Escape From Reason with Thomas Aquinas. He sees Aquinas as a source for the humanism of the Renaissance. This was due to the reintroduction of Greek philosophy, especially the philosophy of Aristotle, to the church. The point here is fine. Schaeffer's problem with Aquinas' use of Aristotle is not the use of rationale as antithesis; it is the use of pagan philosophy (reason) unbounded by Revelation.

"Rational thought as antithesis is not rooted in Aristotle, it is rooted in reality" Francis Schaeffer, The God Who Is There, Volume 1, Page184

Schaeffer's problem therefore with Aquinas was not the use of reason, but the unbounded use of reason.

"In Aquinas' view the will of man was fallen, but the intellect was not. From this incomplete view of the Biblical Fall flowed subsequent difficulties. Out of this as time passed, man's intellect was seen as autonomous." Page 211

"This sphere of the autonomous growing out of Aquinas takes on various forms. One result, for example, was the development of natural theology. In this view, natural theology is a theology that could be pursued independently from the Scriptures." Page 211

"From the basis of this autonomous principle, philosophy also became increasingly free and was separated from revelation. Therefore philosophy began to take wings, as it were, and fly off wherever it wished, without relationship to the Scriptures." Page 211

"Aquinas had opened the way to an autonomous humanism, an autonomous philosophy; and once the movement gained momentum, there was soon a flood." Page 212 Francis Schaeffer, Volume 1, Escape From Reason

This humanistic movement in the church was corrected by the Reformation. At this point, man had two options. He could pursue a unified knowledge of truth beginning only with himself and by his reason alone or he could return to the Bible and God's revelation as the only source for truth. Man, in his rebellion against the Creator of the universe, has chosen the former. Autonomous, humanistic man romantically believed he could come to a knowledge of truth beginning only from himself.

Now notice what has happened: in the process of history, modern man has given up believing that he can come to a knowledge of truth beginning only with himself.

"In the end the philosophers come to the realization that they could not find this unified rationalistic circle and so, departing from the classical methodology of antithesis, they shifted the concept of truth, and modern man was born." (Page 10, Francis Schaeffer, Volume 1, The God Who Is There)

Man seeking to be autonomously rational has given up on rationality. All in life that is meaningful must be held irrationally. It is at this point that Francis Schaeffer's ministry is so helpful. Schaeffer was not against the use of reason. Reason is a gift of God. To the contrary, Schaeffer's understanding of the flow of thought in history caused him to see that modern man must hold everything significant in life in a romantic leap of faith. This principle really defines Schaeffer's apologetic. There is no hope or meaning to life outside of the Christian understanding. Christianity is hope giving because it is really true. Modern man has borrowed his hope from Christianity. It is the job of the apologist/evangelist to take a person and expose how he is borrowing from Christianity. Schaeffer called this "taking the roof off". Schaeffer describes what this entails in Section 4, Chapters 2 and 3 of The God Who Is There and it is really excellent and worth the time considering.

Schaeffer often makes the point that Christianity is the only "system" that a man can hold with all of his philosophical and intellectual doors wide open. What he means by this is that Christianity is really true. We need not make a leap of faith in the area of reason to hold the Christian hope.

"I try to get them [unbelievers] to consider the biblical system and its truth without an appeal to blind authority - that is, as though believing meant believing just because one's family did, or as though the intellect had no part in the matter.

This is the way I became a Christian. I had gone to a "liberal" church for many years. I decided that the only answer on the basis of what I was hearing was agnosticism or atheism. On the basis of liberal theology I do not think I have ever made a more logical decision in my life. I became an agnostic, and then I began to read the Bible for the first time in order to place it against some Greek philosophy I was reading. I did this as an act of honesty insofar as I had given up what I thought was Christianity, but had never read the Bible through. Over a period of about 6 months I became a Christian because I was convinced that the full answer which the Bible presented was alone sufficient to the problems I then knew, and sufficient in a very exciting way." Page 264 Escape From Reason

"It is possible to take the system the Bible teaches, put it down in the marketplace of the ideas of men, and let it stand there and speak for itself." Page 265 Escape From Reason

That is about 6 months of reading distilled into a few paragraphs and so I am sure very little of it makes sense. I think it is important though. Pastor Tim recently said in a context of our need to be born again that apologetics are not only for unbelievers but also for believers. I couldn't agree more. This line of thinking has been a help to my faith.

