On Ryan Hurd’s Babylonian Captivity

Posted on April 10, 2026 by Bobby Grow

I’ve “known” Ryan Hurd for many years now; through online engagements and personal correspondences. I’ve only known Hurd in his classical Reformed context as that has taken place during his time at New Saint Andrews College, and then as he has been an instructor for Davenant Hall. My last correspondence with him was quite a few years ago; he and I were discussing his entrance into the PhD program in theology at the University of Kampen (he was just getting started then). There was no indication that he was wrestling with the types of ecclesiological matters that have now finally bubbled up in his recent announcement. In case you don’t follow online theological matters closely, Ryan just wrote a post for his Substack that announced his (and his wife’s) movement into Roman Catholicism. If you don’t know of Ryan his primary theological interlocutor over the years has been the ‘Angelic Doctor,’ Thomas Aquinas. Indeed, it was this hook that finally captured Hurd’s total intellectual and spiritual development. I have always contended that if you’re going to be a Thomist (follower of Thomas Aquinas), then for consistency’s sake you ought to be a Tridentine Roman Catholic (a Catholic after the Council of Trent). Ryan clearly arrived at that same conclusion. Here is a piece of what he wrote for his Substack announcement:

This occurred in my case. And here is where we find the reason for me becoming Catholic. Of course, there are always many reasons for a thing like this, a whole host and all very different. Actually, it is my impression that people often cannot point to really a single reason within the mass of them; but in my particular case, I can do so easily. The reason, for me, is precisely what initially determined me to the Catholic part on these contradictions. The name of that reason is Thomas Aquinas, and particularly his auctoritas.

Auctoritas is a condition of a person comprising both his knowledge in a science, as well as his moral goodness. The former is how you know that he is not deceived; and the latter is how you know that he does not deceive when he testifies as to which part is true. When such a person does testify, you assent to that part merely on account of that person’s condition (propter auctoritatem)–and then you proceed from there.

Over time, it happened that Thomas’s auctoritas became supreme in my intellectual experience. Obviously, it is not supreme absolutely speaking–Thomas would be the first person to tell you that. But it is so in my experience–especially as I have undergone the confirming process of (1) assenting initially merely because Thomas said so; (2) eventually found rationes; and then (3) locked the proposition down in a demonstration and achieved scientia. All throughout this, my learning process, I have never found Thomas wanting, not even close. He has never steered me wrong. And over time, my intellect has become habituated to proceed about contradictions in precisely this mode (I have articulated this elsewhere as simply what it means to be a Thomist).

As I became intellectually obliged to follow Thomas wherever he leads me, so withholding my assent became intellectually unjustified–even regarding those contradictions where, initially, I had no reasons for the Catholic part, or even my remaining Protestant doubts. Remarkably, I became obliged to conclude Catholicism, merely because Thomas had told me to do so. And in the end, I listened.[1]

Why have I maintained that to be a Thomist most organically leads to being a Tridentine Catholic? Primarily because of the hierarchical chain-of-being and theory of causation present with Thomas’ appropriation of the Aristotelian categories and causation. Steven Ozment writes,

The assumption that real relations existed between God, man, and the world made possible Aquinas’s confidence in a posteriori proofs of God’s existence; finite effects led necessarily to their origin, because they were really connected with it. The same assumption underlay Aquinas’s distinctive views on the “analogical” character of human knowledge and discourse about God. According to Aquinas, one could speak meaningfully of one’s relationship to God by analogy with one’s relationship with one’s fellow man because a real relationship existed between the values of people shared and those God had prescribed.[2]

It is this theory of real hierarchical relations finding their causal and actual force from the Unmoved Mover, God, that in my view entails an ecclesiological theory wherein the Catholic church fits best. Why? Because it makes sense that if there is One God, One primary cause, that in a chain-of-being movement from highest to lowest, that within that chain there be one Church, one people of God. And on analogy even within the structural framework of the said Church, there be a hierarchy of one (like the Pope represents) that works its way down into diffuse levels of leadership out into the various priests, so on and so forth. Indeed, just as in Thomas’ theory, he sees the angels with a similar hierarchical structure within the angelic structure itself. And again, this all starts with the actus purus (pure act) or Pure Being of the singular God.

Does this mean that the hierarchical theory of God’s being in action must necessarily lead to the Roman Episcopy? No. But the most organic iteration of it, I would argue, given the Dominican’s ecclesial space for reasoning, is in fact the Roman Catholic church. And of course, this is why the Nominalists and the via moderna posed such a problem for the prelates within the Roman city. For sure, as the nominalists maintained, there were no real or necessary relations between God and the world. If the ‘moderns’ were right about this we can see how the authority of the Roman church could easily be called into question. If God merely related to the world through covenants and ad hoc words (think of the potentia theology), then the centrality and the necessity for the Roman church to mediate God to the world, could not theologically make an argument for the authority of the papacy. But then this is why I think that to be an ecclesiological Thomist is to be Roman Catholic. Aquinas constructed his theory by deployment of and synthesis with the Aristotelian categories toward buttressing the authority and reality of the Holy Communion of Roma in view. Even if early on his theology wasn’t as enthusiastically endorsed as it finally became post and contemporaneous with Trent.

