Aquinas the Preacher?

Ever think about Aquinas as Preacher? In the Church Dogmatics, Karl Barth charges Aquinas and the whole Catholic tradition with privileging the Sacraments to the neglect of the preached word. However, Barth's charge may be the result of a limited reading of Aquinas. While Aquinas has no special treatise confined to the topic of preaching, Aquinas scholars are discovering a theology of preaching and of the preached word nestled in the Summa Theologiae and other works.

Recent scholarship points to a section of the Summa in which Aquinas meditates on "Christ’s Doctrine” (Third part q. 42). What Aquinas looks at when he asks questions about "Christ's Doctrine" is Jesus's teaching style as described in the Gospels. They say this is an unexplored aspect of how Aquinas’s liturgical and religious context influences his theology. Aquinas was a member, after all, of an "Order of Preachers." Avery Dulles also wrote a small article tracing out Aquinas's "theology of worship" from various places in the Summa, and made a special note on preaching in Aquinas. CUA Press just published this text, a collection of Aquinas's academic sermons. We already have translations of many of Aquinas's sermons and commentaries on biblical books like John's Gospel and Hebrews.

There is a lot of interesting material emerging to help scholars put together what "Aquinas the Preacher" might be like, and what groups like Baptists can learn from him.

A Protestant, Postliberal Aquinas?

Protestants of all kinds are getting interested in Thomas Aquinas, particularly those who write on "practices" and the virtues with inspiration from the work of Stanley Hauerwas. The "postliberal Aquinas" is very popular these days, especially for those who do theology in heavy conversation with Wittgenstein.

Aquinas's doctrine of the "hylomorphic union" of body and soul seems to appeal to the current Protestant interest in "embodiment" as well (Aquinas isn't like Plato: he thinks a human being is a soul and body united, and that our bodies are an essential part of who we are as human beings and how we relate to God).

Aquinas doesn't get a mention in James KA Smith's book Desiring the Kingdom, but there's a connection there that he may not have been aware of. Smith’s reading of “secular” and “Christian” liturgies and his focus on embodiment finds a clear parallel in one of Aquinas’s arguments for the necessity of the sacraments. In this argument in the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas says that one reason that the sacraments were necessary was in order that human beings might be offered “bodily exercise” whereby they might be “trained to avoid superstitious practices, consisting in the worship of demons, and all manner of harmful action, consisting in sinful deeds” (III, 61.1).

Of course, Smith's understanding of the sacraments clearly differs from a lot of what Aquinas says, and he, along with Hauerwas and others, seems to be wary of the language of grace and individual salvation as was traditionally used by Reformed and Catholic theologians. At the same time this little overlap between Smith and Aquinas's Summa is notable for those interested in dialogue.

Baptist Pseudo-Dionysians?

The composer of this hymn, Walter C. Smith, was a poet and minister in the Free Church of Scotland. While in the US we would associate the Free Church of Scotland more with Presbyterians, this is a hymn commonly sung in Baptist Churches. In fact I sang it enough growing up to know that it is hymn #6 in the 1991 Baptist Hymnal.

The funny thing about it is how "philosophical" it sounds. It's really a work of contemplative theology, in the manner of a theologian like Pseudo-Dionysius. In fact, it can get downright existential in a way that sounds foreign to evangelicals: "we wither and perish/but not changeth thee." But I sang it every few weeks or so growing up in a Baptist church, and no one thought it was out of place or odd. It has a pretty tune, but I think people were understanding the words as well.

Baptists don't seem to have much of a "contemplative" tradition, except in their hymns. Baptist (and, in a broader grouping, "evangelical") congregations are typically described in academic literature as focused on "action" in the form of evangelism or missions outreach rather than spending time in contemplative prayer or mysticism. But an earnest Baptist hymn sing or Praise and Worship service, and the fact that these are considered by Baptists to be essential to what it means to do church, says something about "mystical" elements in Baptist/evangelical life that we may tend to pass over.

Believer as Sacrament? (Amos Yong part II)

Still working my way through Amos Yong's book. One of the interesting things I'm finding is how much theology has been written by Pentecostals. A lot of it is just passed over by mainline theologians. Yong's book, and this book, have pointed me to some texts to start with (Yong gives an interesting defense of "Oneness" Pentecostalism in the book as well).

The book, as I suggested in an earlier post, is basically a summary of the ways in which those Yong terms "Classical Pentecostal" groups (Protestant pentecostal denominations not part of other groups, like Assemblies of God) can relate to ecumenical dialogue.

Particularly interesting to me for ecumenical dialogue is Yong's account of Pentecostal "sacramentality." Rather than seeing God's grace as mediated through sacraments or a special priesthood, Yong shows that Pentecostals see what might be called a kind of experiential and incarnational "sacramentality" in the role of believers in a church. Pentecostal congregations are constituted by the action of the Holy Spirit to form a community through the gifts of tongues, healing, evangelism, and so on. There is what we might call a "mediation" of grace through the Spirit's presence in the actions of the congregation. Yong says the Spirit is encountered "tangibly" through the embodied experiences of the community of saints.

