Wolfhart Pannenberg, An Introduction to Systematic Theology

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, 1991, pgs. 69

Summary: Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928-2014) was an Enlightenment theologian who worked to preserve much of the language of traditional theology while attempting to provide an academically acceptable explanation of Christian doctrine. 

An Introduction to Systematic Theology is a part of the M. Eugene Osterhaven Lectureship at Western Theological Seminary—a broadly evangelical school.  

Pannenberg establishes that Jesus is a historical person who is also in some sense the Son of God. And he defines the task of systematic theology as presenting a coherent explanation of the truth of Christianity:  “Whatever is true must finally be consistent with all other truth, so that truth is only one, but all-embracing, closely related to the concept of the one God” (6).

The issue is that while “the task [of systematic theology] is always the same, and the truth that systematic theology tries to reformulate should recognizably be the same truth that had been intended under different forms of language and thought in the great theological systems of the past and in the teaching of the church throughout the ages” (7). Yet, “the distinction has to be made between what is historically relative in the traditional teaching and what is the abiding core” (Ibid.).

One such “historically relative . . .traditional teaching” is the belief that the Bible is true in all that it affirms. Thus, the author of the text identified as 2 Peter 1:16 words, “we did not follow cleverly devised myths,” makes a historically relative statement that is strictly speaking not true. 

Pannenberg finds myths affirmed as true. And thus, “the classical doctrine as well as the biblical reports of creation of the world remained dependent on the mythical form of explaining the world: Everything was imagined as having been established in the origin of time” (41).

We, being moderns and Pannenberg’s readers, know that the Bible has mythological portions, because of two aspects of modernity. Modernity is “a complete program of purely secular interpretation of reality at large and of human life and history” (13-14) and “the modern criticism of all forms of arguing by recourse to authority” (14).

A bait and switch occurs here, because at least Enlightenment thought establishes science as an authority. Or perhaps better, the modern program is the authority (cf. review of Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution). 

Pannenberg submits to the modern program, but attempts to create the intellectual room for faith in portions of the Christian program. So much so that Pannenberg excitedly informs us:

When modern biochemist describe the phenomenon of life as autocatalytic exploitation of an energy gradient, such a description yields the same idea of life as an ecstatic phenomenon which is surprisingly close to the Christian idea of faith as described in the theology of the Reformation; an existence outside oneself, realized in the act of trust in God (45). 

He can produce such rubbish only by overhauling the doctrine of God and then stuffing the traditional term faith into his definition of God. “The concept of God which was developed by medieval and early modern theology in close contact with classical metaphysics is in need of rather radical revision” (23). 

According to Pannenberg, the Bible with its mythological assertions about Jesus and creation, does not support the what Pannenberg perceives as the classical definition of God as mind. The person who brought the world’s attention to this problem was Spinoza (cf. The Problem of Literalism: Spinoza). “Spinoza rejected the image of God as mind which operates by interaction of intellect and will” (34). Mind as formulated by Spinoza and accepted by Pannenberg is “the distinction and interaction of intellect and will [as] bound to the finitude of the human situation.”

Pannenberg cures this problem by “admitting this criticism” yet, “the ideas of a divine will and of God as spirit need not be surrendered, but they have to be reconstructed on a new basis” (35).

The new basis that the author offers is God as spirit:

In the biblical story the spirit is simply the dynamic principle of life, and the soul is the creature which is alive and yet remains dependent on the spirit as the transcendent origin of life (43). 

He notes that this was rejected by the early church because of the Stoic articulation of spirit as matter. And adds, “Origen’s criticism was successful because of the apparent absurdities such a conception would cause in the concept of God. . .In fact, however the Stoic conception of pneuma as a most subtle element like air was much to the biblical language. . .” (43-45).  

Pannenberg then plops this into modern energy field theory: 

The Spirit of God can be understood as the supreme field of power that pervades all of creation. Each finite event or being is to be considered as a special manifestation of that field, and their movements are responsive to its forces (46). . .The field theories of science, then, can be considered as approximations to the metaphysical reality of the all-pervading spiritual field of God’s creative presence in the universe (47). 

