47 - Peter Abelard and Thomas Aquinas

We've been working through church history, and we're looking at some key personalities in the

Middle Ages. We looked at Anselm of Canterbury, and as I was mentioning earlier,

I was going to present to you the ontological argument that he came up with. This is classical scholastic argumentation.

We will get to it eventually, but like I said, it would require the best of me and the best of you, and you don't have the best of me right now, so we will hold that off to another point.

Unless Brother Ed wants to present the ontological argument. I know that's one of your favorites.

The ontological argument? I understand from your wife that every

Tuesday there's a discussion of the ontological argument over dinner. She'll get it. She'll get it eventually? Okay.

All right. Anyway, we'll get to that, but let's move on to the next gentleman on our list here, and that is

Abelard. Why in the world would my letters be leaning to the left?

That's odd. They normally don't do that. At 1079 to 1142, I mentioned to you that he was the canon of the

Cathedral of Notre Dame last week. He was a popular lecturer and teacher, and he drew thousands of students to hear his lectures, which given the time period is pretty impressive.

Today thousands wouldn't be all that big of a deal, but certainly back then. The University of Paris grew out of his teaching popularity, and in fact, the

University of Paris, I had this a little bit down below here.

Let me see where to go. Yeah. He was really important in founding what would eventually become the

University of Paris, which grows to a very large size in an obviously short period of time.

He was a very handsome man. Maybe that helped in drawing crowds.

I mean, I suppose the hunchback of Notre Dame could have been a really good teacher, but he probably wouldn't have drawn thousands of people.

And he fell in love with Heloise, the niece of another canon named

Fulbert. So there's another canon at the Cathedral of Notre Dame.

His name is Fulbert, and he has a niece named Heloise, and Abelard falls in love with Heloise.

Well, he's not supposed to do that, but that's what happens. And he has a notorious affair and marries, and they have a son.

I just love these names. I'm not sure what the story here.

Oh, I can't even spell this morning. Astrolabe.

Are you writing all these down? Just checking. We like Gottschalk. Gottschalk was good.

Gottschalk Astrolabe would be really epic. That would be an epic baby name, which would reflect upon the parents in some fashion,

I would imagine. And Fulbert was very, very unhappy about this.

And we tend to think in our modern time that things could never have been any crazier than they are now.

I mean, you look at what's going on in politics and all the scandals and stuff like this.

No, believe me, things have been much wilder and woolier in the past.

Generally, you didn't get to mix in nuclear weapons. But as far as strangeness in political activity, no, no, no, no.

Fulbert hired a band of thugs who broke into Abelard's room and castrated him.

Yeah. So, Fulbert was not a nice man. And that obviously had an impact upon Abelard and his life.

He was a moderate realist. He rejected Anselm's Credo.

Now, this is important. Remember what Anselm's Credo was? I believe so that I may know.

Well, Abelard's was I know in order that I might believe. And so there is a reversal of the relationship of faith and knowledge in Abelard's perspective.

He wrote a very important work called C 'est

Non, which means Yes and No. Yes and No.

And what it was, was a book on contradictions found in the writings of the early fathers.

Now, why would that be relevant? Well, it shows a, not a skepticism, but a sort of the beginning of a critical mind in not just going, well, as long as the ancients said it, that must make it true.

There was a level of skepticism in his thinking and he recognizes that some of the sources that are being drawn from are not consistent sources.

And so that is an important addition that he provides. And he's also important in his doctrine of the atonement.

The traditional, well, there had been many theories of the atonement enunciated by this period of time.

You'll remember that we made note of the fact that the first major treatise on the atonement doesn't come until the 4th century.

And that it probably would have been the next major area of Christological investigation had the

Roman Empire not fallen and the Middle Ages and the Dark Ages started. And so,

I know, for me anyway, when I was in seminary and thankfully had to take history of theology which was still offered back then,

I'm not even sure they bother with, well, I'm not sure. Maybe now all they have is history of theology and they don't bother with teaching the theology part.

I'm not sure what's going on. Louis Burkhoff has a book that I highly recommend to you on the history of the development of Christian doctrine.