To draw this back in: Hurd, as I have briefly sketched, I think, is being consistent with the aims of Thomas’ ecclesiology and its coherence with the Roman ecclesiology and theory of church government and authority therefrom. There was once another Reformed fellow, in his case, a Presbyterian, named Jason Stellman; he too, within his Presbyterian (Aristotelian) theological commitments arrived at the same conclusion as Ryan Hurd. As a result, he also swam the river Tiber. Surely, there are many former Reformed folk who have made this move. And I would argue for similar reasons to Hurd’s. Ultimately, I have greater respect for people like Hurd who see that the pressure of Thomas’ thinking, if held consistently, ought to lead all of his adherents to Vatican City, Italy. Of course, there are better ways to be genuinely Protestant. And so, I would invite Hurd et al. to abandon Thomas’ project altogether and recognize what it truly means to be a biblical Christian. There are theological, dogmatic ways for doing that; and ways that do not require a sacrificium intellectus. But alas, that was never Hurd’s way to begin with; that is, to be Protestant.

[1] Ryan M. Hurd, Why I’ve Become Roman Catholic, accessed 04-10-2026.

[2] Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform 1250–1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980), 49.

Discoursing Our Way to an Angelology; Philosophy V the Bible; Thomas V Barth

Posted on July 17, 2025 by Bobby Grow

Barth attempts to offer a Biblical Angelology. In the process he surveys some of the most primary developments on an angelology, in the history, as those were offered by Dionysius and Thomas Aquinas. Just on that level his treatment is interesting and rewarding. But in the midst of that, since he is slavishly beholden to the Protestant ‘Scripture Principle,’ he also identifies what I also take to be primary to a truly Christian presentation on the angels. As is typical, especially with reference to my own interests, Barth rightly recognizes the role that a prolegomena/hermeneutic will end up having on how a respective thinker will arrive at their veritable conclusion on what in fact angels (and demons) are. This a priori commitment to whatever hermeneutic someone deploys in their attempt to understand the supraphysical verities in God’s world, will in the end determine whether or not said thinker actually has a point of contact with God’s world or not.

In the following passage the reader will observe how Barth believes a philosophical/speculative attempt at developing a doctrine of the angels, as is present in Aquinas’ guiding habit, ends up providing something highly interesting and imaginative to contemplate; but beyond that, for Barth, this speculation only generates a notion of ‘angelness’ that only can get as high as the virtuoso’s genius. That is, Barth believes, for example, in Thomas’ attempt to prove the existence of angels, that insofar that he stays correspondent within his self-referencing universe, that Thomas does indeed offer something on “the angels” that entails a coherence. But that’s what makes it something of interest to Barth, rather than something of substance (pun intended).

It cannot be contested that in a specific sphere and on a specific assumption proof is here given of the existence of a specific object interesting to the one who conducts the proof. It might be asked whether this sphere is real, and if so accessible, and if so able to be marked off in this way and approached with this assumption. It might be asked whether the proof furnished on this assumption and in this sphere is really conclusive and convincing either in detail or as a whole. But if we assume that everything is in order in this respect, and that Thomas has legitimately proved what he really could prove, there can be no doubt that with this assumption (or with the criticism or partial or total rejection of his demonstration) we are merely making philosophical and not theological decisions. Whether there are intellectual substances without bodies, and whether their existence can be proved in this or some other way, may be a question which is interesting and important in the sphere of philosophy. It may be one which can be discussed and even decided in this sphere. It may even be one which is decisive. But it is purely philosophical. On the basis of the Word of God attested in Holy Scripture we are not asked whether there are or are not substances of this kind, nor are we required to prove their existence in some way. If there are, and if their existence can be proved, this does not lead us to angels in the biblical sense of the term. And if there are not, and their existence cannot be proved, this is no argument against angels in the Christian sense. What are called angels in the Bible are not even envisaged in Thomas’ proof of the existence of these substantiae separatae [distinct substances], let alone is anything said for or against their existence, or anything meaningful states about them at all, with the eight proofs. And what Thomas later constructed upon the demonstrated existence of these substantiae separatae is very different from a doctrine of angels in the Christian sense of the term. In his demonstration Thomas has given us philosophy and not theology, and he has done so far more exclusively than Dionysius. He does so occasionally refer to Holy Scripture, and therefore it may be asked whether he does not incidentally and in some sense contrary to his own intention make some contribution to theological knowledge. But fundamentally and as a whole he simply offers us a classical example of how not to proceed in this matter.[1]

In nuce, if the Christian is going to attempt to offer a genuinely Christian doctrine of angels, they will, as Barth so rightly presses, be committed to the biblical categories rather than the philosophical ones. And of course, it is this methodology that funds the whole of Barth’s style of a confessional trinitarian-dialectical christologically conditioned way of doing theology from the reality of the Bible. The Christian philosophers among us would sneer at this; the classical theologians, the ‘Great Traditioners’ in our midst, would mock; how ironic.

Stay Biblical my friends.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3 §50–51 [393] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 104.

On the Thomistic Captivity of the Protestantisms: Knowledge of the triune God

Posted on June 13, 2025 by Bobby Grow

Human agency is lost in the fall (which remains an inexplicable thing). The only hope for human agency to be reestablished before God is for God to re-create it as He has for us in the human agency of the Second and Greater Adam, who is the Christ. This is one reason people of a certain ilk reject the notion of a natural theology, and its subset in the anologis entis (analogy of being). Hence, knowledge of God is a purely Graced reality, and not a natural one in any way. I am, in fact, of said ilk (shocking!) I will always find it shocking the self-professed Reformed orthodox and Lutheran orthodox folks affirm natural theology as the fundamentum of their theological projects. Don’t you see why? These forlorn Protestantisms claim to hold to a radical form of Total Depravity, wherein what it means to be human, in a fallen sense, is to be so polluted by and riddled with sin, that ostensibly the ontic capacity, along with its noetic counterpart, cannot and will not come to know the true and the living God.