The “spirit” as God allows the Son to distinguish “himself from the Father in order to subordinate himself to his kingdom. . . The eternal act of the Son’s self-differentiation from the Father would then contain the possibility of the separate existence of creatures. As the self-distinction of the Son from the Father is to be regarded as an act of freedom, so the contingency in the production of creatures would be in continuity with such freedom” (42). 

Pannenberg has accepted Spinoza’s deity but has trintitized it by making the Son freely contingent on the Father (cf. John Cooper, Panentheism, 259ff.). Jesus as freely dependent on the Father can with the Holy Spirit pass on his freedom to creation.

The freedom the Son passes on to man is essentially the self-consciousness of humanity (51). We, like the Son, can distinguish ourselves from God. Adam’s sin was not merely distinguishing himself from God; he “actually separated from God” (61). Yet “in the second Adam, the Son of God, human beings accept their differences from God and subordinate themselves to him as the Son does. Like the Son himself, in their voluntary subordination to God they will enjoy communion with God and consequently participate in his eternal life beyond their own finitude and death” (61).

Benefits/Detriments: The enthusiastic undergraduate within me cries, “Damn, that’s clever!” Libertarian free will, evolution, quantum physics, monotheism, a reasonably divine Jesus, and salvation. And the only cost is dropping the Bible as an authority and accepting the authority of the scientific program and Pannenberg’s cleverness. 

And please let’s be clear, Pannenberg’s system allows him to arbitrate which portions of the Bible are mythological and which true. He might argue that the Jesus Seminar is his authority, but it’s moot. Without the Bible, there is no revealed Jesus in history, without Jesus there is no Trinity, and without the Trinity, Pannenberg’s system collapses back into Spinoza’s simple panentheism. Pannenberg’s system depends on an authoritative revelation of the Son of God, and he rejects the possibility of that authority. 

Further, I am befuddled by Pannenberg’s insistence on developing theological positions based on at best theoretical descriptions of background physical phenomena like field theory and quantum events. The shelf-date on such positions is likely less than Twinkies or string theory. The scientific program cannot provide a stable foundation for theology because it changes.

Lastly, Pannenberg has not escaped the absurdities of making God an energy field any more than the Stoics by making God subtle matter. 

The curmudgeonly theologian within me mutters, “Clever, damnably clever.” It’s damnably clever because it was anticipated by Paul as the systematic theology “having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power” (2 Tim. 3:5). The trouble with clever is that nobody saved by it. And there’s very little difference between clever and crafty (Gen. 3:1).

Recommended for folks pursuing academic degrees in theology.  

Blaise Pascal, Pensées, and The Provincial Letters

The Modern Library, New York, 1941, 620 pgs.

Summary: Pascal (1623-1662) was a savant who made contributions in mechanical calculators, vacuum research, geometry, probability, and apologetics. He was a younger contemporary and antagonist of Descartes (1596-1650). Descartes somewhat purposely contributed to the rising skepticism of his age through modification of his Jesuit training. 

Pascal’s family, early in his life, had attached themselves to Jansenism within the French Roman Catholic Church. Jansenism was the last gasp of the Augustinian understanding of total depravity after the Council of Trent (1545-1563). They were also extreme rigorist in exhaustive confession in preparation for the mass, personal ethics, and separation from worldliness. 

The Jansenist and Jesuits tended to compete among the wealthy and the nobles in France as personal confessors. The Jesuits practiced a lax discipline that came to be known as probabilism.

The Jesuit system can be defined as, “if the licitness or illicitness of an action is in doubt, it is lawful to follow a solidly probable opinion favouring liberty, even though the opposing opinion, favouring the law, be more probable” (s.v., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd Ed.). 

The outcome was that if a Jesuit confessor could find a single historical allowance for some behavior, say fornication or murder, then the penance prior to mass was either avoided or minimal. The two Catholic groups holding to probabilism, the Dominicans and Jesuits, had made a cottage industry of publishing casuistry manuals with precedence for greater and greater moral latitude.  

