ROUGHLY EDITED TEXT CHURCH HISTORY 02 May 27, 2005 05-CH2 ***** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communications Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***** >> JOSHUA: Thank you. May I follow up with another question? In your answer, you indicated that scholastic theologians played a role in defining what indulgences were. I've heard the term �scholastic theology� before, but I'm not quite sure what it means. Would you define it for me? >> DR. PAUL ROBINSON: That's a good question, Joshua, and it's a little difficult to answer. In a way, scholastic theology really just means the way they did theology in the schools in the Middle Ages. So really, whatever medieval theologians do is labeled scholastic. But there is a certain method that they're using that came to be called the scholastic method. And it's a method that combines the Bible, what was said by the church fathers and church councils, and ideas and approaches taken from philosophy. And it's a method that really came to prominence in the Middle Ages really in the Western church. Originally, theology was done simply from reading and commenting on the Bible. But as monks studied and lectured on the Bible, they began to think about broader theological questions raised by a particular section of scripture. And so they would go into a larger discussion of that issue. Those larger discussions of theological issues came to be collected separately from the Scripture commentaries. When people would copy out the manuscripts, very often, they were much more interested in these lectures on topics then they were on the scripture commentary. And divorcing that commentary on a topic from the text of the Bible, from the commentary, gave rise to the method of theology that came to be employed in the universities where a teacher would begin, not with the text of scripture, but with a question and then bring scripture and statements of the fathers and philosophical ideas into it. Well, as I mentioned, that method of doing theology came to be identified with the schools or the universities. And that gives us a pretty convenient beginning time for scholastic theology. The earliest medieval university, Bologna, began around 1088, and universities were really coming into prominence in the 12th century. And one of the things that meant was people needed a textbook and so you find *�Lombard�s Sentences� being composed and used as a standard theology text. And this text follows the scholastic method of having topics, issues, questions, and then quotations from the Bible and fathers and councils arranged to argue for and against various ideas. Even before the universities, though, you have someone who is often thought of as a scholastic theologian, namely Anselm. You may have heard of him. He lived from 1033 to 1109. He is often called a proto scholastic, an early scholastic, because he was interested in bringing in reasonable explanations to bear on matters of faith. His motto that he took from Augustine was: I believe so that I might understand. And so even though he firmly believed that God existed, for example, he also came up with rational proofs for the existence of God. And that's the kind of exercise that's very common in scholastic theology. Nobody ever says that you can prove every matter of faith from reason, but they are interested in bringing reason and faith together, and bringing philosophy in to help out with terms and questions in the field of theology. Philosophy became very important for scholastic theology in the 12th century when the works of Aristotle were recovered. And so you find Thomas Aquinas who is often thought of as the greatest medieval theologian. Aquinas had as his program to combine Aristotle and theology to think about the issues raised by Aristotle and his understanding of the world and to bring this together with what the Bible said and with what the church fathers said and come up with what Aquinas believed would be the best representation of the truth, the closest we can come using what we have in terms of revelation, our own reason, the closest we can come to understanding God and the world. If you ever get a chance to look at some of Thomas Aquinas�s work, you'll see a classic example of the scholastic method and what medieval teachers would do in the classroom where you begin with a question. Thomas gives possible answers. He cites an authority who seems to give a different answer, and then he gives his own answer which agrees with the authority and then goes back and explains how the other possible answers are not exactly wrong but perhaps misunderstood. So in the end, you have a complete account from his angle of debate on an issue, and he leads you through the different sources to show you how really in the end, everybody is saying the same thing. And then we can move on to the next question. So Aquinas had a pretty neat and tidy synthesis of reason and faith. That was called into question by the end of the Middle Ages. And the kind of theology that Luther learned in the University at *Erfurt was of this type called nominalism or *Achenism that called into question the way Aquinas had brought reason and faith together. *Nominalists still used reason and faith together, but they felt that there were a lot more things that could only be believed, rather than proved rationally. And one of the areas that proved very difficult for Luther in understanding this was the way *Nominalists approached this question of how people are saved. Because *Nominalists essentially said, you really can't know for sure how God saves you or whether you're saved. God has promised normally to work with us, in other words to take our good works to reward them with grace, enable us to do more good works, and finally with some extra grace, to be able to merit heaven. And they talked about the fact that this is kind of their motto to those doing what is in them God does not deny grace. So it's very much a working together. It's not the neat and clean system Aquinas had. It's a lot messier. You don't know when you've done enough. And for people like Luther, this idea of doing what is in you and getting grace, led to a lot of uncertainty. He just didn't know, couldn't believe that he had really done enough, not only to get grace from God, but to even have God's favor. And so the deficiencies of scholastic theology, as Luther saw them, really led to his own study and to his going in a different direction as we'll see in a little bit.