And yet I would suggest these Protestantisms are held within a Thomistic Captivity. That is, for them, as with Aquinas, what it means to be God, and then as corollary, what it means to be human, is to constantly have a resident and active intellect at play. And for the creature, even postlapsarian, this entails that the intellect, at the very least, retains its spark of being. That is, in order for the integrity of God’s being to be upheld, for those in the Thomist Captivity, human being’s intellect must be upheld even post-fall. As Steven Ozment so eloquently describes this chain of being for Thomas and his children:

With Thomas, for me, it isn’t the idea “that real relations existed between God, man . . . ,” I am a critical/theological realist after all. The problem in the Thomistic frame is that the ‘point of contact’ between God and man, the point of relation, is predicated by a chain-like continuity between God’s intellect and humanity’s (intact, at whatever level postlapse). But the Bible teaches otherwise in regard to the effects of the fall, on both the world simpliciter, and humanity.

I submit, that in order for humanity to come to have a genuine knowledge of the triune God, that the triune God must become us that we might become Him by grace. Without this participatio Christi all the human can do, even in the name of Christ, is construct monuments of their own intellects and worship them as God. This is why I reject the premises of a natural theology; and this is why I would recommend that you do the same.

[1] Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform 1250–1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980), 49.

Problematizing a Development of Sacra Doctrina within the Church: With Reference to Peter of John Olivi

Posted on May 2, 2025 by Bobby Grow

Bernard McGinn writes the following with reference to the apocalyptic-theology-of-history present in the mediaeval theologian, Peter of John Olivi’s (c. 1248—1298) thought:

The invective Olivi directs against the evidences of the carnal Church is concerned not only with the ecclesiastical abuses of the day, especially with avarice and simony, but also, like Bonaventure before him, with the use of Aristotle in theology. The Provençal Franciscan also expressed belief in a double Antichrist—the Mystical Antichrist, a coming false pope who would attack the Franciscan Rule, and the Great, or Open Antichrist, whose defeat would usher in the final period of history. Characteristic of Franciscan apocalyptic is his emphasis on the role of Francis as the initiator of the period of renewal and his hope for the conversion of all peoples in the course of the final events.[1]

Olivi was a student of the infamous mediaeval theologian, Bonaventure. But I thought this treatment by McGinn on Olivi was telling. Telling in regard to the patterns and thematics of theological development. Telling, in regard to how theologies and emphases often repeat themselves in various and all periods of theological development throughout history. As McGinn highlights, Olivi was concerned with a “carnal Church”; he was concerned with the imposition of Aristotle’s categories upon Christian theology (which of course Thomas Aquians was famous for doing). We also observe, that for Olivi, according to McGinn, he saw that the Catholic church itself had corruption riddling it throughout; he saw the Antichrist coming from within the Church, not without. This latter development is interesting to me because it reminds me of Martin Luther’s view that the office of the Pope would finally produce the Antichrist (the Lutheran Church Wisconsin Synod still holds to this position in their confession). And then, we see in Olivi, a belief in something like a postmillennial understanding of the very end of history. He believes, according to McGinn, that the whole world will be Christianized prior to the second coming of Jesus Christ.

Many things stood out to me in this one paragraph on Olivi’s theology. The primary hook for me, and this won’t be surprising to my readers, is that Olivi was critical of Aristotle’s presence in the development of the sacra doctrina within the Church. Olivi, like his teacher, Bonaventure, believed that Aristotle could only serve as an artificial grammar for articulating Christian doctrine. Such sucralose, in the minds of Bonaventure and Olivi, respectively, had no place in affecting a theology for the Church, insofar that Aristotle himself thought a construct of God as a pagan.

It is important for Christian folks in the 21^st century to get beyond theology purely sourced from Twitter/X and other social media platforms. What the genuine student finds, if they study the books, is that things are much more complex and less concretized than they might want to think. There have been various strands of development, various traditions cultivated in the Church’s history that transcend the parochial and sectarian and absolutized divides we see today on the interwebs. I think this one paragraph alone on Olivi helps to illustrate that point.

Within evangelical/reformed theology today there is a movement towards retrieval. And yet what this has come to mean, especially through the work of someone like Matthew Barrett and Craig Carter, is that what is really being retrieved is one strand of development that is Aristotelian/Thomist heavy; as if ‘Christian Aristotelianism’ was the only development present within the mediaeval and early and post Reformed churches. This simply is not the case; again, as our passage illustrates.

Conversely, I am anti-Aristotelian myself (no shocker there!) Some might think that this is because of my appreciation for the theologies of Barth and TF Torrance alone. Again, this is not the case. I was anti-Aristotelian way before I ever read Barth and TFT. I was exposed to the Bonaventure-Olivi thread of development twenty-three years ago in seminary. This thread was developed further with the sparker of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther; he looked back to such threads in the via antiqua through his direct mentor, Johann von Staupitz, and before him, Jean Gerson.

Anyway, this post is somewhat of a smorgasbord of hits on various issues; something like a Miscellanies. But I hope, at least, the reader might be able to better appreciate the “problematized” nature of doctrinal development within the Church of Jesus Christ. In other words, I hope that folks might be alerted to the problem of reducing and then absolutizing one’s pet positions. Surely, we ought to be convicted about the theological things we believe. But those convictions ought to first take shape (in a spiraling and continuous way) through the caldron of toiling with the sources (ad fontes) of the history of interpretation and development of the sacra doctrina.

[1] Bernard McGinn, Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 205.

The Early Aristotelianization of Reformed and Lutheran Theology

Posted on January 25, 2025 by Bobby Grow

Barth on the stillbirth of the Protestant Reformation. He underscores a reality that I have been, we have been writing about for years, in regard to the scholasticism Reformed and Lutheran. That is to note, the reception of the Aristotelian mantle that had, ironically, brought to formation the very Church, and her doctrina, that Luther was seeking to reform. Unfortunately, very early on in the second and third generation reformers (on both the Reformed and Lutheran sides) imbibed the theological categories that had originally led to the status of the Roman Church that Luther and others believed needed to be reformed from within.