All of this is important because the behavior to a degree the policy of the political elite were seen as being dependent on the royalty’s confessors. So the dispute between the Jesuits and Jansenist was a struggle over controlling the court and the culture of the country. A king with a Jansenist confessor would necessarily have a different court and therefore regime than one with a Jesuit. 

The Jesuits with the backing of political leaders like Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642) hounded and persecuted the Jansenist out of existence. With the Jansenist demise, Augustinism left the Roman Church and now resides among the Reformed.   

Pascal’s theological writings are pointed both towards Jesuit casuistry and the rising skepticism of the humanist of his day. 

Pensées—is a group of thoughts (pensées in French) that Pascal intending to develop into a defense of the faith. The fragments have been ordered in different ways throughout history, and while some of them are well developed others are obviously notes for further work.  The most developed argument is on the highest probability being on the side of trusting in God and living a holy life in the famous Pascal’s wager. 

Examples:

343: The beak of the parrot, which it wipes, although it is clean.

555:. . . . The Christian religion, then, teaches men these two truths; that there is a God whom men can know, and that there is a corruption in their nature which renders them unworthy of Him. . . .

627:….There is a great difference between a book which an individual writes, and publishes to a nation, and a book which itself creates a nation. We cannot doubt that the book is as old as the people. 

The Provincial Letters—a witty, sarcastic, carefully footnoted, mocking, evisceration of Jesuit casuistry and their unfair attack and persecution of the Jansenist. They were written ostensibly as letters by an urban Parisian to a friend living in the country attempting to explain the Jesuits and Sorbonne’s actions and statements against the Jansenist. The first half are dryly amusing to sublime, but the bitterness increases towards the end.

Benefits/Detriment: The Pensées are interesting; some are very thought provoking, almost all are wholesome for general orthodoxy. The secular popularity is likely due to the fragmentary nature which allows space to fill with the readers’ personal opinions rather than being confronted by an actual controversial system. 

While I enjoyed the letters and the pensées, both works strike me as inlets on larger and more important seas. Interesting as part of a wider reading on broader controversies, for historical background, and the appreciation of literature. 

Thomas Aquinas, Selected Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas: The Principles of Nature, On Being and Essence, On the Virtues in General, and On Free Choice, trans. Robert P. Goodwin

The Library of Liberal Arts Press, Inc, 1965, 162 pgs. 

Summary: Four basic, short, and fundamental works of Thomas of Aquinas (c. 1225-1274). Thomas in many ways developed the current Roman Catholic explanation of their practice and continues to frame conservative and moderate papal theologians’ thought. Thomas’ influence on Protestant and Reformed thought remains significant. 

Thomas’ main effort was to bring the defense of current religious practice within the forms of Aristotelian insight. Aristotle (384-322 BC) was a student of Plato, tutor of Alexander the Great, and a natural and speculative philosopher. His work influenced all subsequent academic theology and philosophy in the West. 

The translator and editor Robert P. Goodwin provides a competent introduction to Thomas’ life and thought. Further, he reduced the complexity of On the Virtues in General and On Free Choice by removing Thomas’ collection and discussion of past authorities, including I assume Scripture references. The Principles of Nature and On Being and Essence are monographs on the stated topic. 

Goodwin summarizes what he finds as the most fundamental aspect of Thomas’ thought on page xv. 

Under the influence of some earlier thinkers, especially the Arabian Avincenna (980-1037) and William of Auvergne (1180-1249), and under the suggestion of God’s “description” of Himself—“I am who am [sic]” (Exodus 3:14)—St. Thomas contended that the key factor of any reality as a reality was its existence. . . . For him every being possesses a real principle in virtue of which it is. By contrast to so many others, St. Thomas maintained that a being is not a being in virtue of its matter, or a being in virtue of what it is, that is its essence. The principle in virtue of which something is a being was called esse, the act of existing. 

He also notes that by moving the fundamental of existence to the act he modifies Aristotle who places it in form. 

The Principles of Nature

Thomas collates Aristotle’s different comments and work into a single monograph on the principles and causes. He notes the commentaries of Avverroes (1126-1198) and Avicenna (980-1037) on Aristotle. There are citations to On Animals, Metaphysics, Physics, On Generation and Corruption, and On the Soul. Thomas does not interact with Scripture. 

