November 15, 2023 Show with David Reece on “One Reformed Pastor’s Critique of the Rising Alignment with the Theology of Thomas Aquinas”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.

It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

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Questions. And now here's your host, Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon, Cumberland.

County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Wednesday on this 15th day of November 2023.

I'm absolutely thrilled to have back on the program a returning guest who has become, as of recent days or recent weeks, a regularly featured guest. His name is David Reese and he is the pastor of Puritan Reform Church of Phoenix, Arizona, and he's also the owner of a company named Armored Republic.

And we're going to be talking about something very controversial today. We're going to be hearing one reform pastor's critique of the rising alignment with the theology of Thomas Aquinas, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Pastor.

David Reese. Chris, thank you for having me on the show. It's an honor to be here and I'm looking forward to talking about this. My hope is that we will see people be aligned with Bible Protestantism in a strong way from this and they'll be able to see how we can make sure to avoid bringing in the heirs of Aristotle and Aquinas without compromising our Christian witness.

And for the sake of.

Our listeners who have not yet heard you on this program or have not yet heard you on Sermon Audio or anywhere else where your sermons are available, tell us about Puritan Reform Church of Phoenix, Arizona.

Puritan Reform Church is a.

Church that is focused upon applying Sola Scriptura carefully to the doctrine that's taught, but also to the worship that the church engages in together and also to the form of government. And so we try to be very careful in the exercise of authority to make sure to not abdicate and not fail to recognize where it is that the Lord has told us to act with authority and also to be careful to not impose and to not be tyrannical in the imposition of doctrines, worship, or government apart from what we can prove in the Scriptures.

And so if you are desirous to see right worship that can be proven from the Word of God rather than anything that's invented or to see the doctrine that is drawn out of the Scripture text in careful way, that's the kind of congregation that we are and that we strive to be.

And obviously we all have failings and we all have places where we need to grow, but that is our earnest desire to honor the Lord in that way.

And if you could, provide a website for our listeners in the event that they want to visit your church or have loved ones in the Phoenix area. Right, yeah, so.

People can find us at PuritanPHX .com, and furthermore, if they want to see what I'm putting out personally, they can find me on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, now called X, and they can find me at realDavidReese, at realDavidReese, and it's Reese with a C.

Great, and we will be.

Repeating that information, God willing, before the conclusion of the program. Now tell us about this exciting company that you own called Armored Republic. So.

Armored Republic, we manufacture tools of liberty for free men to defend their God-given rights against tyrants and criminals to the honor of the Lord Jesus Christ. And it is a company where I'm trying to have a Christian culture as well as an explicitly Christian external facing, and so my desire is to see that happen in businesses.

And right now, I think last time I was on the show, I'd mentioned to you that we were working on preparing to close for an acquisition for another company that we were trying to see become a Christian company, and we have completed what we need in terms of fundraising for it.

I think I was told you we were really close a couple weeks ago when we got together, and so since then we've been able to get everything for that, so that that deal is about to close, and so praise the Lord.

And so we're continuing to try to build out Christian companies, and I'm passionate for that because I think if you have a company like Armored Republic where we have a Christian culture internally, it really encourages Christians to be more bold because when you're around other people in a place where the Bible is used to talk about what we should do and what's right behavior in the company and things like that, that helps people to have a more consistent witness and the way that you can sharpen each other.

And so, you know, your show's name is really fitting for that, that idea of iron sharpening iron. You know, we do that when we're on your show. We're talking to each other about the doctrine, the things of God, and that can occur all day long if you're in a work environment where there is explicitly Christian culture and things like the handbook try to draw what we ought and ought not to do from the law of God rather than just human opinion.

Great. And today we are.

Addressing, as I've already mentioned, a very touchy subject, a very controversial subject, a subject that has brought division and sadly even animosity with brethren in Christ toward one another, even not only brethren in Christ but people who share the great majority of theology in common.