Doctrine and Genre

As an addition to my previous post on doctrine and "translation" and a little conversation that followed from it: what genres are appropriate for Christian teaching?

Doctrine, after all, is just that: teaching the faith. One of my faculty advisers at the University of Dayton pointed out how "catechesis" is a popular topic especially among Catholic thinkers these days, but is also under-explored theologically.

Why don't theologians do most of their work in biblical commentaries? Or, why are sermons seen as the product of theological reflection rather than the source? Why isn't a Wednesday night bible study at a local church not considered to be "real theology"?

John Webster is a theologian who teaches at Aberdeen who actually has a pretty handy reflection on this topic. This appears in his book Confessing God. It's a little heady (oddly enough), but Webster asks this question of genre and doctrine in a way that I think is useful. What Webster says about the "canonical" shape of premodern theology sounds congenial to Baptist convictions in several ways:

"The history of the genres of theological writing is still largely unexplored in any systematic way; yet the importance of such a study for interpreting the situation of theology in modernity can scarcely be over-emphasized. What happens to styles of theological writing when Wissenschaft [academic essays, basically] replaces citation as the dominant mode of enquiry and argument? When citation is in the ascendant, the literary forms of theology are generally governed by the fact that the Christian worlds of meaning are shaped by biblical, creedal and doxological texts and by the practices which both carry and are themselves carried by those texts. Theology’s literary forms and intellectual architecture, its rhetoric and its modes of argument, are controlled by proximity to these sources. Hence its favoured genres: biblical commentary, exposition of texts which have a heavy presence in the tradition (such as the creeds, the Lord’s Prayer or the Decalogue), or polemic conducted within an agreed frame of reference supplied by a stable canon of biblical materials and of major voices in the tradition. When they function well, these genres are transparent to that into whose presence they seek to introduce the reader. They are not construed as an improvement upon the canon of Christian texts, organizing it more effectively according to scientific principles, or translating its rough, immediate language into a more sophisticated and reflective idiom. Rather, theology maps out the contents of the canon, or applies them in particular circumstances by extended paraphrase of their content."



-Confessing God, 20-21.

Doctrine: How much do you need to teach?

A question that's plagued me since starting divinity school is: How much theology should one teach in a local church/parish? A joke blog made by folks at Duke Divinity School recently featured a satirical article about a young seminarian giving a children's sermon on "apokatastasis." But it was a common question in my theology classes: how do we "translate" this stuff to the parish? Theology gets pretty heady sometimes, how much is translatable at all?

I've been working on a project that looks at this question in ancient church history. Early theologians like Clement of Alexandria or Origen distinguished between two classes of believers, the "fleshly" believers and the "spiritual." They said one kind of doctrine was appropriate for the unlearned fleshly believers but that there was another spiritual doctrine that was only appropriate for the spiritual believers.

But I found a set of sermons by Augustine on John 16:12, where Jesus says "I have many more things to teach you, but you cannot bear them now." Augustine says that believers should immediately distrust any person or group who claims to have this knowledge, or any other kind of secret knowledge or doctrine. Although Augustine recognizes that believers have different levels of capacity for understanding all the truths of the faith, he assures his readers that there is one faith common to all. As he says, "Christ crucified is both milk to sucklings and meat to the more advanced."

Amos Yong and Pentecostal Theology

Just got this book today - been meaning to read it for a while. Amos Yong is a Pentecostal theologian who's co-editing a series of "Pentecostal Manifestos" with James K.A. Smith. He's done some pretty impressive work in the past, especially a book called Theology and Down Syndrome.

I'm just a few chapters in, but I'm already interested in the way Amos Yong says Pentecostal theology is grounded in a exegetical perspective that privileges Luke-Acts. Yong also says that Pentecostal theology provides a corrective to the way Protestant Scholasticism downplayed the role of the Spirit in Justification and in Christology.

He doesn't give any examples of Protestant Scholasticism here, so I'm curious what he's referring to. He brings out a pretty impressive list of biblical texts that describe the role of the Spirit in Jesus's life and work. Christ offers himself on the cross "through the eternal Spirit" (Hebrews 9:14), Jesus is led by the Spirit into the wilderness (Luke 4:1), and Acts 10:38 talks about how God "anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power." And so on (Yong gives many others).

Of course Yong says that this doesn't invalidate "Logos Christology" in any way, but it adds an extra dimension to the complexity of Christ's life and work that he says was passed over. Although all I know from Prot. Scholasticism is from Barth's "small print" sections in the Church Dogmatics, it seems like they were pretty biblical. I wonder why they would pass over these texts.