Face to face with the difficulty of both schools, the Reformed no less than the Lutherans, made a formal borrowing at this point from a philosophy and theology which had been re-discovered and re-asserted at the end of the 16^th and the beginning of the 17^th centuries—the philosophy of Aristotle and the theology of Aquinas. The borrowing consisted in the adoption and introduction of a specific terminology to describe the two partners whose activities are understood and represented in the doctrine of the concursus [accompanying] in terms of a co-operation, the activity of God on the one side and that of the creature on the other. The concept which was adopted and introduced was that of “cause.” For it was by developing the dialectic of this concept that they both effected the differentiation of themselves on the one side and the other, and also decided the difference which already existed at this point within the Evangelical faith itself. This, then, is the controlling concept for the form assumed by Evangelical dogmatics in this and in all kindred topics.[1]

This theological arrangement, ended up thrusting people back upon themselves (as TF Torrance phrases it frequently), by thinking of a God-world relation from within a competitive frame. God above, the great decretal “causer,” and the human below, the striver attempting to meet the conditions of God’s causal-ness (this sounds something like what we see in a Federal or Covenant theology). In this frame we end up with a bilateral, yet asymmetric, relationship between God and humanity, such that God decrees certain things to obtain, whilst the elect of God must discern these things, and again, meet the conditions of the decree; of the covenant of works released through the so-called covenant of grace.

The aforementioned reflects just one example of how this ‘causal’ based relationship gets formulated and expressed. For Barth this would be a theology of the decretum absolutum (absolute decree of predestination, from within a classically construed Reformed theology, in particular). The Lutherans have their own expressions of this type of decretal theology. For a contemporary example see Jordan Cooper’s work.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3 §49 [098] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 97.

An Engagement with Philosophical Personhood in Theological Relief

Posted on January 21, 2025 by Bobby Grow

𝐼𝑛 𝑚𝑦 𝑝ℎ𝑖𝑙𝑜𝑠𝑜𝑝ℎ𝑦 𝑜𝑓 𝑟𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑔𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑐𝑙𝑎𝑠𝑠 𝑤𝑒 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑎𝑙𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑑𝑦 𝑖𝑛 𝑤𝑒𝑒𝑘 2. 𝑇ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑤𝑒𝑒𝑘 𝑤𝑒 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑒𝑛𝑔𝑎𝑔𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝐺𝑜𝑑’𝑠 𝑎𝑡𝑡𝑟𝑖𝑏𝑢𝑡𝑒𝑠, 𝑎𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑜𝑠𝑒 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑝ℎ𝑖𝑙𝑜𝑠𝑜𝑝ℎ𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑦 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑠𝑡𝑟𝑢𝑒𝑑. 𝑇ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑤𝑒𝑒𝑘 𝑤𝑒’𝑟𝑒 𝑒𝑛𝑔𝑎𝑔𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑝𝑒𝑟𝑠𝑜𝑛ℎ𝑜𝑜𝑑, 𝑡𝑟𝑎𝑛𝑠𝑐𝑒𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒, 𝑖𝑚𝑚𝑎𝑛𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒, 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑜𝑚𝑛𝑖𝑝𝑜𝑡𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒 𝑣𝑖𝑠 𝑎 𝑣𝑖𝑠 𝐺𝑜𝑑. 𝐻𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑖𝑠 𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝐼 𝑤𝑟𝑜𝑡𝑒 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑟𝑒𝑓𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑖𝑡 𝑚𝑒𝑎𝑛𝑠 𝑡𝑜 𝑏𝑒 𝑎 𝑝𝑒𝑟𝑠𝑜𝑛. 𝑊𝑒 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑢𝑠𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑇.𝐽. 𝑀𝑎𝑤𝑠𝑜𝑛’𝑠 𝑏𝑜𝑜𝑘 *𝐵𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑓 𝑖𝑛 𝐺𝑜𝑑* 𝑎𝑠 𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑡𝑒𝑥𝑡. 𝑆𝑜, 𝑚𝑦 𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑝𝑜𝑛𝑠𝑒 𝑖𝑠 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑟𝑒𝑓𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒 𝑡𝑜 ℎ𝑜𝑤 ℎ𝑒 𝑑𝑒𝑓𝑖𝑛𝑒𝑠 *𝑝𝑒𝑟𝑠𝑜𝑛ℎ𝑜𝑜𝑑* (𝑖𝑡 𝑖𝑠 𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑢𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑦 𝑡𝑜𝑜 𝑙𝑜𝑛𝑔 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑢𝑚, 𝑜ℎ 𝑤𝑒𝑙𝑙 𝐿𝑂𝐿).

Boethius

I disagree with Mawson out of hand on the entailments of what makes a person a person. Mawson, is taking a classical way, one we would find in Boethius, Aquinas et al. (most of the Latin tradition). To define the base ground of what it means to be a person, on terms of a purely intellectualist or rationalist ground, is to imbibe a philosophical/speculative tradition; indeed. Unfortunately, for my money, to use this type of speculative ground as one’s major premise, in regard to developing an anthropology, can only lead to a speculative conclusion. Indeed, it might be self-referentially coherent, as I think Mawson’s accounting is; but ultimately, in my view, the conclusion is only as sound as the first premise.