I'm talking about people who are the brothers and sisters of my guest and myself in the Reformed Faith, people who may not only be Reformed but they may share our confessions, Pastor Reese's confession being the Westminster Confession of Faith and my confession being the 1689 London Baptist Confession.

There are people who embrace both of those confessions who have come, many of them just very recently, and when I say very recently, and I'll be generous here and say the last decade, but I think most of the controversy lately that has arisen has come about by those who have come to embrace Thomas Aquinas as a hero within the last five or six years.

But I want to make it clear that neither my guest, David Reese, nor myself are intending to vilify anyone who would consider themselves Thomists, consider themselves adherents to much of the theology of Thomas Aquinas.

In fact, the last time we were on the air when we first basically came up with the idea to do today's show on this topic, Pastor Reese and I both enthusiastically declared that the late R .C. Sproul is one of our modern-day heroes and he considered Thomas Aquinas a great hero of his, and not only R .C. Sproul but another hero of mine.

I don't remember if Pastor Reese shared this fondness with me, but another one of my heroes was the mentor, or at least a mentor, of Dr. Sproul, Dr. John Gerstner, who was also an enthusiastic supporter of the theology of Thomas Aquinas, and although my guest and I are in disagreement with that, we do not vilify these men, we do not cast them aside to not be useful to us in many and great ways.

But if you could, I think it'd be wise to start with a summary explanation of who Thomas Aquinas was and in the era in which he lived and had a powerful impact on the.

Church of his day. Absolutely, so Thomas Aquinas is a figure who had a very dramatic impact in the 1100s and the impact of his teaching was such that in the high Middle Ages, in a time when you already had kind of a dominance of the papacy, right, the rise of the papacy occurs in the 600s and you have the papacy's continued rise in many conflicts up into the Reformation.

And so with the high claims of the papacy continuing to go higher and higher, one of the things that we see during sort of the high Middle Age period is a time where across Western Europe the view of a literal eating of the physical body and physical blood of Christ starts to become more and more of an emphasis and Thomas Aquinas comes up with the famous formulation of transubstantiation in terms of how he talks about that and that's one of the dramatic impacts as he comes up with sort of a philosophical way of dealing with that.

But furthermore one of the things that had happened was the writings of Aristotle had come over into Europe and that came through the Muslim influence where there was translation and my recollection is that Thomas obtained Aristotelian writings by having them translated from Arabic into into Latin so he's not even dealing with Aristotle in terms of a sort of Greek writings or manuscripts there he's dealing with them through layers of translation and he's trying to take that and so he starts this idea of Aristotle being the philosopher and so the influence that he has of encouraging people to think of Aristotle as this source of truth and to put it side-by-side with Scripture is a significant change earlier on in the earlier Middle Ages you had Augustine as sort of a very important figure from you know the four and five hundreds into the future of the church and what happened is there's also sort of a connecting of Plato in the in the church so you have sort of a platonic thought trying to take a rationalism without Scripture and put that side-by-side with with the Scripture and so you see that with with Thomas you have him taking experience as opposed to just reason trying to take experience and what you might call empiricism and put it side-by-side with Scripture and that is there's another school that had to kind of try to the old things might call them the mystics or irrationalists who had tried to take things and make it so that personal experience or feelings or some sort of a super rationalism with the what are called the pseudo Dionysius writings.

You have these people trying to pull in sort of this this thing where reason is is curbed or or contradiction exists in the mind of God. You you have sort of this idea that God is beyond understanding at any point.

So you have the you have sort of these this irrationalist school. You have a rational school and you have Thomas bringing in an empirical school of thought and this empirical school of thought from Thomas Aquinas is in a backdrop of sort of the mysticism and the rationalism views being dominant and so what what happens is you end up with Rome adopting this sort of empirical epistemology and that's a that's a five dollar word for how do you know.

