In a recent study, the eminent Methodist theologian William Abraham has argued that Aquinas's theology, especially as received by the Council of Trent, marks the shift from “soteriological” exegesis to the reduction of the function of Scripture (and of the entire “canonical heritage”) to epistemological concerns and claims.Footnote ¹

Abraham states his positive thesis—with much of which, as regards a broad “canonical heritage,” I agree—in the preface to the paperback edition of his book: “I have proposed that we redescribe and reidentify canon in such a way that we think in terms of a canonical heritage; and that we envision that heritage as a network of means of grace intended for use in spiritual direction in the Church.”Footnote ² This “canonical heritage” includes the lists of canonized Fathers, the Scriptures, the Creed, and so forth; and the canonical heritage functioned not epistemologically (as authoritatively guaranteeing, in a foundationalist fashion, truth claims) but rather soteriologically, as “means of grace.”Footnote ³ The canonical heritage, writes Abraham, was understood by the Church, at least during the first millennium (before the schism that divided East and West), “as materials and practices which fed the soul, which mediated the life of God, which returned human beings to their true destiny as children of God, and which ultimately led to a life of sanctity. Alternatively, we might say that they were seen as gifts of the Holy Spirit in the life of the Church, intended to bring about participation in the life of God through the working of the same Spirit, who guided the Church in their selection and use.”Footnote ⁴ It should be noted that Joseph Ratzinger makes a similar point with regard to ecumenical advances in interpreting the Bible. Ratzinger explains, “The great reformed denominations and the Anglican community accepted the ancient creeds as part of their own belief, and so the Trinitarian and Christological faith defined in the councils of the early Church has been kept of out the debate. Side by side with scripture and combined with it, this is the actual nucleus of the unity which binds us together and gives us hope of complete reconciliation. For this reason we must for the sake of unity strenuously resist any attempt to break up this central ecclesial deposit or to discard as outmoded the practice based on it of reading scripture together.”Footnote ⁵

Abraham pins the blame for the loss of this participatory and deifying understanding of the Bible largely upon Aquinas as received, or as Abraham puts it as “canonized,”Footnote ⁶ by the Council of Trent. Why Aquinas? The answer is complex, and certainly relates to Abraham's distaste for the structures of authority of the Catholic Church and for teachings that he deems “epistemological” rather than “soteriological,” e.g., the infallibility of the pope.Footnote ⁷ While I would disagree with Abraham's account of such teachingsFootnote ⁸—which function within Catholicism in a way different than Abraham imagines—at the core of Abraham's critique of Aquinas is a more technical matter, namely Aquinas's view, stated in the first question of the Summa Theologiae, that sacra doctrina is a “scientia.” For Abraham, “the fundamental character of [Aquinas's theological] system is determined by his commitment to an Aristotelian conception of scientia.”Footnote ⁹ Not only is Aristotelian scientia non-biblical and far from the Fathers' approaches, says Abraham, but also the application of the notion of scientia to theology distorts the orientation of theology, from God-centered to human-centered. Theology becomes locked into foundationalist epistemological questions having to do with the nature of divine revelation, Scripture, and ecclesial authority. Whereas the Fathers understood their teaching and preaching, as well as the sacraments and Scripture, as means of elevating human beings to union with God in Christ by the Holy Spirit, after the introduction of theology as a divine scientia, theologians almost inevitably turned their focus away from deification and toward arguments about the foundations of Christian truth. This happened because Aristotelian scientia requires “universal, necessary, and certain” knowledge, in this case deriving from God through the modes of divine revelation and its ecclesial appropriation.Footnote ¹⁰

The result, Abraham holds, was that “the canon was made captive to Aristotle. Despite protestations to the contrary, Aristotelian convictions about knowledge determined at a basic level the inner structure of the Christian tradition.”Footnote ¹¹ As part of “a concerted effort to epistemize the canonical heritage of the church”Footnote ¹² in the West, Aquinas's transformation of theology into an Aristotelian scientia (no matter how different, as a divinely revealed knowledge, from Aristotle's own conceptions of scientia) led to fundamentally distortive understandings of Scripture as inerrant, the Creeds as a “pocket Bible” (in Brian Davies's phrase, attempting to summarize Aquinas's position), the Fathers as “authorities,” divine authorship, prophecy, inspiration, other religions, the authority of the papacy, and the beatific vision (now presented as a full knowledge). No longer a “means of grace,” Scripture now belongs within the scientia of theology. Scripture functions not soteriologically, but to grant theology its authoritative status.