And the reason that I mention it to you is in my experience, just preserving energy, in my experience it was, it's often troubling for Christians to recognize the development of theology over time.

And I know that in reading the section in Burkhoff on the atonement, it was quite troubling.

It really made me think. Because, you know, you're raised in the church and you just sort of figure, well, people have always believed like I believe and it seems so clear to me, how could it have not been clear to them?

But something crosses your mind going, well, they weren't stupid.

And a lot of these people gave their lives to the faith. So what does all this mean?

And it can be uncomfortable to people to be faced with the reality of the fact that there have been a lot of other viewpoints expressed down through the ages.

And so we mentioned, for example, Irenaeus' theory.

From the end of the second century, the recapitulation theory, the idea that Jesus atones.

And even that term, we interpret that within our own context, with our own theological terminology.

But Jesus redeems or atones by recapitulating, living through properly and sinlessly all the aspects of man's life.

And that's why Irenaeus believed that Jesus lived to nearly 60, because he had to live to redeem old people too.

And then you had the ransom to Satan theory, that Jesus paid a ransom to Satan, and that this is how forgiveness comes about, so on and so forth.

And so Anselm, going back to Anselm of Canterbury, he taught a theory of the atonement that said that God's honor demanded a payment, and Christ's death paid the debt to God's honor.

Now, one thing that you... I hope you realize that today there's just as much conversation going on, just not within our circles, obviously, on this topic as there ever has in the past.

There are a lot of people that really dislike what's called

PSA, Penal Substitutionary Atonement. There's a well -known...

I don't even know how you define the term evangelical in England any longer, but it's obviously a much broader category in general usage in England than it is here.

And a few years ago, a fairly well -known person in the evangelical community came out very strongly against Penal Substitutionary Atonement by saying that it made

God a child abuser. He abused his child, and it makes him out to be a monster, a monstrous god.

Of course, the emergent church says the same thing. But over the centuries, you've had numerous theories, like the

Christus -Victor theory, and really, when you look at each one, each one is trying to capture one element of what is obviously a large number of pictures that are given to us in Scripture of what the work of Christ involves.

And again, we might go, man, I wish it was... I wish the

Bible was sort of like a systematic theology. You just open up the section on atonement, and there's this... It doesn't work that way.

And the fact is, when you think about it, there are all sorts of different pictures given to us in Scripture.

And they're purposefully... Well, my favorite, you know, the book of Revelation describes

Jesus what? As the lamb standing as if slain. Well, you're not supposed to be standing if you've been slain.

And so it's the lamb standing, and yet he's got the blood of the...

You know, you'd cut the lamb's throat, and so it's got blood on it. It looks like it's been slain, but it's standing.

And then the lamb that was slain is the lion of the tribe of Judah. And in a few chapters, people are calling on the rocks and the mountains to fall on them to hide them from the what?

Remember the term in Revelation? Wrath of the lamb. I mean, that is meant to be a jarring phrase.

The wrath of the lamb. You ever seen... I mean, lamb. Wrath of the lamb. Oh, yeah. Scared of that one.

That's like the wrath of the kitty. Well, even the kitty has claws. The lamb, what's it going to do? Rub up against you or something?

I mean, you know, wrath of the lamb just doesn't... And to have people calling upon the mountains and the rocks to hide them from the wrath of the lamb.

So there you've got pictures given to us. You've got the refiner's fire.

You've got fire and cleansing and gold and just lots and lots and lots and lots of illustrations and pictures.

And you've got Christ being victorious over death and defeating death and representing us and being the second

Adam. And basically, when you look at the theories that have come down over the years, they grab a part of that and sort of try to make the part the whole.

And that's, you know, it's understandable. But what you want is a fully biblical theory of the atonement.

And where are you going to get the heart of that, but as we said a few weeks ago, from the book of Hebrews?

And yet, what has happened that has made the book of Hebrews almost a closed book at this point in history, and that is the rise, the split with the

Jewish synagogue, Hebrews, Hebrew as a language is becoming almost unknown amongst

Christians. The Old Testament is viewed allegorically, the rise of allegorical interpretation from origin.

