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Robin's paper
Apr. 30th, 2008 | 09:21 pm
Robin Benedict
RJ Snell
4/28/2008
Research Paper: Rough Draft
Protestant Critiques of Nature and Grace in the Theology of Aquinas: A Brief Investigation
In the Protestant world, Aquinas is at best given cautious respect as a brilliant man with good Christian intentions. However, the full message of Aquinas’s theology is rarely accepted due to its perceived violation of a host of core Protestant sensibilities. These objections include: an unacceptable use of Aristotle’s pagan philosophy, the distinction and separation of nature and grace, an incomplete understanding of the Fall, giving autonomy to reason, a misguided separation of faith and reason, and not giving scripture its proper authority. Some have even contended that his giving autonomy to nature unintentionally led to the secularization of the West. Proponents of Aquinas’s theology strongly believe these objections come from misunderstandings and over-simplifications. There is a general sentiment among Thomists that if Protestants took the time to read and seriously interact with Aquinas, their objections would cease. Protestants have had nearly five hundred years to come to the conclusion that Luther and Calvin misjudged the Angelic Doctor, and most have not. Thus, there must be another cause for the Protestant critiques besides chronic misinterpretation and lazy scholarship. The best attempt at finding the true reason for this theological “failure to communicate” comes from the analysis of Herman Dooyeweerd, a Dutch Reformed theologian and philosopher, whom Arvin Voss describes as “one of the most careful Protestant critics”. Dooyeweerd uses a broad historical narrative to show how Western thought has consistently been divided against itself, and Aquinas is one of many examples. He believes that an analysis of how Aquinas uses nature and grace in his theology reveals that he operates from the Greek assumption that humans are fundamentally intellectual beings, whereas the Bible shows that humans are fundamentally religious. The primary mode of experiencing reality is not what the mind knows, but what the heart worships.
How someone interprets Aquinas and his theology largely depends on how they interpret the development of Christian thought in the thousand or so years that preceded him. Dooyeweerds has a unique take on the history of philosophy, which leads to a negative view of Aquinas (and nearly everybody else). A full understanding of his critique of Aquinas requires a diligent examination of his analysis on the development of Western philosophy. Western thought began with the Greeks, so it is with the Greeks that Dooyeweerd begins his critique. This critique of Greek thought will be developed at length because it is Dooyeweerds opinion that Aquinas inherited its problems.
The problems of Greek thought come from its conception of form and matter. Aristotle was the first to use the terms in formal philosophy, but Dooyeweerd, following the lead of Friedrich Nietzsche, says that an analysis of Greek culture reveals those ideas were at work long before Aristotle. The Greek conception of matter came from primal nature religions that dominated the ancient culture. This nature religion consisted of “the deification of a formless, cyclical stream of life. Out of this stream emerged the individual forms of plant, beast, and man, which then matured, perished, and came to life again…time was not linear, but cyclical.” The forces that guided this religious life stream were not rational laws, but blind unpredictable fate called “Anangke”. The “gods” of this religion were not personal but “fluid and invisible…a countless multiplicity of divine powers, bound up with a great variety of natural phenomena.” This divine state of flux and variation was applied to everything the Greeks worshipped: lesser gods like demons, tribal ancestors and heroes, and even “the great gods such as Gaia, Uranos, Demeter, and Dionysus.”
The Greek conception of form comes from a later religion centered not on nature but on culture. In contrast to the nature religions that focused on fate, death and rebirth the new culture religion focused on measure and harmony. Its primary deities were the Olympic gods who “left mother earth and her cycle of life behind. They were immortal, radiant gods of form: invisible, personal, and idealized cultural forces.” The Olympian gods “became the official religion of the Greek city-state”.
The culture religion was never completely free from the nature religion. Its greatest proponents like Homer had a constant desire “to incorporate the older religion (nature/matter) in its own ground motive of form, measure, and harmony.” Homer “was particularly concerned to curb the wild and impassioned worship of Dionysus…with the normative principle of form that characterized [the worship of] Apollo (the supreme culture god).” During the transition period between the two worldviews, “the ancient Greek seers and poet-theologians sought to convince the people that the Olympians themselves had evolved out of the formless gods of nature.” The new religion of form and harmony still used the old concept of “Anangke” only it was renamed to “Moira”. This new kind of fate was used by the Olympian gods for order and design in nature, but Moira itself did not come from them. It was an “older, impersonal, and formless divine power” that even Zeus was powerless to stop when it “willed the fate of a mortals death”.
