Engaging With Thomas Aquinas

On Monday we met at the Pastors Academy in Finchley once again for our reading group. Our subject was Leonardo De Chirco's book on engaging with Aquinas. I was leading so I'll reproduce the questions I prepared below. About ten of us met. We were all quite favourable towards the book which we found helpful though not essential. We decided next time to look at a couple of C S Lewis books.

Questions

How much did you know about Aquinas before reading the book? Have you read any of his work? What did you think of de Chirico's book? Who would benefit best from it?

Introduction 1-11 Are you aware of the evangelical love story with Thomas? (5) How would you answer the five questions on page 6? (“What should we make of this entire discussion? … ie sifting what is good and rejecting what is deviant?”) Also a sixth question as we move on to page 7?

1 The life and work of Thomas Aquinas 12-31 How do you tend to think of the Middle Ages? Is your ultimate goal to see God or to love him? Which is most important - the true or the good? (18) Why is Thomas better remembered than Bonaventure? (19-21) What do you make of Thomas's 1273 mystical experience? (25) How impressive is 8 million words? (26) [Dickens – 4.6m, Shakespeare – 884,000, Bible – 780,000]

2 Sources and synthesis of Thomas Aquinas's thought 32-67 Does a good theologian need a good knowledge of science? (33) Was Thomas's use of Aristotle a theologically compromised use of the Christian faith? (34) Is Aristotle of any use to us? Are some truths of faith accessible to reason? (38) What do you think of Thomas's five attitudes to the Word? (42) Have the inspired apostles and prophets ever said anything contrary to the dictates of natural reason? (44) Did Thomas understand justification by faith? Did he understand total depravity? Is the exitus-reditus motif of any use? (55-57) How do we relate nature and revelation? (59) What do you make of Thomas's five arguments for God? (62) Was Thomas too optimistic? (65-67)

3 Roman Catholic appropriations: from veneration to magisterial affirmation 68-93 Should the accrued venerations of medieval spirituality towards Thomas affect our attitude to him? Is there a Protestant equivalent to Thomas ie someone accepted as the standard representation of Protestantism? How important is the difference between Thomas and Thomism? What is the significance of the legend of the Summa and the Bible? (76) Is Thomas useful to Protestants in proving the incompatibility of Rome and the Reformation? (78) What is wrong with John of St Thomas's approach to Thomas? (80) Why did Thomistic trends from Trent onwards provide the best apologetics for the Roman status quo intellectually and symbolically? (81) What can you learn from Rome's opposition to modernism? (84) What is the significance of Pope Pius XI's 1923 encyclical? (85) “The irony was… neo-Thomism... built a… system that, to fight against the Enlightenment, ended up assimilating the rationalistic outlook of its plausibility structures.” Discuss. (86) What about Thomas's “theological guide” status? (89) Is de Chirico right to note the lack of reference to Protestant theologians in FR? (91) Is the reference to Thomas's Mariolatry significant? (92, 93)

4 Protestant readings of Thomas: circling around evangelical eclecticism 94-124 What are the implications of Schaff's statement? (94) Which approach to Thomas is best – that of Luther (95-100) Calvin (101) Zanchi, Dorsche (102, 103) Bucer, Vermigli (105ff) Melanchthon, etc (109) Turretin and Owen (110ff)?? What about Kuyper's approach? (114) and Bavinck (116ff) and Van Til and Schaeffer (119ff)? How about A Vos and Geisler (121ff)? Can and should evangelicals learn a great deal from Thomas? (123) Was Thomas a Proto-Reformer? (123)

5 Legacy and critical issues… contours... trajectories of Thomas's architectural thought 125-158 Are people naturally open to God? (125ff) Does grace scrap nature or bring it to perfection? (128) How important is it to distinguish common and special grace? (131, 135) How important is what is said about the development of the understanding of nature and grace by Rome? Where does general revelation sit in your theology?Any remarks on what is said about Vatican II? (145-149) Does Christianity need Greek philosophy? Is Bavinck's comment helpful? (150-153) “Updating without changing” – how well does that seem to sum up Romanism? (157)

6 Thomas Aquinas for evangelicals today 159-172 What colour hat for Thomas? (159) Can an evangelical be a Thomist? (160) Thomas on the doctrine of God: Frame or Trueman? (161-164) Can de Chirico's principles be improved, modified, increased? (165-172) Have you been avoiding conversation with Thomas? What is the significance of his having an integrated system? (169) Did you expect more reference to Sproul and apologetics? (171) Are you being mature about this?