Thomas here argues that there are two kinds of being—being in potency and being in act. Being in act exists without qualification while potency’s existence is qualified. 

Things that are in potency can exist in two ways: accidentally as a subject of matter (the white in a man) called matter in which and substantially matter from which (sperm combined with an oocyte becomes a man). 

The type of matter that is only potency is prime matter, because it can become anything. Prime matter differentiated with a form is the substance of a thing. Those things which are not necessary to the thing as accidents are the subject. Without form the thing does not exist, but subject does not control the existence of the substance.

A form is defined as the action of particular existence; so that the form of the substance is the substantial form (ex. soul of man). While the form of the accident is accidental form (the man is white). 

Generation of thing is a movement of form. And so the potency of sperm and the oocyte generate a man. We may also speak of the generation of an accident, but in a qualified way as the man becomes white does not generate the man, but whiteness in the man.

Conversely corruption corresponds with generation: simple corruption is the destruction of the substance. Qualified corruption is the destruction of the accident. 

For generation to occur, matter with potency, privation, and form are needed. A lump of bronze has within it both the potential to be a statue and the privation of the statue form. By adding the form the bronze becomes the statue and the privation is removed. 

The bronze has the substantial form of bronzness, but it is generated into a statue by the additional form of statue which is an artificial form. “[F]or art works only on what is already constituted as existing by nature” (10). 

Nature then has three principles: “matter, form, and privation” (Ibid). Privation is an accident, because it does not belong to matter or form, but is rather a lack.

Accidents are then necessary and non-necessary: risibility [ability to laugh] is necessary to man while whiteness is not. Privation is a necessary accident, because all matter can exist in a different form, and thus privation is necessary for generation. 

Because negation can be attributed to anything even non-entities, negation is not a thing or principle; the principle is privation and privation is a lack of perfection in a thing intended to have it. So blindness is negation in rocks, but a privation in man. 

The only matter that exists without form but with privation is prime matter. 

Knowledge comes to humanity only through the form as attached to matter, and so our knowledge of prime matter then comes from extracting a universal from the observed composite. Properly speaking all differentiated things exist fundamentally as prime matter. Yet prime matter “does not exist in act, since existing in act occurs only in forms, but exists only in potency. Hence whatever exists in act cannot be called prime matter” (14).

The three principles—matter, privation, and form—cannot generate; the form of statue does not create an act of generation, nor can matter itself. The agent of generation is then a cause, specifically the efficient or moving cause. 

Aristotle argued then that the fourth principle must be what “was intended by the agent” (15) and this is the end. Agents are divided into two categories—determined and voluntary. Voluntary agents function as both determined agents (displacing air) and voluntary agents (clapping). The intention of natural agents is “their inclination toward something.”

A “cause is said to be that from whose existing another follows” (17). And there are four causes or elements—material, efficient, formal, and final. 

1. Material—[change in the material of the thing]

2. Efficient/moving—[things apart from the thing being changed or moved]

3. Formal—[change in the shape, arrangement, appearance of the thing]

4. Final—[the end towards which change is directed]

The cause effects the elements of the thing which is “an immanent, specifically irreducible entity of which a thing is primarily composed” (17). Elemental matter cannot be destroyed. So consuming bread does not put bread into the blood, but the elements are placed in the blood while the bread is destroyed. 

A single object or event may have multiple causes, and cause may also function as contraries. A pilot can both be the cause of the sinking and safety of his ship.

The complexity of causation also includes the same thing being a cause and being caused: “Hence the end is the cause of the causality of the efficient cause. Similarly, it makes the matter be matter, and form be form, since matter receives a form only for some end, and a form prefects matter only for an end” (19)

Causes exist prior to the thing caused. And yet the priority of the cause takes two forms. “a thing can be called prior and posterior, and a cause can be called caused, with respect to the same thing. For thing can be called prior to another in generation and in time, or in substance and completeness” (20).

Necessity can be absolute or conditional. Necessity is linked to efficient and material causes in generation requiring the outcome. Thus, “death stems from matter—that is, from the disposition of composing contraries; therefore it is said to be absolute because there is no impediment to it” (21). The conception of a man is necessary for the birth of a man and yet this is conditional.