Back to Aquinas. I have come to have a sense in my wider reading on Schaeffer, that Schaeffer was a little hard on Aquinas. I can't place my thumb on why I think it, but I think RC Sproul thinks this way. So in an effort to understand more about Aquinas, I picked up the Chesterton biography. I went into the reading of this book very interested in letting Aquinas and his Roman apologist speak for themselves.

But, as I read, certain things bothered me throughout. An example was Chesterton's insistence on saying the "the Church has long said so and so" on some particular issue instead of saying "the Bible says so and so". The difference in the views on what is seen as the absolute authority was driven home in this way. Rome finds Scripture submitted under the church; the Reformers correctly submitted man under Scripture.

The culmination of the essence of the things that were bothering me came in the final pages of the book. I've quoted them substantially below:

"It will be found earlier in this book; and it [the Reformation] was a quarrel of monks. We have seen how the great name of Augustine, a name never mentioned by Aquinas without respect but often mentioned without agreement, covered an Augustinian school of thought naturally lingering longest in the existing order. The difference, like every difference between Catholics, was only a difference of emphasis. The Augustinians stressed the idea of the impotence of man before God, the omniscience of God about the destiny of man, the need for holy fear and humiliation of intellectual pride, more than the opposite and corresponding truths of free will or human dignity or good works. In this they did in a sense continue the distinctive note of St. Augustine, who is even now regarded as relatively the determinist doctor of the Church. But there is emphasis and emphasis; and a time was coming when emphasizing the one side was to mean flatly contradicting the other. Perhaps, after all, it did begin with a quarrel of monks; but the pope was yet to learn how quarrelsome a monk could be. For there was one particular monk, in that Augustinian monastery in the German forests, who may be said to have had a single and special talent for emphasis; for emphasis and nothing except emphasis; for emphasis with the quality of earthquake. He was a son of a slatecutter; a man with a great voice and a certain volume of personality; brooding, sincere, decidedly morbid; and his name was Martin Luther. Neither Augustine nor the Augustinians would have desired to see the day of that vindication of the Augustinian tradition; but in one sense, perhaps, the Augustinian tradition was avenged after all.

It came out of its cell again, the day of storm and ruin, and cried out with a new and mighty voice for an elemental and emotional religion, and for the destruction of all philosophies. It had a peculiar horror and loathing of the great Greek philosophies, and of the Scholasticism that had been founded on those philosophies. It had one theory that was the destruction of all theories; in fact it had its own theology, which was itself the death of theology. Man could say nothing to God, nothing from God, nothing about God, except an almost inarticulate cry for mercy for the supernatural help of Christ, in a world were all natural things were useless. Reason was useless. Will was useless. Man could not move himself an inch any more than a stone. Man could not trust what was in his head anymore than a turnip. Nothing remained in earth or in heaven, but the name of Christ lifted in that lonely imprecation; awful as the cry of a beast in pain. (emphasis mine)

We must be just to those human figures, who are in fact the hinges of history. However strong, and rightly strong, be our own controversial conviction, it must never mislead us into thinking that something trivial has transformed the world. So it is with that great Augustinian monk, who avenged all the ascetic Augustinians of the Middle Ages; and whose broad and burly figure has been big enough to block out for centuries the distant human mountain of Aquinas. It is not, as moderns delight to say, a question of theology. The Protestant theology of Martin Luther was a thing that no modern Protestant would be seen dead in a field with; or if the phrase be too flippant, would be especially anxious to touch with a barge-pole. That Protestantism was pessimism; it was nothing but bare insistence on the hopelessness of all human virtue, as an attempt to escape hell (emphasis mine). That Lutheranism is now quite unreal; more modern phases of Lutheranism are rather more unreal; but Luther was not unreal. He was one of those great elemental barbarians, to whom it is indeed given to change the world. To compare those two figures bulking so big in history, in any philosophical sense, would of course be futile and even unfair. On a great map like the mind of Aquinas, the mind of Luther would be almost invisible. But it is not altogether untrue to say, as so many journalists have said without caring whether it was true or untrue, that Luther opened an epic; and began the modern world.