Despite the best efforts of poets and philosophers like Homer and Hesoid, the nature religion of matter and the culture religion of form resisted a clean synthesis. Dooyeweerd believes that “Moira was the expression of the irreconcilabe conflict between both religions”. The shared theme of Moira “revealed an indissoluble, dialectical coherence [between the two]…The religion of culture is inexplicable without the background of the nature religions.” The culture/form religion could not stand on its own, it needed to borrow the primal Anangke backbone of the nature/matter religion to survive. This dialectical tension “in the religious consciousness of the Greeks…was the unsolved puzzle standing at the center of both tragedy and philosophy.” Greek culture was split. Most Greeks practiced the culture religion in public ceremonies but used the rituals of the older nature religion in private life.
Over time, the Olympian culture religion would be rejected by a host of great philosophers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Despites its genus and sophistication, the Greek philosophical tradition could never overcome the religious conflict embedded in the concept of matter and form. On the surface, it appeared that people like Plato and Aristotle had ushered in a new philosophical world independent of religion and culture. This was not the case. They were struggling with the same religious problems that Homer did. Dooyeweerd explains that “the autonomy claimed by Greek philosophical theories against popular belief, implied merely an abandonment of the mythological forms of the latter which were bound to sensuous representation. It did not mean a break with the form-matter motive, which was the common religious starting point of all Greek thinkers.” Even if it claimed to be, Greek philosophy was never secular, but was merely the next stage in this unsolved battle between two incompatible religions.
This is demonstrable with Plato and Aristotle. Plato believed “that the world of becoming was the product of the formative activity of a divine, rational spirit”, which he calls the Demiurge. However, the tension between form and matter prevented Plato’s Demiurge from engaging in a real act of creation. Plato accepted the Greek conception of matter, which demanded that it must pre-exist the Demiurge and be formless and chaotic. Although matter can be given form by a divine intellect like the Demiurge, its self governing principle remains Anangke, which is inherently hostile to the intrusions of rationality and form. In Plato’s account of the earths origin, “the divine Logos checked Anangke merely by means of rational persuasion”, not by possessing any inherent preeminence. The Greek conception of form pressured him into also believing that the design of this divine rationality is only intelligible within the context of sophisticated human (Greek) society.
Aristotle did not think there was a tension between form and matter because he thought he could prove that form is divine and eternal, through the argument of motion. Since every motion is caused, there must have been an “unmoved mover” since an infinite chain of causes could never complete itself to cause motion. He called this “unmoved mover” God, and by God he meant pure form. This proof is certainly logical, and it appears to come completely form sensory experience and not requiring a prior faith commitment. However, appearances can be deceiving. Although logical, this proof does indeed precede on the foundation of a prior religious commitment. Dooyeweerd exposes the religious foundation of this proof by reversing its direction to prove that matter is divine and not form, as many earlier Greek philosophers believed. Aristotle could have just as logically proclaimed, that in life we perceive completed forms like plants, animals, and humans. Yet all these forms both come to be and pass away. If this process of life, death, and rebirth were stopped, the stream of life would also stop. This would end the existence of everything that has form and shape, therefore the stream of life possesses no form and cannot pass away. Therefore the great stream of life is the first cause of everything that has form. Being the first cause, the great stream of life can be called God. Logic and sensory experience confirm both proofs, but because of their different religious starting points they came to vastly different conclusions. The religious tension between form and matter remains unsolved.
The religious starting point, which Dooyeweerd calls the “ground motive”, of the Biblical worldview is creation ex nihilo from God. Dooyeweerd contends that this ground motive gives Christianity a fundamental unity whereas the form-matter ground motive of Greek culture and philosophy is fundamentally divided. Therefore, “a synthesis between the creation motive of the Christian religion and the form-matter motive of Greek religion is not possible”.