Ends are of two types—generation and “the end of the thing generated.” So the knife is generated and generation is an end, but the purpose of the knife is cutting. 

“Being is not a genus, however, since it is predicated, not univocally, but analogously” (26). To understand how this relates to the “unity and diversity within causes,” we must note that “something can be predicated of many things in three ways: univocally, equivocally, and analogously” (Ibid). 

When something has the same name and nature as in animal in reference to man and dog, it is univocal. It is equivocal in reference to two things of disparate nature: the dog (animal) and the Dog (constellation)

“An analogous predication occurs when something is predicated of several things which have diverse natures, but which are related to some one thing” (27). So we speak of a healthy diet, a healthy horse, healthy urine. “For healthy is predicated of urine as a sign of health; of a body, as of its subject; or medicine, as of its cause. Nevertheless, each of these is related to the one end, health” (Ibid). 

On Being and Essence 

Thomas brings together his modification to Aristotle’s understanding of being into a single monograph. He interacts again with Avicenna and Averroes, but also Boethius (cf. review) on universals. He comments on Aristotle’s, Posterior Analytics, Metaphysics, On the Heavens, Physics, Topics, On the Soul, History of Animals, and Parts of Animals.

The vocabulary is foreign enough to require some outside help:

Richard Muller shall assists us in defining our terms:

Genus: genus; viz., either a number of individuals things identified as a group by means of a common concept or universal, or the universal itself as predicated of a group of individual things. In the former view, the universal is merely an abstraction; in the latter, it exists either in the thing or prior to the thing. The ideas of genus must be further clarified as indicating a universal that does not exhaustively express or describe the essence, or quidditas [whatness of a thing] of the individuals in the group. Thus, human beings, horses, and snails all belong to the genus of animal. By way of contrast, species refers to individuals in a group or to the universal predicated of the group in such a way as to express the essence of those individuals fully or exhaustively. The “man” as a species indicates all humans beings as rational, intellectual animals and therefore distinct from horses and snails. (s.v. genus, Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms). 

 Being can be spoken of in two senses according to Aristotle: those things divided up into the ten genera and the truth of a proposition. 

The truth of a proposition or that about which an “affirmative proposition can be formed, even if it posits nothing in reality.” In this sense we can speak of privations and negations as things—blindness, zero, darkness. These things have no positive essence. 

The ten genera [substance, quantity, quality, relatives, somewhere, sometime, being in a position, having, acting, and being acted upon] make up the essence of the thing. And “‘essence’ is used inasmuch as it designates that through which and in which a being has the act of existing” (36).

Accidents have essences in a qualified way, but particularly simple substances have the clearest essence. Composite substances are less noble and have essences but they are divisible. “For simple substances are the cause of composite ones—at least the first substance, God, is” (36). 

Matter and form as separate things cannot be the essence, because “a thing is so determined by that by which it is in act.” 

He then notes as an aside that “the definition of natural substances contains not only form, but also matter; otherwise there would be no difference between definitions in physics and mathematics” (37).  

Thomas then goes on to explain the relationship between matter and genus; this is related to abstracting to or from an individual to the universal with precision: when we think of Obama as a human being we are thinking of him with precision, but when we think him as a skinny, tall, African-American, we are thinking of him in less and less precise abstraction. 

The basic issue, as I understand it is: if we think of Obama as he is different from all other men, he has a specific Obama essence different than other men; yet if we think of him as similar to all other men he has an essence that is universally shared. 

Thus we can think of form as human—shared by all men, and form as differentiated Obama as Obama. And it’s the same with essence and differentiated matter (differentiated in genus and species). 

Thus there appears to be an animal form, an animal-donkey form, and an animal-donkey-owned by Balaam form. A precise essence has the greatest abstraction and the least abstract is therefore the most unique essence—animal-man-Obama. 

Thomas then moves on to consider if genus, species, etc. exits in individuals. And this he rejects. He also rejects that these ideas exist independently apart from the individual as Plato held. And instead argues that the categories exist within the mind but have references to real things abstracted from individual examples.   