And so, if you don't have some of those really foundational texts functioning the way they should, then it makes sense that you end up with these imbalanced partial perspectives that people will come up with.

And so Anselm, you know, there is an element of truth to the idea that God's honor demanded a payment.

I mean, it's true. I mean, we talk about why is punishment necessary?

Well, the law of the eternal God has been spurned and broken.

And there is a element there of the same thought that Anselm has.

And you do have the idea of Christ's death as a payment, but a payment to whom?

It's certainly better to think of it as a payment of a debt to God's honor than it is to think of payment of a ransom to Satan, as if Satan is the equal with God, and he's getting paid off, something along those lines.

But again, there's, you know, ransom is used in Scripture. Redemption, a payment, you know, and so there's thinking through, well, who is it paid to?

And I don't even, I can't even conceive how you can begin to make heads or tails out of all this if you don't have a

Trinitarian view of God in the first place. I mean, if you don't see that the Father, the

Son, and the Spirit are working together to bring this about, you have to come up with a theory that only explains a part of the information, because there's no way to put the whole of it together.

So, that was Anselm's view. Abelard rejected both the ransom to Satan theory as well as the honor theory, and he taught the moral influence theory of the atonement.

And this is very popular even to this day amongst those we would identify classically as liberals.

He taught that Christ's death was to show his great love, and that was the only reason for Christ's death.

It wasn't necessary, but it was a tremendous example of God's love.

The emergent church guys have grabbed hold of this as well. And it's, you know,

Christ gives himself as an example of service and love, and it has nothing to do with penalty of sin, wrath, redemption.

And it only brings about redemption by example type of a situation.

Very, very, very common, very often heard in seminaries and things like that today.

When we understand this, it makes us love God so that we can earn our salvation. So, it puts us in the proper mindset and relationship to God.

Certainly, Abelard was nowhere close to a Reformed understanding of pretty much anything, and certainly not in this area as well.

But these scholastic individuals were the big names, some of the big names, that Luther and others were deeply influenced by, but then,

I hate to use the term rejected, but rebelled against in a sense, though they remained indebted to them for some of their terminology and things like that.

So, then the biggest name, who's the biggest name amongst the scholastics?

Uh -oh, he asked us a question. Yeah, that's so I can see if the breathing

I'm hearing is that slow, rhythmic breathing of sleep, or, come on, who's the big name?

Everybody knows. Who's the big name amongst the scholastics?

Who's the biggest name? There you go. We just asked the doc down front. Thomas Aquinas.

Thomas Aquinas. Oh. And guess who really, what's my dates here, 1225 to 1274.

That's not very long. Guess who really, really liked

Aquinas? And I say this only because it's the, you know, we're all remembering,

I would imagine, the influence of Dr. R .C. Sproul in our lives as he passed this week.

But Sproul really liked Aquinas, which always made some of us sort of go.

And I think it was Aquinas' influence on R .C.

that made R .C. an opponent, not proponent, but opponent of presuppositional methodology and apologetics.

When I think of Aquinas, you know, the first thing that crossed my mind, given what

I do, is I think of his codification of the theistic proofs.

And back when I was in Bible college, when

I started reading on theistic proofs and dealing with atheists and stuff like that, it's all

I had, you know. I mean, that's what Norman Geisler promotes. And if any of you know,

Southern Evangelical Seminary in Charlotte, SES that Geisler founded, huge fans of Aquinas.

I mean, there's entire classes on Thomas Aquinas taught at SES. That's why it's not ironic to me whatsoever that so far

I think there are up to 28 students and staff of SES over the past number of years that have converted to Roman Catholicism.

So much so that they've written a book about their, as a group, becoming

Roman Catholics. Because I think he was Roman Catholic. So, you know, you're right.

You've got transubstantiation, the Pope, when he writes in defense of the papacy.

And this is important. This is important, by the way. I realize I'm wandering a tad bit, but I'm doing the best

I can. Especially with all of the pink elephants and tutus dancing across the room.

Very, very, very distracting. Aquinas, when he wrote in defense of the papacy, for example, was very dependent.

