A number of Protestants (e.g., Norman Geisler), including some who are Reformed (e.g., R.C. Sproul) seem to believe that Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) can be salvaged by Protestants. However, if one reads the works of Aquinas, this is mission impossible. Jeffrey D. Johnson, a Reformed Baptist, in his critique of natural theology and Aquinas, alongside noting that the Aristotelian (and Thomistic) doctrine of God as actus purus results in a false conception of God, also noted that, from a historic Protestant perspective, Aquinas rejected central tenets of Protestantism (e.g., sola scriptura) and preached a “false gospel”:
Though I greatly respect Aquinas
for his intellectual fortitude, depth of learning, and prolific output, I am
nevertheless convinced that Aquinas is no friend of Protestantism. Aquinas was
unorthodox in his soteriology, in part, because he was unorthodox in his
ecclesiology. . . . he taught that salvation is dependent on the Catholic
Church and the authority of the pope. . . . By introducing Aristotelian
concepts into his theology proper, he departed from the established Platonism
of Augustine. . . . Aquinas made the assumption that mobility—the willful
exertion of power—is an essential characteristic of imperfection, finiteness,
and temporality. Because God’s can’t be any of these things, mobility must not
be in God. Yet by Thomas’s adding immobility to the list of divine attributes,
other attributes of God, such as aseity, simplicity, and immutability, were
negatively impacted. Moreover, as we will see immobility negatively impacts the
free and unnecessary acts of God, such as creating and governing the universe.
Most importantly, divine immobility is incongruent with the Trinitarian God of
the Bible. . . . Natural theology, unlike revealed theology, does not start
with God’s self-disclosure. Natural theology, at least for Aquinas, begins on
the false notion that man is ignorant of God. (Jeffrey D. Johnson, The
Failure of Natural Theology: A Critical Appraisal of the Philosophical Theology
of Thomas Aquinas [New Studies in Theology; Conway, Ark.: Free Grace Press
Academic, 2021], 4, 5, 11)
The Sufficiency of Divine Revelation
Aquinas’s doctrine of God is not
rooted in revelation alone. Because of this, Aquinas’s synthesis of the god of
Aristotle with the God of the Bible was an inadvertent attack on the sufficiency
of divine revelation. . . . Aquinas’s natural theology was an attack on the
sufficiency of special revelation. Aquinas used this new philosophical synthesis
as an interpretive framework to understand the nature of God and the language of
special revelation. Rather than allowing Scripture to be self-sufficient in
providing its own rules of interpretation, Aquinas interpreted Scriptures, as
we shall see, through the lens of his own philosophical theology. He taught
that all knowledge begins with sense experience and all knowledge—even knowledge
by revelation—is confined and limited to concepts gathered from sense
experience (DT [Commentary on the De Trinitate of Boethius], 6.3).
(Ibid., 48 49)
Denial of Justification by Faith
Alone
Consequently, though
sanctification, Aquinas alleged, may lead to justification, it doesn’t guarantee
justification because four things are necessary for justification: “There are
four things which are accounted to be necessary for the justification of the
ungodly, viz. the infusion of grace, the movement of the free-will towards God
by faith, the movement of the free-will towards sin, and the remission of sins.
The reason for this is that . . . the justification of the ungodly is a
movement whereby the soul is moved by God from a state of sin to a state of
justice” (ST, 2-2.113.6).
In this we can see Aquinas did not
believe justification was a legal sentence whereby God declares a sinner righteous.
Subsequently, Aquinas didn’t separate justification from sanctification. Like
sanctification, he viewed justification as a process of “the soul [being] moved
by God from a state of sin to a state of justice.” This movement from the soul,
moreover, takes place not by imputed grace but by infused grace: “On the part
of the Divine motion, there is the infusion of grace; on the part of the
free-will which is moved, there are two movements—of departure from the term ‘whence,’
and of approach to the term ‘whereto;’ but the consummation of the movement or
the attainment of the end of the movement is implied in the remission of sins;
for in this is the justification of the ungodly completed” (ST, 2-2.113.6).
“For St. Thomas,” Allister E.
McGrath states, “the nature of grace, sin and divine acceptation were such that
a created habit of grace was necessary in justification by the very nature of
things” (Allister E. McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross [Oxford:
Blackwell, 1985], 82). And David Schaff claims,
No distinction was made by the
medieval theologians between the doctrine of justification and the doctrine of sanctification
such as is made by Protestant theologians. Justification was treated as a
process of making the sinner righteous, and not as a judicial sentence by which
he was declared to be righteous. . . . Although several of Paul’s statements in
the Epistle to the Romans are quoted by Thomas Aquinas, neither he nor the
other Schoolmen rise to the idea that it is upon the [condition] of faith that
a man is justified. Faith is a virtue, not a justifying principle, and is
treated at the side of hope and love. (Quoted in Phillip Schaff, History of
the Christian Church [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1960], 5:662, 675, 754, 756) (Ibid.,
211-12)