He was the first man who ever consciously used his consciousness; or what was later called his personality. He had as a fact, a rather strong personality. Aquinas had an even stronger personality; he had a massive and magnetic presence; he had an intellect that could act like a huge system of artillery spread over the whole world; he had that instantaneous presence of mind in debate, which alone really deserves the name of wit. But it never occurred to him to use anything except his wits, in defense of the truth distinct from himself. It never occurred to Aquinas to use Aquinas as a weapon. There is not a trace of his ever using his personal advantages, of birth or body or brain or breeding, in debate with anybody. In short, he belonged to an age of intellectual unconsciousness, to an age of intellectual innocence, which was very intellectual. Now Luther did begin the modern mood of depending on things not merely intellectual. It is not a question of praise or blame; it matters little whether we say that he was a strong personality, or that he was a bit of a big bully. When he quoted a Scripture text, inserting a word that is not in Scripture, he was content to shout back at all hecklers: "Tell them that Dr. Martin Luther will have it so!" That is what we now call Personality. A little later it was called Psychology. After that it was called Advertisement or Salesmanship. But we are not arguing about advantages or disadvantages. It is due to this great Augustinian pessimists to say, not only that he did triumph at last over the Angel of the Schools, but that he did in a very real sense make the modern world. He destroyed Reason; and substituted Suggestion.

It is said that the great Reformer publicly burned the Summa Theologica and in the works of Aquinas; and with the bonfire of such books this book may well come to an end. They say it is very difficult to burn a book; and it a must of been exceedingly difficult to burn such a mountain of books as the Dominican had contributed to the controversies of Christendom. Anyhow, there is something lurid and apocalyptic about the idea of such destruction, when we consider the compact complexity of all that encyclopedic survey of social and moral and theoretical things. All the close-packed definitions that excluded so many errors and extremes; all the broad and balanced judgments upon the class of loyalties or the choice of evils; all the liberal speculations upon the limits of government or the proper conditions of justice; all the distinctions between use and abuse of private property; all the rules and exceptions about the great evil of war; all the allowances for human weakness and all the provisions for human health; all this mass of medieval humanism shriveled and curled up in smoke before the eyes of its enemy; and that great passionate peasant rejoiced darkly, because the day of the Intellect was over. Sentence by sentence it burned, and syllogism by syllogism; and the golden maxims turned to golden flames in that last and dying glory of all that had once been the great wisdom of the Greeks. The great central Synthesis of history, that was to have linked the ancient with the modern world, went up in smoke and, for half the world, was forgotten like a vapor." Pages 163-166, GK Chesterton, Thomas Aquinas

These paragraphs clearly demonstrate the expanse between Rome and Protestant theology. The very thing we hold dear is the belief that man cannot move himself an inch toward God and that the work of salvation must be all of Christ's and that all the glory must go to Him and not to us. With this understanding of Aquinas, I can't help but agree with Schaeffer that Aquinas had an incomplete view of the Fall. We are by nature useless. We must be born again to see the kingdom of God.

Purely due to the providence of God, at the same time I read the above words I was listening to John Piper's bio on Martin Luther. I love it when the Lord works like this. It is an assurance that He is caring for me. The quote that shook me from that pastor's conference message is below

At the heart of Luther's theology was a total dependence on the freedom of God's omnipotent grace rescuing powerless man from the bondage of the will. His book by that name, The Bondage of the Will, published in 1525, was an answer to Erasmus' book, The Freedom of the Will. Luther regarded this one book of his -The Bondage of the Will - as his "best theological book, and the only one in that class worthy of publication" (see note 69).

To understand Luther's theology and his methodology of study it is extremely important to recognize that he conceded that Erasmus, more than any other opponent had realized that the powerlessness of man before God, not the indulgence controversy or purgatory was the central question of the Christian faith. Man is powerless to justify himself, powerless to sanctify himself, powerless to study as he ought and powerless to trust God to do anything about this.

Erasmus' exaltation of man's will as free to overcome its own sin and bondage was, in Luther's mind, an assault on the freedom of God's grace and therefore on the very gospel itself. In his summary of faith in 1528 he writes,

I condemn and reject as nothing but error all doctrines which exalt our "free will" as being directly opposed to this mediation and grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. For since, apart from Christ, sin and death are our masters and the devil is our god and prince, there can be no strength or power, no wit or wisdom, by which we can fit or fashion ourselves for righteousness and life. On the contrary, blinded and captivated, we are bound to be the subjects of Satan and sin, doing and thinking what pleases him and is opposed to God and His commandments (see note 70).

For Luther the issue of man's bondage to sin and his moral inability to believe or make himself right—including the inability to study rightly —was the root issue of the Reformation. The freedom of God, and therefore the freedom of the Gospel and therefore the Glory of God and the salvation of men were at stake in this controversy. Therefore Luther loved the message of The Bondage of the Will, ascribing all freedom and power and grace to God, and all powerlessness and dependency to man.

John Piper, Pastor's Conference 1996, Martin Luther: Lessons Learned from His Life and Labor

Amen.