This is all I have so far. From here I plan to develop Dooyeweereds idea that the early Church assimiliated the Greek ground motive of matter and form and that it caused conflicts between the role of reason and faith, notably between the Tertullians and the Augustinians. From there I will examine how Aquinas responded to the challenge of that tension, how he perfected the model of nature and grace to solve that tension, and why that model eventually broke down. Hopefully, it will make sense and support my thesis that Aquinas made a brilliant attempt (as did Aristotle and many others) to bring together what cannot be brought together, that being two different religious ground motives.
RJ Snell
4/28/2008
Research Paper: Rough Draft
Protestant Critiques of Nature and Grace in the Theology of Aquinas: A Brief Investigation
In the Protestant world, Aquinas is at best given cautious respect as a brilliant man with good Christian intentions. However, the full message of Aquinas’s theology is rarely accepted due to its perceived violation of a host of core Protestant sensibilities. These objections include: an unacceptable use of Aristotle’s pagan philosophy, the distinction and separation of nature and grace, an incomplete understanding of the Fall, giving autonomy to reason, a misguided separation of faith and reason, and not giving scripture its proper authority. Some have even contended that his giving autonomy to nature unintentionally led to the secularization of the West. Proponents of Aquinas’s theology strongly believe these objections come from misunderstandings and over-simplifications. There is a general sentiment among Thomists that if Protestants took the time to read and seriously interact with Aquinas, their objections would cease. Protestants have had nearly five hundred years to come to the conclusion that Luther and Calvin misjudged the Angelic Doctor, and most have not. Thus, there must be another cause for the Protestant critiques besides chronic misinterpretation and lazy scholarship. The best attempt at finding the true reason for this theological “failure to communicate” comes from the analysis of Herman Dooyeweerd, a Dutch Reformed theologian and philosopher, whom Arvin Voss describes as “one of the most careful Protestant critics”. Dooyeweerd uses a broad historical narrative to show how Western thought has consistently been divided against itself, and Aquinas is one of many examples. He believes that an analysis of how Aquinas uses nature and grace in his theology reveals that he operates from the Greek assumption that humans are fundamentally intellectual beings, whereas the Bible shows that humans are fundamentally religious. The primary mode of experiencing reality is not what the mind knows, but what the heart worships.
How someone interprets Aquinas and his theology largely depends on how they interpret the development of Christian thought in the thousand or so years that preceded him. Dooyeweerds has a unique take on the history of philosophy, which leads to a negative view of Aquinas (and nearly everybody else). A full understanding of his critique of Aquinas requires a diligent examination of his analysis on the development of Western philosophy. Western thought began with the Greeks, so it is with the Greeks that Dooyeweerd begins his critique. This critique of Greek thought will be developed at length because it is Dooyeweerds opinion that Aquinas inherited its problems.
The problems of Greek thought come from its conception of form and matter. Aristotle was the first to use the terms in formal philosophy, but Dooyeweerd, following the lead of Friedrich Nietzsche, says that an analysis of Greek culture reveals those ideas were at work long before Aristotle. The Greek conception of matter came from primal nature religions that dominated the ancient culture. This nature religion consisted of “the deification of a formless, cyclical stream of life. Out of this stream emerged the individual forms of plant, beast, and man, which then matured, perished, and came to life again…time was not linear, but cyclical.” The forces that guided this religious life stream were not rational laws, but blind unpredictable fate called “Anangke”. The “gods” of this religion were not personal but “fluid and invisible…a countless multiplicity of divine powers, bound up with a great variety of natural phenomena.” This divine state of flux and variation was applied to everything the Greeks worshipped: lesser gods like demons, tribal ancestors and heroes, and even “the great gods such as Gaia, Uranos, Demeter, and Dionysus.”
The Greek conception of form comes from a later religion centered not on nature but on culture. In contrast to the nature religions that focused on fate, death and rebirth the new culture religion focused on measure and harmony. Its primary deities were the Olympic gods who “left mother earth and her cycle of life behind. They were immortal, radiant gods of form: invisible, personal, and idealized cultural forces.” The Olympian gods “became the official religion of the Greek city-state”.