As a Christian theist I would argue that personhood ought to be defined by reference to the imago Dei/Christi (image of God/Christ). That is to say, in my view, to understand the entailments of personhood cannot (or at least, should not) begin with an abstract thought, but instead with the concrete givenness of God’s life for the world in the face of His Son, Jesus Christ (see Colossians 1.15). In this way, personhood’s definition finds an antecedent ground beyond the immanent frame, and has a ‘transcendent’ starting point not from within itself (as an immanent abstraction), but outwith itself in the personhood of the divine Monarchia, as the Father, Son and Holy Spirit (the hypostases/persons of the Godhead coinhere one in the other in a filial and eternal relationship of interpenetrating life). If this mysterious (yet revealed) life becomes the ground by which personhood comes to have definition, at the very least what it means to be a person, is to be in a community of love for the other; living a life of self-givenness, one for the other, wherein what it means to be a person isn’t defined by having “rationality” or “self-consciousness,” per se, but to be in person-al relationship one with the other. And what serves as the ground of this community-fellowship-based personhood, only can come first, as gift, as God has graciously invited us into participation with His triune-person-grounded life through Jesus Christ.

If I reject Mawson’s definition for personhood, which I do, of course, then his dilemma of attempting to provide nobility or sanctity for humans without brain-activity is non-starting for me.

Based on my first long response, in regard to the constituents of what makes a person a person, I would argue that the triune God is the personalizing person. So, in this frame, can someone be “more” of a person than someone else? That seems to make an attempt at quantifying what it means to be a person in terms of a quality (or substance) or something. God in Christ by the Holy Spirit, I would argue, is the person making person, in eternal relation; which would make Him the archetypal personalizing person maker. In this sense He is the Alpha and Omega. But since He graciously invites us into participation with Him through Christ, at a purely human level, there isn’t one person who is more person than another. God’s life is sui generis. All people are equal, insofar that all people are created in the image of God/Christ.

According to Scripture (John 4.24) ‘God is spirit,’ and spirit is not gendered, per se. That said, God has Self-revealed Himself as Father of the Son (as Athanasius is wont to press). In the Christian reality God enfleshed came as a Man, as the Son of God (the second person). The Bible refers to God in masculine terms, by and large (except with reference to the Holy Spirit); and for me that ought to be determinative for how we refer to God.

PS. a struggle, which I knew I was bringing to this course of study, is that I am already committed to a certain Christian orientation with reference to thinking God, and everything subsequent. I had attempted to study God philosophically, at a formal level, many years ago now, and found it wanting. Even so, I still think there is value in learning to contemplate and think deeply and rigorously with regard to anything (which is why I paid for the class).

In the Rut of General Theism: Against Neutral Theology

Posted on December 15, 2024 by Bobby Grow

Christians don’t believe in an abstract ethereal god. Christians believe in the triune God who has Self-revealed Himself in Jesus Christ. Period. This should be an unremarkable assertion. There should be zero pushback to this. But in the so-called Great Tradition of the Church, and those who are ostensibly “retrieving” it, this isn’t the case. Classical theism, so-called, as a contemporary way to identify certain expressions of the antique past, especially with reference to a theology proper, have so synthesized, say, the Aristotelian categories with an ecclesiastical doctrine of God, that it is nay impossible to make a distinction, in substance (pun intended), between the philosopher’s unmoved mover of pure act, and the God revealed in the face of Jesus Christ. In other words, there is such a conflation between the god of the philosophers, and the Christian God in this instance, that the god of the philosophers in fact becomes the Christian God in substance. Indeed, most of contemporary theology today, especially on the Latin side (i.e., Catholic and Protestant), traffics on the highway that the philosophers, and their theologians, respectively, have constructed for them. That is to say, contemporary theology, especially in certain iterations of Protestant theology, have so imbibed the cathedral of the Protestant development, that is primarily through the ‘schoolmen,’ or the scholastics, that to do theology, for them, requires a straight repristination; an outright and absolute reception of whatever the Protestant fathers said; a total gleaning, a harvesting, if you will, of whatever golden apples the oldmen of Protestant yesteryear planted in their gardens of theological delight.

But what if they were simply squished by their sitz im leben (situation in life); what if they were just doing the best they could with what they had available to them, intellectually, at that time? What if what they did was rather imaginative and forward thinking for their times, respectively, but in the end wasn’t the last or final word? I’m here to say it wasn’t; it wasn’t the last or final, or not even the best word. Karl Barth writes the following in his own analysis of those theological times. What you will find is that he agrees with me (or more correctly, that I agree with him).

Unfortunately the connexion between the belief in providence and belief in Christ had not been worked out and demonstrated theologically by the Reformers themselves. Only occasionally and from afar, if at all, had they seen the problem of natural theology and the necessity of a radical application to all theology of their recognition of the free grace of God in Christ. In their case, to be sure, we almost always feel and detect, even though it is so seldom palpable theologically, that when they speak of the world dominion of God they are in fact speaking with Christian content and on the basis of the Gospel, not abstractly in terms of a neutral God of Jews, Turks, pagans and Christians. And this is what gives warmth and force to the matter in P. Gerhardt. But if in him there is an unmistakable movement away from the Word of God to the experience of the Christian subject, this was to some extent a reaction against the dominant and self-evident abstraction with which the orthodoxy of his day followed another self-evident rut in these matters. This was the rut of a general theism which, apart from the mention of the Deus triunus [triune God], occasional quotations from the Bible and references to Church history, lacked any distinctive Christian content, being primarily concerned to distinguish itself from atheism, and limiting its consideration of the Gospel to the establishment and development of Christology and resultant doctrines. As if this were the real way to treat that primarium caput fidei et religionis [chief cornerstone of faith and religion].[1]

Surely, what Barth is explicating is the more sure word; relatively speaking. The Christian God is not neutral, He is not general, and He is not discoverable in some leftover vestiges of His presence in the fallen created order. That is to say, the fallen heart and mind of the fallen humanity has no access into the inner sanctum of God’s eternal life; that is, not without God first becoming us that we might become Him in Christ (by grace not nature). Isn’t there an infinitely qualitative distance between God and humanity?, as Kierkegaard so rightly identified. Aren’t human beings, us, born dead in our trespasses and sins with an ugly ditch between us and the holy God of triune wonder? This is all Barth is getting at. This is all I’m getting at, with reference to Barth. Selah

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3 §48 [032] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 31.