This epistemizing of Scripture is reflected in a theological arrogance, Abraham finds, on the part of Aquinas.Footnote ¹³ For instance, with regard to the major ecclesial issue of Aquinas's day, the schism that separated the East and West, Abraham finds Aquinas treating the filioque debate and the debate over the nature of the beatific vision in an arrogant manner, “sweeping aside” and “dispatching” other positions while “without a pause” identifying Scripture with his own position.Footnote ¹⁴ Abraham remarks that Aquinas, while recognizing the weakness of the human mind in comparison to the divine mind, rarely expressed a doubt about his own position on theological problems. This “extraordinary confidence in the rightness of his own position” stems inevitably, Abraham suggests, “from his confidence in theology as scientia.”Footnote ¹⁵ As a scientia theology enables demonstrative knowledge, and Aquinas is confident that he has such knowledge.

Everything else, Abraham affirms, takes second place to this need for epistemological assurance. Thus, Aquinas simply assumes that the Creeds state what is found in Scripture, without attending to the “distinction between canonical and non canonical creeds” or to “the complex intellectual, experiential, and spiritual process which actually lay behind their creation.”Footnote ¹⁶ Similarly, Aquinas ignores the historical formation of the biblical canon and assumes that Scripture is fundamentally “written by God” and that the prophets' teachings convey God's own knowledge,Footnote ¹⁷ with the result that the canon of Scripture is “set apart in a radical way from the rest of the Church's canonical heritage.”Footnote ¹⁸ Aquinas treats the Fathers as a set of epistemic “authorities” rather than spiritual guides.Footnote ¹⁹ What is lost is the more messy biblical and historical reality of God's soteriological accomplishment of the work of deification in the world; what is gained is a strict and clear epistemological account of the authority and modes of divine teaching, in which account the canon of Scripture now has its limited place and function. Aquinas, later joined by the Church in the West, exchanges the messy, but biblical, soteriological reality for a neatly packaged Aristotelian epistemological foundation for Christian truth claims. As Abraham states bluntly, “Aquinas and all who follow him are, then, departing radically from the earlier tradition,” in which epistemological claims, while present in various competing forms, were not canonized, and in which “scripture” functioned “soteriologically” rather than instrumentally in accord with “the drastic reworking of the sense and reference of scripture developed by Aquinas.”Footnote ²⁰

Not surprisingly, therefore, Abraham describes Aquinas's injury on his way to the Council of Lyons, an injury that prevented him from attending the Council and that led to his death, as almost certainly no loss for the Council's effort to heal the schism. Aquinas “was too committed to theology as scientia, too confident about the status of Aristotle in any accurate analysis of human reasoning, and too sure that the Church in the West was right, for anyone to expect the outcome [of the Council] to have been radically different from what it was.”Footnote ²¹ As Abraham is aware, Aquinas on this reading appears as the first modern fundamentalist.Footnote ²² Whatever Aquinas's own intentions or motives in theologizing, Aquinas's account of the canon of Scripture as the foundation for theology's epistemological assurance led almost ineluctably to a fundamentalist “inversion” of the “canonical heritage.”Footnote ²³

As Abraham summarizes this inversion, “Epistemic considerations became primary, with the result that the whole tradition was received to fit the primacy of epistemology. Within the Church in the West, how one knew that one knew the truth about God overshadowed knowing God.”Footnote ²⁴ The Reformation thus appears as a necessary response to Aquinas and the medieval Church. The Reformers, “[d]riven by soteriological interests and obsessed by what they took to be a corruption of the life of the primitive and patristic Church,” reacted against Aquinas's distortions but did so, Abraham suggests, within the epistemological categories set by Aquinas by adopting the rallying cry of “sola scriptura.”Footnote ²⁵ Fortunately, the Reformers nonetheless managed to recover, in practice, a broad swath of the “canonical heritage,” and the attempts since that time to re-establish philosophical and theological epistemological foundationalism have failed. Abraham sums up his book's larger argument:

Abraham will not allow that Aquinas's actual practice of biblical exegesis has anything to do with the question of whether his inclusion of Scripture within a divine scientia epistemized theology; thus appeal to Aquinas's biblical exegesis itself cannot settle the question.

