Francis Beckwith, Doting Thomists: Evangelicals, Thomas Aquinas, and Justification, EQ 85/3 (2013): 211-227. This is bizarre. Its all happening. Beckwith left Evangelicalism to, as he put it, return to the Church. What he wants to let Evangelicals know is that proto-Protestant Thomist Presbyterians and Reformed Baptists like Gerstner, Sproul and Geisler are barking up the wrong tree as it were in Beckwiths opinion. Mind you, Im inclined to think he *would* say that, though its obvious why Beckwith, an ex-Protestant, is in a unique position to tell Protestants that Aquinas is a great theologian, correct, but Roman, and Roman on soteriology. Actually, I dont buy what Beckwith is saying. I think Aquinas bypasses uniquely Reformed issues like limited atonement and double imputation, which are Protestant doctrines with a kind of papal infallibility, and teaches the Bible within an Aristotelian framework rather than an early modern legal framework. It is a curse in Protestantism that the only gospel preached is a forensic gospel, when the Bible is rich in very many other, far more human and poignant analogies for the truth, like redemption, purification and so on. Romans 1-8 (conveniently stopping there) are preached over and over, because its the only way people understand that the gospel is actually outlined, yet even in those chapters alone multiple analogies are offered by Paul within a large cycle of logic that reaches to chapter 11, and is not really distinct from chapters 12 and following either. Anyway, Ill have to leave this for now. That Aquinas is awesome for apologetics, philosophy, anthropology, ethics and politics is uncontroversial. But I do agree with the Calvinist philosophical theologians who see that even his soteriology *is* consistent with the Bible and the doctrines of grace, even if not always obviously meshing with idiosyncracies of the early reformation forms of systematising the jubilant explosion of their articulation of those soteriological doctrines of grace. Hes *better* than Augustine! https://bearspace.baylor.edu/Francis_Beckwith/www/Sites/Doting.pdf
Posted on: Fri, 07 Mar 2014 04:48:08 +0000
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