‘The older Protestant theology was right to treat Aristotle as an adversary’

Posted on November 25, 2024 by Bobby Grow

There has been a resurgence, among Protestants, either towards affirming the classical theism of Thomas Aquinas (i.e., Christian-Catholic theology synthesized with Aristotelian categories) or rejecting it.[1] But even those, in the broader Reformed world who ostensibly reject it, still affirm it; insofar, that they operate with the philosophical-theological categories provided for by said Thomistic synthesis. I have, for decades now, been calling this Thomistic-Aristotelian mode of Reformed theology out. And yet, that machine will never really bust. It has tentacles reaching into the far reaches of the Christian world at this point. In the West, in particular, it has publishing houses, online warriors, pamphleteers, jargoneers, so on and so forth; which makes it exceedingly difficult to be critical of for the masses. Even so, I remain stalwart in my mission to bear witness to the world that there is only one “decree” of God, and his name is: Jesus Christ (and all that entails)! That is to say, rather than thinking God before meeting God in the face of Jesus Christ—as the reformed scholastics and their lesser descendants found in and among the Baptists and other 5 point environs—it is better to only think God after God has spoken, after God has first introduced Himself to us, for us, and with us in the prosopon (face) of Jesus Christ. For some reason, and I have many theories on this, this Reformed (and this isn’t just limited to the Reformed, there are also Lutheran iterations of this same mode) nut simply will not crack. I’d argue, primarily, that this is the case more for sociological rather than theological reasons. But that case will have to be developed at a later date.

Following, we will hear from none other than Reformed theologian par excellence, that heretic of old, Karl Barth. What did Barth, that theological charlatan, think of Aristotle, and how that impacted the array of theological developments following the Thomist synthesis. Here, here he is:

The more perspicacious of the older Protestant polemicists like A. Heidanus (l. c., p. 350f.) thought it right to mark off themselves no less from the theology and cosmology of Aristotle. For him the world is eternal and there can thus be no question of a creation. What then is his deity, his prime mover which is itself unmoved, his immaterial form, his actuality unburdened with potentiality, his reason which thinks itself (and therefore the best)? Does this πρώτον κινοῦν [first mover] move otherwise than as the principle and exemplary model of all other movement? Does it move otherwise than as the good and goal which has no other goal beyond itself, towards which everything else strives in virtue of the attraction which everything loved (and this unconditionally as the perfect and the imperfectly loved) exercises on that which loves, on which therefore everything depends and towards which everything must move? Does it even more, asks Heidanus, as a captain moves his ship, a conductor his choir or a field-marshal his troops? Is this prime mover of all things more and other than the law, the eternal prius, of their movement? That in which alone the Aristotelian world-principle would resemble the God of the Christian doctrine of providence is obviously the freedom of will and movement, the sovereignty and above all the inner self-determination of a God who confronts the world as its Creator and can thus approach its movement independently and determine it from without. But since the Aristotelian mover of all things is not their Creator, it is necessarily too exalted (or from the standpoint of the Christian doctrine of providence too poverty-stricken) to be capable of this movement in relation to the really distinct from it. The Aristotelian cosmos has a kind of god ordering it, unlike the Epicurean. But since this god is not the Creator of his cosmos, since he is not above but in it (thus finally resembling the Epicurean gods), the Aristotelian cosmos is also in fact one which is abandoned by God. The older Protestant theology was right to treat Aristotle as an adversary in this respect, and we can only wish that it had freed itself more basically and radically and generally from the spirit of this picture of god and the world, and the argumentations dictated by it.[2]

If you have followed my work (along with Myk Habets’) on Evangelical Calvinism over the years, the above should find lots of resonance with the themes put forward and developed vis-à-vis our critique of Aristotelian formed Reformed (and Lutheran) theologies, respectively. It is unnecessary, even within the history and development of Reformed theology and ideas, to presume that its only expression and iteration is under the unmoved mover offered by Aristotle and his theological tribe; even as Barth rightly notes in the above passage.

At the end of the day, dividing and “conquering” various theologies is not that difficult. Some might fear that my suggestion runs afoul of an untoward reductionism, but I would protest. Theologies done after Deus dixit (God has spoken) definitively and copiously without remainder in the vocal cords of Jesus Christ, in-breathed by the Holy Spirit, are diametrically different than theologies done prior to hearing that voice. Theologies based on hearing from the philosophers, about “godness,” prior to actually encountering God in Jesus Christ, will deleteriously suffer from offering and speaking of a god who looks and sounds like the god[s] of the Greeks rather than the God of the Man from Nazareth. This is surely a theological methodological issue, but one that shouldn’t come prior to God’s theology for us (so in that sense, a tautology) in Jesus Christ. I would aggressively argue that if a Christian is genuinely going to do Christian theology that it will only be as they dialogue and cohabitate, through the mediating and vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ, with the triune and living God. A genuine Christian theologian will first be a child of God, rather than a thinker for God. We must get this order right. We must first gestate in the bosom of the Father, with the Son for us, prior to maturating into thinkers and speakers and witnessers for God, if we are going to actually be thinking and speaking and witnessing for the true God. But alas, our egos would rather imagine that we have a place in this world, by virtue of just “showing up” in this world, to the point that humans come fully and naturally equipped with the antennae to think, speak, and witness for God on our own profanely imagined terms, rather than upon those provided first for us in the heart of the living and triune God.

