The Aquinas Fuss

You belong in the circus, Spock, right next to the dog-faced boy.

Welcome to No Compromise Radio Ministry. Pastor Steve made me do it. It's not my fault. Okay, I'm tired of the headlock. Don't blame me. Did you learn those headlocks at the prison? How'd that work? Don't ask, don't tell.

Do you remember that episode with Spock and Kirk? No.

No. I'm not so much of a Trekker, Trek person where I have every episode memorized.

At least you say Trek instead of star Trek like I used to say in Nebraska. I think Spock was under a spell of some chemical or pollen seed spore or something underneath the powers of some person and then—.

Chin tut. That sounds like a Batman episode. And he—I guess if people got mad, they broke the spell or something. So he was trying to get Spock mad at him. And then he would have enough, I don't know, sweat glands or something that he would get out of the spell.

So that's what he was trying to do there. No Compromise Radio, Pastor Mike Abendroth with Pastor Steve Cooley, The Tuesday Guy. His Twitter handle is at TheTuesdayGuy, correct? That is correct. Facebook, NoTuesdayGuy, just says Steve Cooley.

Steve Cooley. Uh-huh. And what about Instagram?

I don't even remember. I mean, I have an Instagram account. And you know what? One of these days, I'm going to actually link the Instagram with Facebook. I just haven't done it. Let's just do that right now on the air.

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Yes. And it's about who God is. And when you know God, your joy and holiness and happiness is increased, I think. I think that's well said. I think it's March 23rd through 25th. He'll be preaching here on the Lord's Day, Sunday school, Sunday night.

Looking forward to having Steve here. Friday morning, Friday afternoon, Friday evening, Saturday morning.

Reading Thomas Aquinas Without Losing the Gospel

That's right. Steve, as you know, the internet has been veritably abuzz. That doesn't really sound right. Lit up. Lit up with a discussion about Thomas Aquinas. In your kind of lay opinion regarding Aquinas, you're no ox scholar.

What do you think of what's going on in Twitter? How would you set the table for our discussion today?

Well, I did go to junior high with Thomas. And no, I, you know, all I remember is reading him in seminary and thinking, this man is impenetrable, right? I mean, his logic, because, you know, the seminary assignment was not the best.

It was basically like, read 25 pages of the Summa. Okay. So, you just open it up, pick 25 random pages and, you know, plow through.

I think we had to do the same thing for the Quran. You don't have to read the whole thing. Just read a little bit of the Book of Mormon.

Yeah. And if I'm being honest, I probably learned more reading the Quran, you know, just in terms of what kind of errors were in it, you know, concerning the flood and stuff. But with Aquinas, or like really with anybody, we were talking about this off the air.

What do you have to do? You have to read what they're saying. I mean, do you have to? And I think the answer is, it's good to know what men have taught throughout the ages. We talked about this, Ephesians 4.

The Lord Jesus Christ gave gifts to the church and these gifts are men who've been specially gifted by him throughout the ages. You know, why? So that we're not tossed about by every wind of doctrine.

I mean, we have these men to help equip us. Okay. So, God has not been silent through all these years. He didn't leave his church defenseless. He gave them special men. Sometimes these men are spot on and sometimes they're not.

And that's true of anybody. So, when we read them, we have to read them carefully. We have to examine what they're saying against scripture and decide whether what they're saying is right or not. And that goes for Aquinas, it goes for Augustine, it goes for Calvin, it goes for MacArthur, it goes for Sproul, it goes for anybody you want to name.

I mean, they all have, I would say, I've not read anybody that I would say, well, this guy has everything wired.

I've occasionally published a book or two and at the time I've said, finally a book I can agree with everything regarding the author. Then I mature a few years later and think, I sure wish I would have corrected this.

I wish I would have done that braggy kind of introduction.

Steve, are you saying that I should get up on Sunday and say, I'm God's gift to you, Bethlehem Bible Church, Ephesians chapter 4? That would be bad, no. Steve, let's make it, it's almost a false bifurcation, but on one side of this argument within evangelicalism and maybe within Baptist confessionalists especially, we have some people saying, let's not really read slash promote Thomas Aquinas because it's going to propel people, possibly impel them to Roman Catholicism.