Now, I'm really bummed that Sean's not here. Because this is the kind of extra credit question.

But maybe Gary can grab this, and now you'll have an advantage on Sean. You'll be able to get the answer out before he does next time around or something along those lines.

When he writes in defense of the papacy, he quotes extensively from the pseudo -Isidorian decretals.

Now, that is a cool thing to memorize. It will do you no good in the rest of your life, but it will make you feel good about yourself.

So I just recommend that highly to you. The pseudo -Isidorian decretals.

Anyway, what are these? Well, there is a long history of forgery in what we would call the general history of Christianity.

We've heard of, remember Melito Sardis? Well, there was pseudo -Melito.

And especially up to this time period, there were lots of folks, if they wanted to write something, best way to get it published was to slap somebody's name on it that everybody knew.

Nobody knew you, so you become somebody else. And you have pseudonymous writings, you just have forgeries.

I think I mentioned to you the Donation of Constantine, which was a document that had a tremendous influence on the rise of the papacy, where allegedly

Constantine gave the city of Rome to the bishop of Rome. And for hundreds of years, people believed that it, well, if Constantine, if the emperor did it, then he has legal right to the city of Rome and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Well, I've talked to you before about anachronism, remember? We've talked about the fact that when you're born in one place and you never travel more than seven miles any one direction from that place, it's easy to get into the mindset that this is the world and the world's always looked like this, that castles always been up there and people have always dressed like they dress and there was no

Vogue magazine coming up with new stuff all the time. And so the vast majority of Europeans lived their lives thinking that things have pretty much always been the way they were now.

Now, if you went down to Rome, you sort of looked around, you went, ooh, hmm, there's stuff here that looks differently than we do things now, and so maybe things have changed.

But most people never got to Rome, and so you'd see all sorts of paintings of David living in a castle and riding a horse and having armor and all the rest of that stuff because people thought things had never changed.

And so it is just a little bit past this time.

We've still got a couple hundred years to go before it really starts kicking in with a guy named

Lorenzo Valla, but we look at ancient documents and the first thing we do is we go,

I wonder if someone's pulling the wool over our eyes. You know, somebody comes up with something new and it's like,

I think we need to test this radiometrically and we need to test the ink, and there was that fragment that that one

Yale professor lady tried to popularize until someone took the text and Googled it and discovered that one of the spelling errors in it came from an online source that maybe someone who knew

Aramaic as their original language would have recognized or Syriac or whatever it was, but somebody else faking it might not, and we're just automatically skeptical and we automatically think about fakes and frauds and anachronisms.

Does this thing contain elements that could not have been in the knowledge of somebody at this time period?

They didn't think about that back then. And so the pseudo -Isidorean decretals were a whole collection of quotes from the early church fathers, and many of them were in support of the supremacy and the primacy of the

Bishop of Rome. I forget what the number was, but I saw one study that examined

Aquinas' uses of this and said that 97 % of the quotations that he used were actually fraudulent.

Not that he knew that. He didn't know that. But 97 % of the material that he quoted, the quotations from the early church fathers, they never wrote.

We recognize they were forgeries. Now what's important about this, it's not that Aquinas...

Aquinas really is the summit of the scholastic period. And really, for most of the key issues, he is the systematizer.

I mean, he was brilliant. No one can argue with the fact that Aquinas was, without a doubt, one of the most brilliant minds that church history is going to provide to you.

But the sources that he drew from, there wasn't any critical use of those sources as of yet.

And so when it comes to the papacy, sacraments, he wrote on a lot of stuff.

He's really important. And so if the sources he's drawing from are corrupt, the results can be corrupt.

So what you've got is you've got this entire papal system that we still have to this day.

I mean, you can't hardly, you know, watch the news or whatever else without Pope Frankie popping in once in a while with some strange new statement that he's made.

And yet, history has come along and it has, in essence, washed the foundation out from underneath the papacy.

What it was built on was a bunch of lies. And obviously,

Rome has, you know, Rome recognizes anachronism and the fact that pseudo -Isidorean decretals were faked and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

They recognize all that. They don't argue against that. They've come up with new arguments.