These are stark and even deep matters; I hope that hasn’t thrown the reader off the scent of what matters. At the end of the day the Christian either is in point of contact with the real and living God or not. Ironically, those who have presumed the title ‘theologian,’ even for the millennia, often are the furthest away from representing the true and living God found attested to, purely and simply in the Bible. May God have mercy on us all!

[1] As an aside: I take it that anyone who affirms, at the basest level of Reformed theology, the 5 points of Calvinism up to and including Federal-Covenantal theology, to be appropriating the Thomist-Aristotelian synthesis; categorically, that is. Decretal theology (theology based on the so-called decretum absolutum [absolute decree of predestination, election-reprobation], in its classically Reformed iteration, necessarily is reposing in the theological lagoon provided for it by the Thomist-Aristotelian synthesis, to one degree or the other).

[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3 §48 [011] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 10 [emphasis mine].

On Being a Real Protestant: Calvin and Barth against Thomas and the Thomists on a Vestigial Knowledge of God

Posted on June 19, 2024 by Bobby Grow

Is God really knowable, secularly, in the vestiges of the created order? In other words, does God repose in the fallen order to the point that vain and profane people can come to have some type of vestigial knowledge of the living God? According to Thomas Aquinas, and other scholastics of similar ilk, the answer is a resounding: yes. Here is Thomas himself:

as we have shown [q. 32, a. 1], the Trinity of persons cannot be demonstratively proven. But it is still congruous to place it in the light of some things which are more manifest to us. And the essential attributes stand out more to our reason than the properties of the persons do, for, beginning from the creatures from which we derive our knowledge of the personal properties, as we have said [q. 32, a. 1]. Thus, just as to disclose the persons we make use of vestigial or imaged likenesses of the Trinity in creatures, so too we use their essential attributes. And what we call appropriation is the disclosure of the persons through the essential attributes.[1]

Karl Barth makes appeal to John Calvin to repudiate this type of ‘vestigial’ knowledge of God, as we find that in Thomas Aquinas previously. Calvin might not develop an anti-natural theology in the ways that Barth does, but he does share with Barth a principled and prior commitment to a radical theology of the Word, to a knowledge of God as Redeemer prior to Creator. And so here we have Barth and Calvin joining forces, even if only in incipient ways, on Calvin’s part (mediated through Barth), against the Angelic Doctor, St Thomas Aquinas:

To my knowledge, the strongest testimony of theological tradition in this direction is Calvin’s foreword to his Commentary on the Book of Genesis (1554). In this work he recalls 1 Cor. 1:21: “For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.” What Paul obviously means is: it is in vain for God to be sought by reference to visible things, and indeed that anything should remain, except so that we should be brought straight to Christ. Therefore we should make our beginning not with the things of this world, but with the gospel, which puts forth one Christ with his cross and holds us in him. In view of this, Calvin’s conviction is also: indeed it is vain for any to philosophize in the manner of the world, unless they have first been humbled by the preaching of the gospel, and have instructed the whole compass of their intellect to submit to the foolishness of the cross. I say that we will find out nothing above or below that will lift us to God, until Christ has educated us in his school. Nothing further can be done, if we are not raised up from the lowest depths and carried aboard his cross above all the heavens, so that there by faith we might comprehend what no eye has ever seen, nor ear ever heard, and which far surpasses our hearts and minds. For the earth is not before us there, nor its fruits supplied for daily food, but Christ himself offers himself to us unto eternal life; nor do the heavens illuminate our bodily eyes with the splendor of the sun and stars, but the same Christ, the light of the world and the sun of righteousness, shines forth in our souls; nor does the empty air spread its ebb and flow around us, but the very Spirit of God quickens and enlivens us. And so there the invisible kingdom of Christ fills all things, and his spiritual grace is diffused through all things. To be sure, this ought to prevent us from looking to heaven and earth as well and in this way fortifying ourselves in the true knowledge of God. For Christ is the image, in which God not only allows his breast to be seen, but also His hands and feet. By ‘breast’ I mean that secret love, by which we are enfolded in Christ; by ‘hands’ and ‘feet’ I understand those works which are set before our eyes. But: As soon as we have departed from Christ, there is nothing is so gross or trivial that we can avoid being mistaken as to its true nature. (C.R. 23, 10 f.). We do not find in Calvin any more detailed explanation or exposition of this programmatical assertion either in the Commentary on Genesis or in the relevant passages in the Institutio. Yet there can be no doubt that he has given us a stimulus to further thinking in this direction. The step which we ourselves have attempted along the lines he so impressively indicated is only a logical conclusion which is as it were set on our lips by the statements of the fathers, although they did not draw it for themselves.[2]

This is one reason among many why any serious Reformed person who would ever think that resourcing Thomas Aquinas and his Aristotelianism as a ‘congruous’ means by which to think God becomes quite staggering. Such a move flatly contradicts a principled and intensive commitment to the so-called ‘Protestant Scripture Principle.’ And yet, as the Post Reformed orthodox history bears out this is exactly what many of these Reformers did; they built their “Reformed” systems of theology on the Thomistic and Aristotelian ground provided for them in the Latin theological heritage so bequeathed. I’m still of the mind that it’s better to actually be principially Protestant rather than functionally Tridentine and Roman Catholic in my theology, as a Protestant. Many like Matthew Barrett, Craig Carter, and more seriously, Richard Muller and David Steinmetz et al. disagree.

[1] Thomas Aquinas, ST 1, q. 39, a. 7 cited by Gilles Emery, OP, The Trinitarian Theology of St Thomas Aquinas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 328–29.

[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/1 §40 [031] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 30–1 [italics mine, they represent the translation of Calvin’s Latin].