Right. So epistemology is a study of knowledge and so that you answer the questions what's true and how do I know that's what epistemology is and and so this this is sort of the most significant thing that Thomas brings in is he's trying to emphasize that we can gain knowledge by experience by our senses by what we see touch taste hear and smell and and so using that as a source of truth that is authoritative and and that is sort of the emphasis there and what we see Luther reacting to in the Reformation is not only a doctrine of justification and a doctrine of authority in terms of the church but he also opposes tradition and sort of the human philosophy of deriving things from our experience as authoritative for the faith and for our ethics.

And that's a major part of the the reaction of Sola Scriptura against that backdrop and so Thomas's influence significantly there in the high Middle Ages is an important part of what we find the Reformation reacting against and what would be the essence of the.

Dispute when it comes to those in our day who are both Presbyterian and Reformed Baptist who are enamored with Thomas Aquinas who actually some go as far as saying that we cannot accurately understand the scriptures or our own confessions without understanding Aquinas.

What would be the essence of the argument between the Aquinas's advocates and those who are extremely concerned to put it mildly all the way to the perhaps the the extreme end of those who would denounce it the theology of Aquinas in regard to the differences that is as.

Heresy. Yeah. So I would say that the the principal point of difference is going to be on the view of the role of experience in knowledge. And so for example you would call me a presuppositionalist and so I'm going to say that that scripture is the foundation for knowledge.

I'm going to say that logic is a part of that. And so you have what God explicitly says and what God says as a necessary inference. Right. So what he explicitly says and all of the system that's implied from his explicit statements.

And an empiricist or a Thomist is going to say that we have to start with our experience. And we can get to this set of natural theology that is derived from our experience principally using for example the cosmological argument where from our observation of motion we can arrive at the need for a first mover.

And so you're going to have how you know is going to be built differently. So you're going to go from experience to God to scripture as opposed to saying we're starting with scripture and from there we build the system.

And so that's going to be the most foundational difference. And and that's going to that's controlling the question how do you know. And and when you think about philosophies as a whole and Christianity is a philosophy it's just the true philosophy.

And so there are human philosophies the question is what is that God has said what the word philosophy is just a love of wisdom. Right. Phyla. And Sophia. Sophia's wisdom. Phyla is brotherly love. And so this idea of the love of wisdom we ought to love wisdom.

And God is the revealer of wisdom. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And so we have this idea that the God reveals himself. And the question is how does he reveal himself. Does he reveal himself in a way where we learn about him authoritatively from our experience of the creation.

Or do we learn about him authoritatively because he has revealed propositional truths that he has communicated to us. And so that question of experience versus the words that God has spoken as the starting point for knowledge is going.

To be the key question and because of what you just said basically that the the two sides of the divide amongst reformed Christians have accused the other of from some very serious errors. You have those on the one side who are advocates of Thomas Aquinas who actually for the first time in my life as a Christian I've never heard this term used or this word used in a derogatory sense until recently but the Thomists are calling those who oppose Aquinas's theology biblicists and they're using that as an ad hominem or a pejorative term.

And then you have those on the other side of the divide who are opposed to Aquinas who are accusing Thomas of denying sola scriptura whether they would consciously verbalize that or not if you could touch on those two ends.

Of the spectrum that I would just mention. Absolutely so this idea of being a biblicist or a scripturalist for example that that idea that that the Bible is is used as the authority and the starting point and that you don't take things in from outside of the Bible to interpret it that gets attacked as sort of a fundamentalist.

Wooden view. Right. And so first of all I am a fundamentalist so you know have that. Secondly yes in the early 20th century.

Understanding of that I'm assuming the fundamentalist modernist controversy.

That's exactly right. That's exactly right. So that the origins of the word fundamentalist come from that very controversy. And the funny thing is the controversy between the modernists and the fundamentalist was actually a question about what is the source of authority was it scripture or the modernists would often present the view of we can learn from archaeology and science and it's a authority alongside the Word of God.

And I believe that modernism frankly is an outworking of the problem of a two-source theory of truth where what you say is we have the Bible and we also have something else and we're going to try to harmonize those and what happens is when they one of them is always actually the higher authority.