Day Off Week 3 2025

More of a traditional day off this week after holidays and Carey in the first two weeks. It was unsual in that I have agreed to lead a discussion at the Pastors Academy on January 27 so I needed to finish the book and draw uo a set of questions which took up my morning. The book is by Leonardo de Chirico and is an introduction to Thomas Aquinas for evangelicals. This meant I had to postpone my walk on the Heath until the afternoon but I managed to get it done by sundown. Bumped into George Platt pastor of neighbouring Highgate Road Chapel with his new baby, Teddy. In the evening we watched the first two Silent Witnesses of the new season. It's an odd programme, quite pro-life in its own way.

Five Lies of our Anti-Christian Age Rosaria Butterfield

The Pastors Academy reading group gathered again recently. About ten of us gathered, led by Peter Day, to discuss Rosaria Butterfield's latest tome, Five Lies of our Anti-Christian Age. The five lies are as follows

Lie #1: Homosexuality Is Normal (Chapters 1-4)

Lie #2: Being a Spiritual Person Is Kinder than Being a Biblical Christian (Chapters 5, 6)

Lie #3: Feminism Is Good for the World and the Church (Chaoters 7-10)

Lie #4: Transgenderism Is Normal (Chapters 11, 12)

Lie #5: Modesty Is an Outdated Burden That Serves Male Dominance and Holds Women Back (Chapters 13-16)

Like me, several thought the book badly edited and too long, (I even spotted a spelling mistake on page 220 and a grammatical error on page 236). Some thought she has grown rather harsh since previous books. Maybe. While recognising this is a book for American women not British men we thought that it made some excllent points and it led to some good discussion among us, eg on whether women should be submissive in the realm of the state (we all agreed they should be in church and in the home).

It was a nice surprise to see a friend of mine from University days. He has recently retired and someone in the same position he knows invited him (we were in fact four Aber graduates - two slightly older men, a pastor and an elder, now also in the London area). I made some suggestions for the next book to do and we agreed to look at one of them next time - Leonardo de Chirico on Thomas Aquinas. Our chairman (Brad Framnklin) deftly volunteered me to lead. That meeting is January 27, 2025.

Leonardo de Chirico

I was at the London Seminary once again today for two sessions. The first was a mini-conference with Leonardo de Chirico from Rome, the author of Same words; different worlds. He very helpfully described Roman Catholicism and spoke of the way to reach such people. It was a master class. So much in Catholicism seems to be the same as Protestantism but there are aubtle differences we need to understand. This meeting was organised by AGBCSE as a shop front for their group and was much appreciated. Jim Sayers chaired and Andrew King spoke about the association. Our churh does not belong to an association but if we did join one this would be the obvoous move.

Westminster Conference Online 2020

We were able to have a mini Westminster Conference earlier in the month and the papers and discussion are now available on YouTube.

For David McKay's paper on Luther check here.
For Leonardo De Chrico's paper on Roberto Bellarmine check here.
For the panel discussion check here

Westminster Conference 2020

CAPTIVE TO GOD’S WORD

You may be aware that the Westminster Conference this year has not been possible but there is a short online version next week. The two sessions will be

Tuesday 1st December 2020

2.00pm ~ LUTHER AND AUTHORITY

DAVID MCKAY ~ Pastor of Shaftesbury Square RPC, Belfast

Luther stands astride the history of the Reformation like a colossus. We all know, or think we know, his famous, “Here I stand …” But what governed his life and bound his heart? Who or what directed Luther’s steps? In some respects, he could be seen as a flamboyant rebel with a stiff neck. In others, he appears a humble subject with a bent knee. We need to see him in a milieu in which authority was very differently understood in comparison to our own day, and to learn how he wrestled with and submitted to authority, whether God’s or man’s.

3.15pm ~ BELLARMINE AGAINST THE REFORMERS

LEONARD O DE CHIRICO ~ Pastor of Breccia di Roma

If you read much Protestant and Reformed theology from the 16th and 17th centuries, especially of a more polemical kind, you are likely to come up against the name of Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621). Who was this man, and why was he such a significant interlocutor with the Reformers and their successors? Leonardo De Chirico will introduce the man, survey his works and his thought, and help us to understand how and why he became one of the most prominent and even respected opponents of the Protestant Reformation.

The conference will be on more than one platform. The Youtube link is

Westminster Conference 2020 on YouTube 

Westminster Conference 2020 on Facebook

So, God willing, the conference will run from 2pm until 5pm on Tuesday 1st December 2020. Two of our original speakers will be joining us to deliver two papers, followed by a round table discussion.

At 2pm, David McKay, pastor of Shaftesbury Square RPC, Belfast, will speak on Luther and Authority. After a short break, at 3.15pm Leonardo De Chirico, pastor of Breccia di Roma, will address us on Bellarmine against the Reformers. Immediately following this paper, our two speakers will participate 

in a moderated round table discussion. We expect to conclude by about 5pm.