Created Grace

Posted on June 4, 2024 by Bobby Grow

I have pressed the idea for decades now, after being alerted to these things by my former historical theology seminary professor (and still mentor), Dr. Ron Frost, in regard to Thomas Aquinas’ synthesis of Aristotelian categories with Christian [Augustinian] theology. I am referring to the Thomist thinking on created grace. There are many retrievers of scholastic Reformed theology these days, inclusive of Matthew Barrett, in his own idiosyncratic way. Richard Muller has identified the swath of Post Reformed orthodox theology as Christian Aristotelianism. This would be another way of simply saying (for the most part): Thomism or a neo-Thomism of sorts. This is why I have argued, along with others, that Tridentine Catholic theology, along with those who appropriated said theological categories, like the Reformed scholastic, have taken over a semi-Pelagian soteriology; or a cooperative theory of salvation vis-à-vis God and the human agent. Within the scholasticism Reformed frame, we see this type of cooperative model developed under the aegis of what is known as a Covenantal or Federal theology. The elect are provided with a created grace (distinct from the personal grace that is the Holy Spirit’s unction), by which, in the Federal scheme, they are able to cooperate with God in meeting the conditions of the promisso, or bilateral covenant betwixt God and man/woman, in regard to attesting to and appropriating their elect status.

There is more to be said about all of the aforementioned, but I wanted at least to provide a theological context or background for the points made by Gilles Emery, as created grace looked in the theology of Thomas Aquinas—as distinct and opposed to the personal grace of the Holy Spirit. The scholastics Reformed will often equate the personal grace of the Holy Spirit notion with created grace, with the point of downplaying the Thomistic/Aristotelian flare found in what can be called the habitus theology of Thomas Aquinas. Someone who doesn’t downplay these things though is indeed, Richard Muller. Emery writes,

Thomas actually emphasizes the necessity of a created grace. When the Holy Spirit is given to human beings, he does not enter into a synthesis with someone with whom he is ‘mixed’ or ‘fused’. Even in Christ, there is no mixture or conflation between the divine and the human nature. For a human being’s own nature to be raised into communion with God, it is necessary to recognize, from the moment of their participation in God onwards, a gift in her which will be the intrinsic principle of her sanctification, a reality which has a human size, and so is a created one, situated on the ontological plane of creatureliness: this is the grace which is called ‘created’. This gift comes from God alone, because it is God alone who divinizes, God alone who makes human beings participants in his own divine nature. But, even when he gives himself, God remains distinct from human beings. In the scholastic terminology, it is necessary to see that God is not the ‘formal cause’ of the life of grace, because he does not enter into formal composition with the human (both God’s simplicity and the created condition of human beings make this unthinkable, for we would then be faced with a conflation of the divine and human nature). In this light, grace is a created disposition which human beings receive from God. It is, so to speak, a gift from God which puts itself onto the ontological level of human nature, proportioning itself to the human in order to make it possible for men and women to be united to God from within their own human life. Such created grace disposes human beings to receiving the divine person. Thomas states,

the gift of sanctifying grace disposes the soul to possess the divine person; this is what the formula ‘the Holy Spirit is given through the gift of grace’ means. But the gift itself is the grace coming from the Holy Spirit; this is what Paul means when he says, The charity of God is poured forth in our hearts by the Holy Spirit.

The insistence on the necessity for a created gift (habitual grace with its gifts of wisdom and charity) must not make us forget that its aim is to make human beings capable of receiving the Holy Spirit himself, and, beside the Holy Spirit, the Father and the Son, who come to build their dwelling in the saints (‘to possess the divine person’). St Thomas is very clear on this:

through the gift of sanctifying grace, the reasonable creature is not only perfected in such a way as to be able to make use of the created gift, but also in such a way as to enjoy the divine person himself…. the grace of the Holy Spirit is given to human beings in such a way that the actual source of the grace is given, to wit, the Holy Spirit himself.[1]

It is important to understand what a Thomist Intellectualist anthropology is at this point (which I clumsily wrote about in a seminary paper back in 2002, my first real exposure to these things). Suffice it to say, when a theologian starts with an Augustinian conditioned doctrine of predestination and election—wherein the elect (and reprobate) is thought of in abstract and individualistic ways—it is possible to end up with the thinking we see evinced in the outworking of Thomas’ theology of anthropology/salvation. There is an utter need to think the human agent away from the divine, to the point that when the Christ comes as God enfleshed, we end up with a necessary rupture between God’s person and work; to the point that even Christ’s human nature would need a created grace to cooperate with God in the work of salvation. This, in a Thomistic frame, is why a created grace is constructed in the first place: i.e., in order to keep the pure nature of an independent humanity in tact vis-à-vis the Creator/creature distinction, distinct. But this move becomes unnecessary, that is, the move to think of God’s grace in dualistic ways; i.e., personal and created. It is unnecessary because God’s Grace is God’s being in becoming for us; God’s grace is an eternal act of triune felicity (relative to the Deus incarnandus ‘God to be incarnate’).

There are things that need further detailing in order to tie up the dangling definitional ends in this post. But as usual, this will have to suffice for a blog post. I haven’t strung all of the dots together for you, but that’s part of the fun; I’ll leave it to you to bring some of the implications of what I have been writing on together.

[1] Gilles Emery, OP, The Trinitarian Theology of Thomas Aquinas (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 253–54.

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Athanasian Reformed

𝑉𝑒𝑟𝑏𝑢𝑚 𝐷𝑒𝑖 𝑚𝑎𝑛𝑒𝑡 𝑖𝑛 𝑎𝑒𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑛𝑢𝑚. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐝 𝐨𝐟 𝐆𝐨𝐝 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐥𝐚𝐬𝐭 𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫.

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