So that's one side. Or let's not, maybe they're just saying, don't overdo it, a quote or two, but always introducing all the new works on Aquinas. Let's be careful. That's one side. The other side is where Thomas is right.

Let's use him. And he's right on simplicity and the doctrine of God and double predestination and other things. And I think today on No Compromise Radio, we kind of want to be in the middle with, you can use Thomas, but let's put some warnings there.

How would you warn people? And what I'm asking, directly asking now, Steve, is talk to me from a pastor's heart versus a scholastic's heart, because I think that's probably where the problem lies to some degree.

I think it's, you know, you start reading him and you think, well, he's right on this and you keep reading him and you think, oh, that's new and I agree with him here and I agree with him there. So therefore I must agree with him all across the board and therefore I must be Roman Catholic.

So the caution again is, you know,.

Tip your toes into the pool. Oh, but don't swim the Tiber.

Yeah, don't just leap in because you're not going to wind up, you're not going to like where the current takes you.

Well, Steve, I watch people and they'll promote Roman Catholic authors and books and they'll have them on their podcast or they'll quote them in their blogs or books or something like that. But as a pastor, when I do that, I would say, now we don't agree with Aquinas on baptismal regeneration and soteriology and on justification by infused righteousness, whatever he's going to teach.

We don't agree with that, but we can selectively learn about aseity and simplicity and impassibility from Thomas. But be careful, friends. We're Protestants and we believe in sola fide. I want somebody to give the caveat that the guard, the PS, why don't people do that?

I don't know. I mean, it's much like, you know, if you're going to go fiddle around with some kind of electrical panel or whatever, and you just kind of figure, well, it doesn't really matter what I do.

I can't get hurt. Well, stand by. So I think, I mean, let's just say Aquinas was, we'll just be ridiculous here for a moment. Like we're never ridiculous. You know, Aquinas is in town. He's alive. You know, and you say, well, I'd like to have him on no compromise radio, right?

You're not going to say, here's my good buddy, Thomas Aquinas, with whom I fully agree across the board. Anything he says you can embrace. No, because I mean, it's more like what you said. We don't agree on basic doctrine.

We don't agree on salvation by faith alone. We don't agree, you know, I mean, justification, we don't agree on, you know, on and on and on and on, the clarity of scripture or whatever. I mean, I don't even know all the problems with Aquinas.

But you say today we're going to talk about something that we do agree upon, you know, and it's the nature of the Trinity or it's this, that, the other thing. Okay, fine. You know, I wouldn't bring Aquinas on, and although I wouldn't think he would be a full-blown Mary worshiper, he would probably have some of that in him because it's the church over the last, the Roman Catholic church over the last, you know, 1 ,000 years has really developed a special, shall we say, a place for Mary that she doesn't belong in.

It was years ago, Steve, with World Magazine. I think a Presbyterian magazine. I don't know if it's still out or not. It's kind of like Christianity Today, Newsweek for Presbyterians. I think it is.

I think they've probably slowed their publication rate, but I think it is.

And they had Man of the Year, and it was Pope John Paul II. And they had a big article about why he was the Man of the Year and how he did this against abortion and this, that, and the other. And I just wrote to them and said, I want to be taken off your subscription list because you gave no warning, no caveats, no pastoral, you know, he did this, that, and the other well, but we have fundamental disagreements as protesters, as Protestants, as those who teach the exact opposite of things.

And actually Rome knows that because they say, if you teach justification by faith alone, you're anathema. If you don't believe there's grace in the sacrament, transubstantiation, i .e., or not i .e., but something close to that, you're anathema.

They know. Why don't we know? And to world's credit, they refunded me my money and posted that letter in the back of their magazine and the letter to the editors. Yeah, they never posted my letter.

What did your letter say? I probably just cut and pasted what you wrote. Okay.

So then we have Pope Benedict die, and I realize that Pope Benedict has written supposedly, I've never read anything that he's done, great things about certain subjects that we would agree with and that he was the conservative and that Francis is, you know, the man who follows the wind of the age right now and he just blown around with whatever he's got going on with woke and all that stuff.

But you can't say he was great and you're a pastor or you're a teacher or you're a theologian and then that's it. You have to say he did great on this. We admire some of his integrity for such and such, but be careful of this.

I think it's pastoral malfeasance to do that without a warning. Well, it's like, you know, some people will say,.