And so for example R .C. Sproul would have said that he believed you could get knowledge from science but guess what he interpreted the science from the Bible right. And and then in.

Fact he ceased being a old earth creationist because of that. That's.

Exactly right so he went through a process of reform there because he was being reformed according to the Word of God more and more as he grew in sanctification. And he's a great example of that humility he would when he realized he was wrong about something he would publicly repent of it.

He wouldn't try to hide it and pretend like he always knew he would just straight-up say I used to believe this right here's why I was wrong. And that was such a glorious example to the church. Amen.

That man gave that wonderful humble example in his time here and I am so grateful for him. He didn't agree on the things that I'm talking about. He would disagree with my critique right here but but at the same time in the places where he saw what the Bible was teaching he would make sure that he would not say that the science is going to control his interpretation.

He's going to make sure that the Bible is the Word of God and he knows that his interpretation of the science is something that has to be controlled by the Bible. And so in an ultimate sense I mean he really was putting the Bible over since experience and and so that idea though the modernist fundamentalist controversy was a a controversy about whether or not we should try to harmonize you know external things evidences and science.

I think the modernist did a bad job even with that they were not a consistent group. But I mean you'd have people saying like the Hittites don't exist for example because we don't have any archaeological examples from them or evidence from them and so they'd say so you know the Bible must be wrong.

Well now we have tons of Hittite stuff so so like over time you find different things. The fact you haven't found it yet is a silly argument for the Bible being true or being false. And so that was an example of something that was occurring during the early part of the 1900s is that argument about the Hittites.

But the point is that then on the other side so there's the biblicists like myself it's like I'm happy to take that title. And then there's the other side where there's this this idea of the endangerment of Sola Scriptura and and I think it's true that having multiple sources does endanger Sola Scriptura but there and I think that historically the Protestant Reformation declined into the mainline churches adopting modernism because our seminaries advocated for a dual source theory of truth opposed to saying the Bible alone is the authority that governs our faith and practice.

We tried to have other sources to govern our faith and practice outside of the Bible and that could be science or whatever else. But the point is the response to that is going to be well historically Christians have always taught natural theology and they're going to say that to say that that natural theology endangers Sola Scriptura is something that's sort of an invention of Vantill or Clark or or you know Bovink or something like that they're gonna try to try to come in and say that this is this is a outrageous now here's the problem.

The term natural theology is a term that has four meanings and I recently had an interaction with Stephen Wolf for example who is a he's the author of of Christian nationalism right. And you know he's been interacting on this and he made that same claim and I said well you know the idea that Christian that natural theology means the same thing and it's historical usage is absurd the same with natural law.

So different people have defined the terms natural theology differently and so the four definitions of natural theology are very.

Important to understand. In fact could you pick up with those four definitions when we return from the first break. Sounds great. And if anybody has a question for pastor David Reese on Thomism or Thomas Aquinas and his theology and the modern churches adopting of his theology including in the Reformed faith our email address is Chris Arnzen at gmail .com CHR is a RN Z and a gmail .com.

As always give us your first name at least your city and state of residence and your country of residence. If you live outside of the USA please only remain anonymous. If your question involves a personal and private matter let's say you are in disagreement on one side or the other with your own pastors over this issue.

Or perhaps you are a pastor yourself and you are having a conflict with your fellow elders or your denomination or fellowship. Well whatever the case is that would compel you to remain anonymous. We will we will respect your request.

But if it's just a general question on history and the scriptures and theology please give us your first name at least your city and state and your country of residence. Don't go away we'll be right back with pastor David Reese right after these messages from our sponsors.

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We're now back with my guest Pastor David Reese of Puritan Reformed Church in Phoenix Arizona and we are conducting a critique of Thomism the theology of Thomas Aquinas and there has been a rise in the acceptance of Thomism amongst reformed pastors and scholars and theologians and individuals and it is a matter of concern of great concern to my guest Pastor David Reese.

If you have a question send it to Chris Armson at gmail .com and give us your first name at least city and state and country of residence. So before the break you had said that you wanted to give four different definitions of natural theology.