The culture religion was never completely free from the nature religion. Its greatest proponents like Homer had a constant desire “to incorporate the older religion (nature/matter) in its own ground motive of form, measure, and harmony.” Homer “was particularly concerned to curb the wild and impassioned worship of Dionysus…with the normative principle of form that characterized [the worship of] Apollo (the supreme culture god).” During the transition period between the two worldviews, “the ancient Greek seers and poet-theologians sought to convince the people that the Olympians themselves had evolved out of the formless gods of nature.” The new religion of form and harmony still used the old concept of “Anangke” only it was renamed to “Moira”. This new kind of fate was used by the Olympian gods for order and design in nature, but Moira itself did not come from them. It was an “older, impersonal, and formless divine power” that even Zeus was powerless to stop when it “willed the fate of a mortals death”.
Despite the best efforts of poets and philosophers like Homer and Hesoid, the nature religion of matter and the culture religion of form resisted a clean synthesis. Dooyeweerd believes that “Moira was the expression of the irreconcilabe conflict between both religions”. The shared theme of Moira “revealed an indissoluble, dialectical coherence [between the two]…The religion of culture is inexplicable without the background of the nature religions.” The culture/form religion could not stand on its own, it needed to borrow the primal Anangke backbone of the nature/matter religion to survive. This dialectical tension “in the religious consciousness of the Greeks…was the unsolved puzzle standing at the center of both tragedy and philosophy.” Greek culture was split. Most Greeks practiced the culture religion in public ceremonies but used the rituals of the older nature religion in private life.
Over time, the Olympian culture religion would be rejected by a host of great philosophers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Despites its genus and sophistication, the Greek philosophical tradition could never overcome the religious conflict embedded in the concept of matter and form. On the surface, it appeared that people like Plato and Aristotle had ushered in a new philosophical world independent of religion and culture. This was not the case. They were struggling with the same religious problems that Homer did. Dooyeweerd explains that “the autonomy claimed by Greek philosophical theories against popular belief, implied merely an abandonment of the mythological forms of the latter which were bound to sensuous representation. It did not mean a break with the form-matter motive, which was the common religious starting point of all Greek thinkers.” Even if it claimed to be, Greek philosophy was never secular, but was merely the next stage in this unsolved battle between two incompatible religions.
This is demonstrable with Plato and Aristotle. Plato believed “that the world of becoming was the product of the formative activity of a divine, rational spirit”, which he calls the Demiurge. However, the tension between form and matter prevented Plato’s Demiurge from engaging in a real act of creation. Plato accepted the Greek conception of matter, which demanded that it must pre-exist the Demiurge and be formless and chaotic. Although matter can be given form by a divine intellect like the Demiurge, its self governing principle remains Anangke, which is inherently hostile to the intrusions of rationality and form. In Plato’s account of the earths origin, “the divine Logos checked Anangke merely by means of rational persuasion”, not by possessing any inherent preeminence. The Greek conception of form pressured him into also believing that the design of this divine rationality is only intelligible within the context of sophisticated human (Greek) society.
Aristotle did not think there was a tension between form and matter because he thought he could prove that form is divine and eternal, through the argument of motion. Since every motion is caused, there must have been an “unmoved mover” since an infinite chain of causes could never complete itself to cause motion. He called this “unmoved mover” God, and by God he meant pure form. This proof is certainly logical, and it appears to come completely form sensory experience and not requiring a prior faith commitment. However, appearances can be deceiving. Although logical, this proof does indeed precede on the foundation of a prior religious commitment. Dooyeweerd exposes the religious foundation of this proof by reversing its direction to prove that matter is divine and not form, as many earlier Greek philosophers believed. Aristotle could have just as logically proclaimed, that in life we perceive completed forms like plants, animals, and humans. Yet all these forms both come to be and pass away. If this process of life, death, and rebirth were stopped, the stream of life would also stop. This would end the existence of everything that has form and shape, therefore the stream of life possesses no form and cannot pass away. Therefore the great stream of life is the first cause of everything that has form. Being the first cause, the great stream of life can be called God. Logic and sensory experience confirm both proofs, but because of their different religious starting points they came to vastly different conclusions. The religious tension between form and matter remains unsolved.