Like I might even say, I'm a Calvinist and then someone will look at me funny and go, well, I'm not because I don't believe in baptizing babies and I'm going, okay, you got me, right? I mean, I don't either.

So I guess, you know, I'm a Calvinist asterisk.

Steve, I have a book called Holy Teaching and it's basically a summary of the Summa and it's got kind of Aquinas' mind shown in certain areas, just brief glimpses of this is what we believe. This is what we don't believe.

These are the implications. It's almost Turritan-ish with a great logical flow and I would read something on predestination and agree. I'd read something on the doctrine of God and agree. But can you think, I mean, do you think I'm like out there promoting Aquinas all the time?

I don't think I've ever quoted Aquinas, but once or twice maybe in my life and with a caveat. If I have to say, J .I. Packer said, and by the way, that's the old J .I. Packer before he went ecumenical and ECT, right?

Or Billy Graham. We're glad he says, repent and believe in the Lord Jesus, the only savior. And then all of a sudden he says some dumb things on Schuller. Don't we need to help protect and guard people so they just don't imbibe it all?

Yeah.

And I mean, I guess have I ever quoted anyone and regretted it later or thought even while I was doing it, do I need to caveat that?

Do I need to couch it? So sometimes I just say I did it on Sunday. A theologian said, a scholar said, and I don't have to get bogged into the caveats. If somebody wants to ask me.

Or they want to accuse me of cribbing something or whatever, I don't know. But yeah, they can ask me because I always have the reference and I'll even put the person's name, maybe not always the reference in my notes, but I'll have the person's name there.

I think, Steve, that we've talked about this before on the show. If you want to dive into church fathers, if you want to dive into Thomas Aquinas, if you want to push your students or your congregation into studying some of the great doctrines from centuries ago that are true and right about our triune God, fine, but make sure they know, this is advice I got from Evan Burns, make sure they know about justification by faith alone, that sola fide, they have that down pat.

They're never going to be moved from it. It's this impregnable rock and fortress. They believe in sola fide so they can filter out everything else. What do you think of that advice?

I think it's great advice because it really would stop people from, if they have that grounding, they're not going to leave, I'll just say terra firma. They're not going to leave the firm ground of the gospel.

They might move around a little bit within evangelicalism, but they're not going to leave it. They're not going to abandon the gospel and they're not going to go to Rome, which is pretty important. We were talking a little before the show, people who are really not grounded in those things wind up reading different Catholic apologists, listening to them, and then being swayed and find themselves doing things that they ought not to do and then they abandon the faith altogether.

Steve, I think you're exactly right, and if our folks know about justification and they have read Fesco's book, Buchanan's book, Calvin on justification, Horton's got a two volume out now, I have it, I've only read maybe 35 pages.

I have a lot of books, I've only read the first 35 pages.

Not because they're bad, I just have ADD. The first 35 pages are always the best. Right, I should probably go to the end and read the conclusion.

And I'd be settled, right? Yeah, done. After we teach folks about that, I think if they do end up going to Rome, it's because they want to, right? It's similar to a Reformed Baptist and he loves Presbyterianism so much and he's like, well, I've got to be truly Reformed, therefore I have to go all the way.

Now it's more apples and oranges, I know that, but I listened to a podcast the other day, Pints with Aquinas, and it was, I think the man is a young man, a young man who was at Reformation Bible College down at Ligonier, and that he, if memory serves me, he got asked to leave because he couldn't sign the doctrinal statement any longer and so he gets essentially kicked out of the program for being a Roman Catholic.

And so it's two hours of him saying, the Calvinists are good on this, they believe in imputed righteousness, everything's a nice system, here's what this, that, and the other is, but I believe in infused righteousness, I then came to believe in baptismal regeneration.

I don't know the guy, but it seemed to me that he just wanted to be Roman Catholic. I don't know why, because it's cost him school, and I think his father's an evangelical, but is there a psychological side to this?

Is there a desire for, I don't know, we want to go back as far as we can and Rome is the original kind of church thinking? I don't think that's correct, but is that what they think?

I don't know. If it is, then they really haven't done their homework because they would ultimately find out that the Roman Catholic Church doesn't start until around 600 AD, but that's a whole different topic.

Right.