Thomas’ view comes to be called the conceptualist; because the thing conceptualized—form, genus, species—is real but it does not exist independently of the observed in the individual example.  

Or as he writes, “Predication is something which is accomplished by the action of the intellect composing and dividing and has for its foundation in the real thing itself the unity of those things one of which is said of the other” (50). 

He now moves on to consider how “essence is found in separated substances, namely, the soul, the intelligences [angels], and the First Cause” (51). 

“Hence, [the soul’s] possible intellect is related to intelligible form as prime matter, which holds the lowest grade among sensible things, is related to sensible forms, as the Commentator say in his commentary on the third book of the  De Animia. Accordingly, the Philosopher compares it to a writing tablet on which nothing is written, because it has a greater degree of potency than other intelligible substances. The human soul, then, is so near to material things that the material things is drawn to participate in its act of existing; thus from the body and soul there results one act of existing in one composite, although the act of existing, insofar as it is the soul’s    does not depend upon the body” (57).

There are three modes of existence which have been discussed—in things without life, things with life, and things with intelligence (men corporeal, angels incorporeal). Thomas now turns to God and suggests that God is “Whose essence is its very act of existing” (59). . . . “The act of existing which God is is such that no addition can be made to it. Hence, by its purity, His act of existing is distinct from every other of existing” (Ibid). . . . “Indeed, God possesses the perfections which are in all genera, because of which He is said to be perfect without qualification, as the Philosopher and the Commentator state in the fifth book of the  Metaphysics  [v. 16, 1021b30].

On the Virtues in General 

Thomas defines virtue: “The name ‘virtue’ indicates the perfection of a power, and hence the Philosopher [Aristotle] states in the first book of On Heaven and Earth that virtue is the ultimate perfection of potency” (75)

Virtue then is the use of an active potency within a human being for some perfection. It is not a passive capacity in the sense that paper has the capacity to take ink, but it is an active use of an existing potency.

Potency “are passive only which act only when moved by others” (76). So the eye is a passive potency because it cannot operate for its end without light and an object. The reasonable potencies must cooperate actively in their perfection or they are not reasonable (77). 

Further, these potencies to be perfected must reach three aspects described by Aristotle: “uniformity in operation,” “preformed readily,” and “operation must be completed pleasurably” (77-78). Thus completed action is a virtuous habit. 

This leads to difficulty of contradicting a portion of Augustine’s definition of virtue: “virtue is a good quality of the mind by which one lives rightly, which no one uses badly, and God produces in us without us” (78).

Augustine has essentially defined all virtue as passive in that they are caused by the work of God within us making us the secondary cause of our action. 

Thomas handles this by carving out distinctions among the virtues--moral, intellectual, theological, and acquired—are all active virtues, but there is “infused virtue” which is passive as described by Augustine. 

Infused virtues are necessary because humanity has two ends: “man’s good is twofold: one good is proportioned to his nature, and another exceeds the faculty of his nature” (100).

Thus, we have virtues which are perfected to make us more natural, and then we have supernatural good or end that requires God’s activity: “the rational soul, which is caused immediately by God, so exceeds the capacity of matter that corporal matter is not totally capable of confining it” (Ibid). “This occurs with none of the other forms, which are caused by natural agents” (101).

Thomas later must turn and explain why Augustine is wrong and he has two essential disagreements with him: the first, on the issue of anthropology.

They hold that forms are capable of change just as substances are. [Note to Augustine, De Genesis ad Litteram, 6.6]. Wherefore, not finding that whence forms are generated, they posit them either as created or as pre-existing in matter.

If I grasp this correctly, Augustine thought that a radical shift had occurred at the Fall changing what Thomas refers to as the form of humanity. Thomas doesn’t think the form can change because it springs from the soul. Augustine sees a change to the actual potency of man as he is then Thomas does. (The citation to Genesis ad Litteram is to an extremely obscure section of Augustine on a staggered creation of humanity and is provided by the editor. But it does point to Augustine seeing humanity as participating in multiple creations and not a single creational act.)