The religious starting point, which Dooyeweerd calls the “ground motive”, of the Biblical worldview is creation ex nihilo from God. Dooyeweerd contends that this ground motive gives Christianity a fundamental unity whereas the form-matter ground motive of Greek culture and philosophy is fundamentally divided. Therefore, “a synthesis between the creation motive of the Christian religion and the form-matter motive of Greek religion is not possible”.
This is all I have so far. From here I plan to develop Dooyeweereds idea that the early Church assimiliated the Greek ground motive of matter and form and that it caused conflicts between the role of reason and faith, notably between the Tertullians and the Augustinians. From there I will examine how Aquinas responded to the challenge of that tension, how he perfected the model of nature and grace to solve that tension, and why that model eventually broke down. Hopefully, it will make sense and support my thesis that Aquinas made a brilliant attempt (as did Aristotle and many others) to bring together what cannot be brought together, that being two different religious ground motives.
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South Park Picture
Mar. 16th, 2007 | 12:06 pm
What I would look like as a cartoon as of now...
[Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<img [...] ">') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.]
What I would look like as a cartoon as of now...
<img target="_blank" alt="south park character" src="<center>hi, you have to check out this great thing for making your very own southpark guy <br /><a href=" http://www.customsouthparks.com/"="http://www.customsouthparks.com/""><img alt="Picture of me!" src="http://images.customsouthparks.com/3/6/0/401-3.png" border="0"/></a><br/><br/><a target="_blank" href="http://www.customsouthparks.com/">Click here to make one</a></center> undefined" />
<img target="_blank" alt="south park character" src="<center>hi, you have to check out this great thing for making your very own southpark guy <br /><a href=" http://www.customsouthparks.com/"="http://www.customsouthparks.com/""><img alt="Picture of me!" src="http://images.customsouthparks.com/3/6/0/401-3.png" border="0"/></a><br/><br/><a target="_blank" href="http://www.customsouthparks.com/">Click here to make one</a></center> undefined" />
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Stupid Senior Stuff
May. 24th, 2006 | 10:05 pm
Wanna know what I think is dumb? Honoring weighted grades. The academic recognitions were based on weighted grades, allowing people like me (3.4 student) to be given something for 3.85 or higher GPA. Seems kinda pointless to honor about 1/5 of the class too.
Also, I thought that retreat was rather pointless.
Also, I thought that retreat was rather pointless.
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Stress
May. 9th, 2006 | 05:06 pm
mood: 
stressed
School is just stressing me out. I can not stand projects and I feel silly as it appears that most people are not stressed, or at least as not as much as I am acting. I guess I just am nervous about Biology and Litterature, as they have deadlines and seem alot more work. I don't want school to be over, just the stress. I hope my audition this afternoon went well....At least I have only one more AP test
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Great movies to check out....
Apr. 29th, 2006 | 11:14 pm
House Parody
http://thatvideosite.com/view/1660.h
Mentos Commercial
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/3
Enjoy
http://thatvideosite.com/view/1660.h
Mentos Commercial
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/3
Enjoy
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Sorry that I am too lazy to format my page...
Apr. 27th, 2006 | 11:13 pm
location: bedroom
mood: 
sleepy
music: FM Static: Definitely Maybe (check them out)
I have heard enough about how writing down goals helps and having other people increases your chances of doing so, thus leading to my goals:
-I want to get into doing some sort of physical activity, preferably cardiovascular
-I would like to grow a backbone (gain some self confidence)
-Learn to love myself
-Go to college and find out if my depression is merely enviromental
-Tell everyone that I know how great they are and appreciate them before school ends
I doubt anyone will read this, but oh well.
-I want to get into doing some sort of physical activity, preferably cardiovascular
-I would like to grow a backbone (gain some self confidence)
-Learn to love myself
-Go to college and find out if my depression is merely enviromental
-Tell everyone that I know how great they are and appreciate them before school ends
I doubt anyone will read this, but oh well.