Why Protestantism, Not Rome, Is the Root of the Church

I watch guys on the, I can't believe you're promoting Thomas because people are going to swim the Tiber. Look at the guys at Reformation Bible College. I hear that, but I also on the other side say to myself, the people that we love, and we love to read, of course, we have some differences here, there, the other, but let's just say John Calvin.

That's an easy one. Well, why do we love John Calvin? Warm, devotional. You see his theology fleshed out in his commentaries and then his sermons, but we love him for lots of reasons. Why don't we love it that he quotes from the church fathers when they're right?

I mean, he'll even quote Bernard of Clairvaux. I mean, if I quote Bernard of Clairvaux, I want to almost give an automatic disclaimer. He doesn't give the disclaimers. He assumes we know, okay, if Gregory or Irenaeus or Tertullian or Origen says something dumb, we don't believe the dumb stuff.

We believe the good stuff. And Origen said plenty of dumb stuff.

But it's almost like maybe your seminary days were different than mine, Steve, Tertullian, Origen, a lot of the fathers. It's like we learned what they said poorly. And I didn't really either. I don't remember, or I wasn't taught what a lot of the church fathers said.

Well, it was almost like, well, we call them fathers, but they're really church children because the church has grown, you know, by the, by the ministry of the Holy Spirit for now two more millennia. I like that,.

You know, church children, because we're really, I mean, specific issues throughout church history. We would be taught when they got this right, or they got that right. And it's almost like, yay for them.

Right. I mean, what a, that was like lightning striking, you know, because here there's this whole morass of just gibberish. And out of that comes, you know, an astounding truth, a moment of victory.

Yeah. Talking today to Pastor Steve, we're talking about Thomism and Thomas Aquinas. And swimming in the Tiber. And what is the Tiber? Flip turns. Tiber is a river that goes through Rome. Good. I've walked over the Tiber on the little bridge, but I never swam it.

Oh, you have to swim it to become a Catholic. I've walked over it.

Okay. But then I walked back over because my hotel was on the other side. We had to walk over and then back. Hmm. So it's kind of like you became a Catholic and then. I'll tell you like Luther, when you go to Rome,.

It makes you think, why would I ever become a Roman Catholic? Hmm. There are consequences to all this stuff. And you're like, what did Luther say? I don't, you know, if there is a hell, Rome's built on it type of thing.

And you're just like, oh, that one church, you walk inside and you see Mary with a cross. And it looks like she's holding it. It's this big gold cross, like a lightsaber. And she is, it's a marble statue.

And she's after Calvin and Luther and her little, the little imps, her helpers, the little angels or whatever they are, are ripping the pages out of Calvin's book and Luther's books. Very fascinating.

Wow.

I mean, I just remember, you know, I've only been to one, I think it was just one Roman Catholic wedding. And I was just so, cause I had no idea what to expect. And just watching the couple go over to this statue of Mary and give her an offering.

And I was like, what is this? I mean, this is just odd to me, right? Well,.

If you go to St. Patrick's Cathedral and you see the little kiosk for Joseph, tiny kiosk for Jesus, little bigger, the very back, who's got the big kiosk? Cause that's where the action is. And by the way, now you go to St. Patrick's, you can just, they have tapping with your credit cards.

You can just tap an offering. I mean, I kid you not, I kid you not. Just have Apple pay. Just tap. So Steve, let's think about church history and the spirit of God, as you referred to in Ephesians chapter four, building the church, maturing the church, giving the church gifts and apostles and prophets and evangelists and pastor teachers.

And you can imagine Jesus dies for the bride. He's going to make sure she makes it all the way home to glory and that she's maturing and that she's taken care of. What husband would not do that for his bride?

How much more the Lord Jesus. And so imagine just the stalk of a tree, like an old Redwood tree. And the stock is, is growing. The, the, the, the, the trunk is growing. A lot of people think that stock is Rome and we're the offshoot of the reformation where the Protestant offshoots, but we're trying to tell the folks and we firmly believe and teach and can prove that the stock, the root, the, the trunk is biblical Christianity.

And an offshoot is Roman Catholicism. Now, why is that important? Because some of the things that Rome taught are still within the trunk, as it were, that are good and right. They didn't get everything wrong.

They believe God is triune. Right? So if I, if I use this illustration, I grew up in a Lutheran church. I never doubted, even though I was not saved at, I was unsaved at 15, 20, 25 and up till 29 years.

