There are three things that Aquinas can teach theologians at the beginning of the third millennium…First, that theology remains at the service of the Church and therefore is subject to the pleasure of the Roman Pontiff….Second, that the Christian thinker must interest himself in both nature and grace, faith and reason, Church and State….Third and finally, that the Christian thinker himself must live a holy life.
During the course of the Christian millennia, Christian claims about salvation and about the role of Jesus of Nazareth in God’s final and definitive deed of saving humanity have included a variety of understandings, explanations, and analogies. Moreover, those claims and their various renderings have a doctrinal and theological history, within which St. Thomas Aquinas occupies a canonical position
No reviewer to my knowledge has suggested that Mel Gibson read the “Summa Theologiae” before setting about to direct “The Passion of the Christ.” But he must have read Question 48 of the third part of Aquinas’ “Summa.” There, Aquinas examines how the passion of Christ produced its effect — its efficiency, if you will.
In Saint John’s account of the trial before Pontius Pilate, Christ asserts that he has come into the world that he “should bear witness unto the truth,” and Pilate’s reply is “Quid est veritas?” “What is truth?” This well-known retort (John 18:38) supplies a good starting point for a review of David Daniell’s 900-page study of English versions of the Christian Bible. Pilate’s question, after all, is one of the few examples of a complete New Testament sentence that is translated identically in the King James Version (1611); J. B. Phillips, The Gospels in Modern English (1952); the Revised Standard Version (1952); The Living Bible (1962-82); The New English Bible (1970); Today’s English Version (also Good News Bible, 1976); and the New International Version (1978). Daniell’s fascinating and well-researched study shows that identical translations of original texts constitute a rare occurrence in the history of the English Bible.
Why should a medieval Catholic priest merit a place among the most important figures of the second millennium? In part because more than seven centuries after his death his writings and teachings still seem fresh and-more importantly-true. His genius as a thinker and teacher has led thousands of scholars to carry on the intellectual projects and hand on the teachings in philosophy and theology of this thirteenth-century Neapolitan Dominican friar
No one aware of the present state of marriage can pick up and start to read a book like this without soon harboring the suspicion that something central to marriage has disappeared over the past several hundred years.
Audio and transcript of the session with Brian McLaren and James Alison recorded at the 2013 Colloquium on Violence and Religion held at the University of Northern Iowa.
If we wish, then, we can use the language of Jesus offering himself as a perfect sacrifice to the Father, just so long as we remember that this is a way of describing not some private sacrificial intention of Jesus towards a Father who needed satisfying, but the whole obedient acting out by which Jesus came to occupy an all-too-humanly constituted place of shame, violence and death, and not hold it against us. There is an angry deity in this equation, and it is us, in whose midst God, quite without violence, manifests the depth of his forgiving love by plumbing the depths of, and thus defanging our violence.
I apologise for having started with this long preamble, but it seemed to me an appropriate way into a discussion about monotheism and idolatry. I wanted to illustrate two points: just how difficult really useful self-criticism is, and just how difficult and delicate a matter is the communication of genuine critical insight from another source outside ourselves. And yet there is no helpful discussion of idolatry that isn’t founded in these matters.
Idol worship is not something that looks evil. Under different guises in every culture, especially our own, it passes as good and sacred and holy. Lent is a call to leave idols, to get past fake goodness and discover our heart in the heart of God.