But the reality is that their system came into existence through the utilization of this kind of fraudulent material.

Most people don't have any idea what these things are today. Most Roman Catholics don't have any idea what these things are today.

But history certainly shows us the importance of these particular things. Aquinas was born of a noble family.

His mother was the sister of Barbarossa, who we mentioned earlier. Physically, he was slow of tongue and large in size.

His schoolmates called him... Now, I'm not sure if we can even say this now because aren't there laws against bullying now?

So we may not be able to repeat these words. But his schoolmates called him fat, slow, and pious.

Fat, slow, and pious. That was Thomas Aquinas.

At age five, he went to Montecassino and later decided to become a monk. We mentioned

Montecassino earlier as one of those important monasteries.

His family opposed his plans, however. They even hired a prostitute to attempt to seduce him.

That didn't work. They tried to kidnap him. And then, of course, they tried buying him a post in the church.

So, we don't want you to go into monasteries, so we'll buy you a nice lucrative bishopric out here where you can make money and still go hunting and do all the stuff that you'd want to do.

He became a monk anyway. His fellow monks, their favorite name for him was

Big Dumb Ox. Big Dumb Ox. So, evidently, he wore the

XXL monk habit type thing and never won a foot race in his life.

But, while he was not an orator, he wrote very convincingly.

He could express himself in language, not so much the spoken language, but in the written language.

Of course, his greatest work is called his Summa Theologica. He selected 600 key questions of theology.

He would make a statement and then would examine the positive and negative answers or discussions of that statement in standard scholastic fashion.

We wouldn't find this format overly compelling or engaging, but it does have its values.

I mean, especially if he addresses a subject you are actually very interested in, it's always worthwhile to, if you can find it in Aquinas, take a look at it.

You've been influenced by it one way or another. The Summa influenced everybody. The Summa really is the basic foundation of the theology of the

Roman Catholic Church to this day, though there have been developments since then, obviously.

I mean, purgatory had not yet reached its fullest definition by this point.

The Marian dogmas, I mean, he has a very exalted view of Mary, but still you don't have what you have today in regards to Mary, Immaculate Conception, Bodily Assumption.

These are still hundreds of years down the road. But as far as sacramentology and authority and things like that, definitely found in the

Summa. The Council of Trent referred to him as the standard. So the council that was the

Counter -Reformation Council viewed him as the standard. Aquinas' view on the nature of women is really important.

Sorry, ladies, this is not going to be an overly uplifting portion, but it is important to understand.

He absorbed the Aristotelian view of women. And what was the

Aristotelian view of women? A lower class of being, or another way to put it is misbegotten men.

Misbegotten men. Yeah, Aquinas said that women were made in God's image.

He did say that. However, they are a lesser form of perfection than men.

He felt women were weaker mentally, physically, and spiritually.

Hence they must be in subjection and hence should not be ordained. And so there is an interesting mixture there, at least on one level.

The positive thing is that the imago dei, the image of God is confirmed, but not in equality.

This view of women as lesser than was very important in his view of sexuality.

And I think we do have to discuss this briefly anyways. Because you have all the issues of the priesthood, celibacy, nature of marriage.

These are going to come up in the Reformation. In fact, one of the first things that happens in Wittenberg is the monks begin to marry.

And of course the Roman Catholics go, see, that's the only reason this is happening is that these are just a bunch of guys without self -control.

But of course the reality was in 1510, everybody was fully aware of the fact that almost every bishop, almost every priest had a concubine.

And this had materially impacted the morality of the society, the view of marriage. You had the church saying one thing and then doing something else.

Pretty much everybody knew that the Pope had harems of women. And so when you have such a massive level of hypocrisy that impacts everything else.

So where did this all come from? Well, it's very important in understanding

Roman Catholicism's view today. And there are things to be thought of here for all of us because we all have absorbed what's come before us.

Thomas felt the only purpose for sex was procreation. It's the only purpose. And what do you have today in many people's thoughts?

The only purpose of sex is pleasure. Procreation is irrelevant. We've banished it.