I never doubted that there was a God, that he was one, that he was three, that Jesus was the God man. He died. He lived. He was sinless. I never doubted any of that. I mean, they taught baptismal regeneration.

That's true, but they laid a foundation because they were within that stock trunk or root. You, on the other hand, you grow up as a Mormon. There's nothing close to that stock, our root, our biblical Christianity, because the nature of God is all wrong.

Well, and even the Mormon church would say, you know, that this, they, they would claim that it's a restoration, but they would make no kind of claim that the church fathers were Mormon or anything else.

They would say, you know, they would say there was this falling away and that everything got distorted. And, you know, using that same illustration with Rome, it's not only now basically a dead branch of the church, but one that has sawn itself off.

Right? I mean, this is, and then, you know, with its nasty little crooked stick laying on the ground, it points back at the tree and says, that's no real church.

Reading Commentaries With Discernment

I guess what we're trying to say is, as we're trying to wrap this up now, there's nothing wrong with reading people that you disagree with to some degree. I was just talking about commentaries. I was telling the young guys here, the preachers, you can read John Stott.

You just need to know what he believes that we would disagree with, because he really does a good job in first Timothy, second Timothy and Titus in his commentaries. And he helps you understand, right?

Or you just pick somebody and you go, okay, Stott's annihilationist. And this guy is such and such, this guy is whatever. And you just have it in your mind. So, you know, and therefore, if I want to read Aquinas, I need to realize that this is where he's wrong.

This is where he's right. But for me, Steve, I don't need to push Aquinas. I'm not afraid of reading him and turning to and going to Rome, but I can push other people that have the good Aquinas quotes in there, simply Trinity by Barrett or somebody like that.

So, I don't need to say, and we don't have one books in our bookstore that's written by Aquinas. I don't need to, because the good stuff in Aquinas is already in the good reformation stuff, whether it's Calvin or anybody else.

And so again, you know, the idea that the Lord has given men to the church, men who have done the sifting for us, who've, you know, as it were taken their pan, dug it into the mud outside the gold mine, you know, run it through the water and come out with the nuggets, got rid of all the dross.

So, you know, if we read somebody like Barrett and he's quoting Aquinas, he's done the work, we get the benefit. Right.

I guess in summary for me, and I'll let you have the final word, Steve, in this Aquinas debate where some people say, uh, I think they're too cautious. We can never say anything because people might swim the Tiber.

By the way, people have been swimming the Tiber before this big, uh, this, uh, Aquinas push has been happened. By the way, why don't they do the same thing with Augustine to be, to be fair? Right. And then on the other side, okay, let's read Aquinas.

It's fine to do, but I don't think we should push it in such a way that we ignore our pastoral responsibilities of shepherding and warning. And especially for people that are thinking like philosophers, thinking like engineers, they really can latch onto what Thomas is saying.

And then all of a sudden they just think, well, he's right on this. He must be right on other things. So I just want to make sure I'm almost kind of like, I'm not trying to hedge my bets, but I think there's, there's a third way.

Scripture and Theological Discernment in Reading Any Author

Yeah. And well, and I mean, what you said about commentaries, because during the course of preparation, yes, you, uh, sermon prep, you look at Greek sources, Hebrew sources, depending on where you're preaching.

But, um, and you look at the English, you look at the grammar, you look at all these things and you start looking at commentaries. And like you said, you know, the biases of these men, you know, who's the Presbytery, you know, who the Reformed Baptist guy is.

You may even be reading for whatever reason, you might read a Catholic guy,.

Whatever. You might read the anchor Bible commentary. So,.

So you look through these things, you know what their biases are and you go, okay, this independent other biases, this is a good nugget from the Greek language. You know, this is what they drew out of that.

And that's right. So I can use that regardless of what other kind of nonsense may, may, you know, be attached to it. And I think we always, anytime we read anybody, you know, whether it's secular, whether it's supposedly sacred or whether it's actually sacred, we have to view it through the lens of scripture.

Is this true or is it not true? And if it's true, we can embrace it. If it's not, then we should reject it just like any other. Amen. I thought you were going to say, is it secular or J. Seculo? No.

See, thanks for being on the show today. You can write us info at no compromise, radio .com.