Anyone is welcome to join us. We hope that this may be an opportunity for many who do not normally attend the conference in person to get a taste of the theology and history which we love to study and from which we delight to learn. Some eighty have registered so far.

As we are not holding a full conference this year, there will be no printed publication for 2020

Carey Conference Final Day Session 1

Our final session from Dr Chirico was a powerpoint presentation on Vatican II. He very helpfully took us through the deceptive and equivocal approach of the Roman church since Vatican II. He went through some of the various documents and pointed out the yes no approach that blurs the whole scene. These three messages have been very helpful.

Carey Conference 2017 Day 2 Session 1

I chaired the first session of the day. After a report on GBM from Dayl Jones, our speaker was again Dr Leonardo de Chirico. His subject was the present Pope, Pope Francis.

His PowerPoint presentation covered four points under the general heading of a journey into Pope Francis' world
1. Three overlapping worlds
1 The Jesuit identity, anti Protestant
2 The name Francis, St Francis never challenged Roman structures
3 Latin American DNA
(All 3 are firsts)
2. Four significant writings
1 Aperecida (2015) a theology of the people and marianism
2 Lectures on the Jesuit history (1985) Luther the heretic and Calvin the schismatic
3 Evangeli Genetium (2013) Rahner influences
4 Laudatory Si (2015) ecological concerns
3. Three programmatic missions
1 A turn around with regard to the past
2 Presiding over the continent where the future of the RCC lies
3 A "catholicity of mercy"
4. Challenges for evangelicals
He has many acquaintances in the evangelical world and shows them affection and consideration
He knows and uses evangelical vocabulary
He knows and practices evangelical forms of spirituality
He has a vision of unity as a 'polyhedron' where there can be multiple relationships
We must either
Be the evangelical wing of a Roman Catholic church further globalised
Or a radical witness to the gospel which regenerates.
We had a good question session to follow.

Carey Conference 2017 Session 2

Our second session was given by Italian pastor and theologian Leonardo de Chirico. We began with an interesting interview which included reference to a statement on the matter of whether the Reformation is over that can be accessed here.

The gist of the message is reproduced below from another address given elsewhere but containing similar material. (See here).

The evangelical understanding of the gospel stands on two pillars: the authority of Scripture as God’s word written (the formal principle) and justification by grace alone through faith alone (the material principle).

Scripture is the norm of the Christian life; justification is the ground of it. Without the norm of Scripture, our lives are shaped by false standards and deceived by false narratives. Without the ground of justification, our lives are built on sinking sand and will ultimately collapse under the righteous judgment of God.

In J.I. Packer’s lucid way of condensing Biblical teaching, justification is “God’s act of remitting the sins of, and reckoning righteousness to, ungodly sinners freely, by his grace, through faith in Christ, on the ground not of their own works, but of the representative righteousness and substitutionary blood-shedding of Jesus Christ on their behalf”.

Historically, justification has been the landmark of the evangelical faith since the times of the Apostles. The Church Fathers maintained it, and while it was not their main concern, they fully endorsed it. The Reformation did not invent it. Simply it restated it in more biblical and coherent terms, in times in which it had been obscured by medieval opacity. Reformed and Lutheran orthodoxies embraced it wholeheartedly.

Giants like Jonathan Edwards and the British Puritans preached it with full conviction. German Pietism shaped its spirituality around it. Great preachers like C.H. Spurgeon made justification by faith central to their preaching and that pattern continued up to the times of John Stott and Martyn Lloyd-Jones. Even Billy Graham’s message fully stands within the parameters set by justification by faith. The sinner is saved by grace alone through faith alone, apart from good works without any merit on our part. This has been a fundamental mark of the biblical faith throughout the centuries because it lies at the heart of the biblical gospel.

Reactions Against Justification

However, there have been two strong reactions against justification. One the one hand, the Roman Catholic Church violently rejected it at the Council of Trent (1545-1562). Trent continued to use the word justification but filled it with a completely different meaning. For Trent, justification was a process rather than an act of God; a process initiated by the sacrament of baptism where the righteousness of God was thought to be infused; a process nurtured by the religious works of the faithful and sustained by the sacramental system of the church; a process needing to go through a time of purification in purgatory, before perhaps being enacted on judgement day.

Rome reframed and reconstructed justification in terms of a combination of God’s initiative and man’s efforts, grace and works joined together resulting in an on-going journey of justification, ultimately dependent on the “clay and iron” of human works and ecclesiastical sacraments. What was missing was the declarative, forensic act of justification, the exclusive grounding in divine grace, the full assurance of being justified because of what God the Father has declared, God the Son has achieved, and God the Spirit has worked out. Trent came up with a confused and confusing teaching on justification that has been misleading people since.