For Augustine, a sinner can love himself and to some degree his neighbor but hate God. For him to love God requires that God add love to him or provide him the potency to love. And to this Thomas responds:

The Philosopher disproves this, however, in Book Four of the Physics. For when something becomes more curved, something does not become curved which was previously not curved. Rather, the whole thing becomes more curved. It is impossible to suppose this in regard to spiritual qualities whose subject is the soul, or part of the soul. (104).

A man loves God and in loving God increases his activity of love, so that the whole is more “curved.” So man must not merely have the internal structures necessary for loving—will, memory, appetites, intellect—but he must have the actual power.  

Thomas steps further away from the historical position of the church by removing the necessity of the indwelling Spirit of God for Godward love to exist:

This position would indeed have some merit, if charity were a certain substance having an act of existing apart from substance. Hence, the author of Sentence, [Peter Lombard, cf. review] thinking charity to be a certain substance, namely, the Holy Spirit Himself, seems, not unreasonably, to have held this type of increase” (Ibid). 

Humanity then has a natural love for God. This love is insufficient for salvation, and so God comes and infuses those who are naturally loving him with greater charity:

For a man doing what he can prepares himself to receive charity from God. Our later acts can be meritorious with respect to the growth of charity because they presuppose charity, which is the principle of merit. But no one can merit without obtaining charity from the beginning, because merit cannot exist without charity. Therefore we say that charity grows with intensity (107).    

On Free Choice

Thomas holds to a conditional libertarian free. By libertarian is meant choosing between good and evil without prior influence. The condition is the current state of “goodness” caused by embodiment. (See below) 

The Reformed understanding is that the will can always make choices between perceived goods, but these goods may or may not be good according to God. Regeneration and cooperation with the Spirit of God are necessary elements of the potency to choose between good and evil after the fall. 

Thomas clearly rejects the doctrine of total depravity by his doctrine of natural goods and supernatural goods:

Nevertheless, because some attempts [toward goodness] do occur, these can be a way of preparing for grace.

The reason why a man in this state of life is incapable of being so obstinate in evil that he cannot cooperate in his liberation is evident from these facts: passion dissipates and is repressible; habit does not totally corrupt the soul; and reason does not adhere so pertinaciously to falsity that it is incapable of being changed by contrary reason.

But after this state of life the separated soul will not understand by receiving from the senses, nor will its appetitive powers of sense be in act. Thus the separated soul is similar to an angel with respect to the mode of understanding, and with the respect to the indivisibility of its appetite, which were the causes of obstinacy in a fallen angel. Hence, for the same reason, the separated soul will be obstinate.

Finally, in the resurrection the body will follow the condition of the soul. The soul, therefore, will not return to the state in which it presently is, wherein it must learn through the body, although it will use bodily instruments. Hence, the same cause for obstinacy will remain (144). 

Essentially, Thomas believes and teaches that human beings must be able to do some good in their current—pre-mortem and pre-resurrection—state. The good exists because the physical body and the soul interacting require goodness so that the senses can accept and interpret data.

When the soul is separated from the body without grace, then the soul will be obstinate and lack the power to choose good. At the resurrection the body will be converted by the soul to total depravity. 

Benefits/Detriments: The collection is an extremely helpful introduction to Thomas’ thought.

Thomas’ understanding of the Fall and its effects is essentially that supernatural good was removed from man leaving him only with natural good. Nature remains fundamentally the same and remains open to its supernatural end through cooperative elevation. Thomas’ insights are fundamental to the current Roman system which I anathematize in the strongest terms. 

Such a view allows someone like Aristotle to make authoritative statements on what can only be revealed truths. Thus his work is sprinkled with statements like:

Accordingly, the Philosopher compares [the soul] to a writing tablet on which nothing is written. . . . (57)

Angels are incapable of a sin of passion because, according to the Philosopher in Book Seven of the Ethics, a passion is found only in a soul’s sensible part, which angels do not possess (142). 

Aristotle then provides the most fundamental tools for interpreting the Bible, and the Bible it seems plays a very secondary role in correcting Aristotle.

Recommended for philosophy students and academically minded pastors. Please note Goodwin’s editing when reading.