If you don't want to have it, you don't have to have it. You've got abortion, you've got every type of method of contraception now. It's changed everything.

By the way, he thought that Adam and Eve before the fall could choose the sex of their offspring.

How in the world would anybody know that? Given that it's before the fall and they didn't have any offspring before the fall.

So how do you know these things? I don't know. But that's what he thought. He said that the fall accentuated lust.

That if a couple engages in marital relations without the idea of procreation one is sinning.

That's still pretty much Rome's perspective. I doubt that it's

Francis' perspective. But most...

Well, I can't even say this anymore. Okay, conservative Roman Catholicism versus scholastic and liberal

Roman Catholicism. In conservative Roman Catholicism which would harken back to pretty much the popes up to the 1950s and beforehand would still have this idea.

That there must be an openness to procreation. That's why there is the rejection of contraception.

So contraception is sin from Aquinas' perspective and from the

Roman Catholic perspective today as well. It's easy to dismiss that conversation while it's uncomfortable or you shouldn't talk about stuff like that.

But today in our society with the radical reorientation of the view of sexuality, maleness, femaleness, marriage, and everything else we really sell ourselves short when we don't give serious thought to the relationship of sexuality, marriage, the continuation of the species, which is sort of...

Most generations before us thought it was fairly important. We have a generation coming up that doesn't think it's important at all.

And, I mean, there are radical forms of feminism that literally preach the idea that the world would be a better place if it was just women.

And they're like, have you thought that one through very long? Are you thinking down the road at all?

No, not really. There's a lot of stuff there and a lot of it goes back to Aquinas and the conversations that were being had at that particular point in time.

Now, he also, in the

Summa, or was it Contra Gentiles? Those are the two of his biggest works, Contra Gentiles against the

Gentiles. And the Summa Theologica. He really did lay out the classical theistic proofs in the clearest way that had ever really been presented.

You at least have to give him credit, even as a presuppositionalist, for the clarity of the methodology that he laid out in laying out the cosmological argument, for example, and first cause and that.

Yeah, it was scholastic, but it was better than pretty much anybody else had done it at this point in time.

And I'll never forget the apologetics class I took at Fuller.

Only time I ever had a class with this particular fellow. And when the class first started, we were all completely lost.

We had no idea, because all of us pretty much had been exposed to Thomas Aquinas.

And this guy's talking, he's having us read Blaise Pascal and Francis Schaeffer, and we just don't know what's going on.

And finally one day in class, he said, now here's what you've got to remember.

Aquinas was brilliant, but Aquinas proved the wrong God. And everybody else had pretty much given up by that point in the class except me.

I'm finding Pascal, his book called The Pensee, if you ever want to read something really, really interesting.

Pensee means thoughts. Pascal was a Jansenist, sort of a, they're considered heretics, but they were

Roman Catholics with an extremely high view of grace and predestination. So they're right on the border of converting, but not quite.

And Pascal's statements about reason, the reason's last step is the realization that there is so much beyond it, and things like that.

And so when this guy stands up in front of the class, and says Aquinas proved the wrong God, that was really when

I started, that's when I started getting introduced to presuppositionalism, and basically his argument being that Aquinas' reasoning from the created order upward to God, and the created order, because of its imperfection and because of its limitedness, is never going to get you to the true

God. The only way to have true knowledge of the true God is his own self -revelation. And while there is general revelation in creation, it is limited in what it can communicate to us.

And so that building's long gone, it's underneath some parking garage, now

I would assume over there at Grand Canyon, but I'll never forget that day, and when he said that, and what it sort of meant for me, as we went down the road.

So we will pick up from there. Thank you very much for putting up with, is that a finger, sir?

Very quickly. A quick question. Abelard's moral influence theory, please.

People. People. Demonstrate, well, demonstration to the creation of God's great love.

Okay, let's close the work here. Father, we thank you for this opportunity to once again look back and consider what you've done in the past.

We ask you would help us to remember that we would not simply file these facts away, but that we would seek to be better servants of yours as a result of this study.

We ask that you would be with us now as we go into worship. May you be honored and glorified in all that takes place. We pray in Christ's name.