The other objection to the evangelical doctrine of justification by faith alone came from theological liberalism since the XIX century. In this case, too, the word justification was maintained but the meaning of it was totally undermined and eventually redefined. By rejecting the biblical doctrine of sin as a tragic separation from God and rebellion against God, liberalism objected to the need for justification. According to liberalism, our problem is not so much us being sinner in the hands of a righteous God, but our call to be righteous people as human beings. Christ is the perfect righteous man whom we need to imitate if we want to become righteous. No atonement is needed, no sin is to be forgiven, no judgement is previewed. The liberal vision is to create a world where self-defined righteous people attempt to build a would-be righteous society marked by universal human brotherhood. This culture of self-righteousness has been damaging Western churches and society to the point of making them implode under the weight of unrealistic and false illusions.

While Evangelical Protestants have always advocated for justification, making it central in their preaching, pastoral practices and missionary endeavours for centuries, there have been contrary accounts of justification that have offered alternative accounts of it. Despite their differences, both the Catholic and liberal versions of justification significantly converge in presenting an inflated view of man’s abilities to do something for one’s own salvation (whatever salvation means for them), a defective view of sin, a rejection of Christ’s substitutionary atonement, and an uneasiness towards everything related to God’s justice and judgement.

It is no surprise that in 1999 these Catholic and Protestant liberal accounts of justification merged together into the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (between Rome and the Lutheran World Federation). They were already close enough to finally come to the point of drafting a joint statement. The non-tragic view of sin is shared by both Catholic and liberal views; the necessity of the sacramental system of the church is what the Catholic part insists on while the liberal emphasis is on the universalist scope of justification. All are and will be justified because in the end God will have mercy on all. This is the present-day common understanding of justification shared by both the Roman Catholic Church and the liberal churches.

In 2017, these two bodies will celebrate the fact that the Reformation is over! And if justification is what they say it is, they are right! It is over indeed.

Church Planting and Justification by Faith

How are we then to plant churches in such a context? The church will continue to be founded on the authority of Scripture and justification by faith. There is no other recipe available for a healthy gospel church. There is no other gospel than the biblically attested message of Jesus Christ that saves unworthy sinners like us on the ground of his one-and-for-all work on the cross. We may and should be creative to find new and better ways to convey justification, to preach it, to apply it, to witness its living reality, but the Bible is crystal clear that we are either justified by God’s grace or we fall into a kind a self-justification that is a tragic deception. This is a false gospel.

Any accommodation to the idea that we are ultimately capable of saving ourselves, any accommodation to the fact that salvation is not God’s gift from beginning to end is a slippery slope towards a false gospel. Do not think that justification is a theological relic of a distant past. It is indeed key to grasping the good news of Christ.

May all church planters wholeheartedly embrace what the apostle Paul wrote: “I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ - the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith” (Philippians 3:8-9). Let us plant churches in Europe that faithfully and passionately reflect and embody this gospel!
Dr Chirico commended this article by Mike Reeves here on the 1999 document.

Affinity 2013 Paper 6

The snow has begun to fall and so we are going to finish our conference here in High Leigh slightly early by dropping the final plenary session and ending with the presentation of the last paper. Once again the written paper was summarised and we then went to our groups to discuss before coming together again for a plenary session.

This was the most controversial of the papers, pleading as it did for a new approach to the subject of abortion.

The New Bioethical Wine in the Old Moral Wineskins?

Exploring the Issues When Human Life Begins:

Dr Leonardo De Chirico, Istituto di Formazione Evangelica e Documentazione

Outline

1. A polarized field

2. The Dead-Ends of Biolatry and Egolatry

ie the pro-life absolutising of the sacredness of an aspect of life life and the pro-choice absolutising of the individual and his or her choice

3. The shortcomings of evangelical bioethics

4. The anthropology of the womb

Arguing that the beginnings of life are always linked with the womb in Scripture

5. The beginning of life of the first and last Adam

6. The bioethical implications of being created in the image of God

7. A relational bioethics of the beginning of life

Questions

1) What are the strengths and weaknesses of the pro-life position?

2) What are the strengths and weaknesses of the pro-choice position?

3) How can life become an idol in the biblical sense? Find examples.

4) How can individual choice can become an idol in the biblical sense? Find examples.

5) What does Psalm 139 say about the beginning of life? What does it not say?

6) What does the typology of the first and last Adam say about the beginning of life?

7) In what sense the ‘relational’ aspect of the Trinity has a bearing on the bioethics of the beginning of life?

8) What can be done in society in order to overcome the polarized debate between pro-life and pro-choice?