Absolutely thanks Chris. So.

Basically when we think about natural theology and natural law those tend to go hand-in-hand in terms of how you define the two and so one of the critiques again of those who are the defenders of Thomism today and again they're not defenders of everything Thomas ever taught but generally the defenders of sort of his is apologetic in terms of how you know.

And they're also defenders of his view of law and natural law and the draw for them is they want to have a way of trying to appeal to something other than the Bible to argue for God and also to argue for morality and also generally to argue for some sort of a political order.

So they're gonna have natural law applied to the political order. So natural theology natural law I tend to go hand-in-hand and so how you define natural law and natural theology is going to also go hand-in-hand.

So some people are going to talk about a natural theology in terms of everybody having a general sense of divinity some sort of a feeling of the holy or a feeling of something that is higher and a feeling about what is right and what is wrong.

And that's what they mean by natural law and natural theology is some sort of a deep in your gut feeling about those things. And I don't think that you're gonna find that that's that's not the historic Reformed view of natural law or natural theology but that was associated with sort of romanticism and and so that that philosophy has had a significant impact on us you know and that's kind of like Disney theology right.

That's like you know do what you feel but you do feel is right. You know all that kind of stuff as Jiminy Cricket once said always let your conscience be your guide right. So a conscience that's uninformed from Scripture is simply going to lead you into all sorts of wickedness.

Right. Conscience is a negative guide. It guards us against error. We should not do things that are against conscience. But the conscience is not sufficient to provide us with active understanding active teaching about what we ought to do just like a positive.

Teacher. Just like nature itself in Romans 1 it only makes us inescapable of.

Guilt right. And that is the Calvinistic position historically. Whereas the next one the next definition of natural theology natural law is that we can positively construct who God is from empirical data reasoning using analogical reasoning from the creature to the Creator.

So and that's through empirical information collection through our sensation through our our experience with our five senses. And you might have different number of senses depending on what person you're talking to is an empiricist but that would be sort of that view.

That's one that's a second definition and that's the definition the people are saying is specifically Thomist. So Thomist natural law is going to rely upon drawing definitions and Thomist natural theology is going to rely on drawing definitions drawing attributes of God out of your experience of creatures.

And so that's the that's the problem there. Now the third definition of natural theology or natural law is something that you're drawing rationalistically in other words by reason alone drawing using reason alone having positive definitions of what man is and what what the creation is and what God is.

And so Anselm of Canterbury who is in the 11th century and then you have Aquinas being after that being in the 1200s in the 13th century they're they're sort of separated and so Anselm is sort of a an example using the ontological argument for God of a rationalistic argument.

And and and Aquinas is an example of using the sort of the empirical argumentation. So there are two examples of trying to say we can prove God apart from Scripture. Now both of them get their definition of God from Scripture and they're trying to you know prove it and so they're trying to go but you know and they kind of pretend as though they're they're getting the definition from someplace else or like you could get it from someplace else but the reality is a definition of God they're trying to work from is the God of the Bible.

That's what the attributes they've got lines up there. And they're trying to give two reasons why they're rejecting that subs and they end up trying to present methods that you know avoid the Bible so but so Anselm is so the rationalistic example and Thomas Aquinas is the is the example of of the the sensation in puristism one.

And then you have the Calvinistic example of a sort of natural law or natural theology which has innate categories. What you have is the idea of think of Adam before the fall he has a proper definition of God in his mind uncorrupted and he has a proper view of the law uncorrupted in his mind.

And so then after the fall we have wrongly formed a definition of God and a wrongly formed a definition of right and wrong. And we contradict even that so we you know nonsensically worship stupid things because we take attributes of God and apply them to the universe or false gods or whatever.

And we we contradict our conscience at different points because you know we have written on our hearts a sense of what it is that is the idea of property rights. And we contradict ourselves because at one moment I go hey I want you to leave my stuff alone and the next moment we violate other people's stuff.