What stands out in Abraham's account of theology as a scientia, however, is how “nominalist,” in the sense described by Catherine Pickstock as “the loss of an integrally conceptual and mystical path,” Abraham's account is.Footnote ²⁷ For Abraham, Aquinas's claim that sacra doctrina is a scientia that takes its principles from revelation as found in canonical Scripture, instrumentalizes Scripture as an epistemic norm. What Abraham does not see is that such a scientia, as sapientia, is for Aquinas a participation in God the Trinity—a participation that is a uniting of the believer, in faith, hope, and love and by means of spiritual exercises, to the cruciform incarnate Word of the Father revealed by the Holy Spirit. The scientia-sapientia that is sacra doctrina is a sharing in the teaching office of Christ the Teacher, who teaches most fully, Augustine and Aquinas agree, from the Cross. It is a participation in the Wisdom of the Cross, the wisdom of self-giving love. Such scientia-sapientia, far from being a rationalism or an exercise in epistemology, is the fruit of God's self-giving love, in which by deification—including the contemplative practices that wean us from idolatry and draw us into the truth of the triune God—we come to share in the trinitarian knowing and loving.Footnote ²⁸

The practice of this scientia-sapientia belongs to the sacramental and spiritual practices by which the believer seeks union with the God revealed in Christ. Within this contemplative ascent, Scripture, as itself sacra doctrina, enables the believer to participate with the saints (including the prophets and apostles) in the sacra doctrina of the Trinity, a participation that requires the whole set of practices and materials identified by Abraham as the “canonical heritage.” The scientia-sapientia that Aquinas proposes in the Summa Theologiae is thus not a rationalist knowledge/wisdom, but an embodied wisdom, rooted in the gifts of creation transformed and elevated by grace, that is a participation in the One who says, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (Jn 8:31-32). As Adrian Walker has remarked about the modern understanding of objectivity grounded in “pure” reason: “This typically modern ideal confuses objectivity, which is, of course, both attainable and important, with neutrality. But, because neutrality is in fact impossible, the result of the confusion just mentioned is not at all real neutrality, but a prejudice about the nature of objectivity. This prejudice diminishes the loving, disponible attentiveness to reality in all of its factors that is the true core of genuine objectivity and, indeed, intelligence in the first place.”Footnote ²⁹ As opposed to a nominalist account of human rationality (reason and will) as autonomous, truth and goodness constitute and draw human rationality, for Aquinas as for the patristic-medieval tradition.

The goal of sacra doctrina is soteriological: being configured to the cruciform image of the Word incarnate. By sharing in the Truth of God, a sharing fully possible only through God's gifts of faith, hope, and love, we become his friends. Drawing upon the biblical Wisdom literature, Aquinas explains in his introduction to the Summa contra Gentiles the soteriological purpose of his pursuit of wisdom:

Ironically, Abraham, in opposing the epistemizing of theology, has fallen into the trap of treating Aquinas's sacra doctrina as epistemologically ordered, and thus he reads Aquinas as if Aquinas's theology were not participatory to its very core. When Aquinas is read with nominalist lenses, his theology, and thus his deployment of Scripture, becomes arid and barren. When such nominalism is diagnosed and excised, reading of Aquinas's theology and exegesis can once again take place with insight into Aquinas's transformative purposes and thus his continuity, rather than discontinuity, with the biblical and patristic practice of sacra doctrina. In addition to this point, Abraham's account of post-Aquinas decline offers a second lesson: the need to read Scripture as “soteriological,” as caught up within the graced participatory pattern of the entirety of Christian life.

It can hardly be denied that many biblical scholars and theologians do not read Scripture in this way, but instead treat Scripture as a set of ancient texts whose diverse claims must be adjudicated first epistemologically. As Walker states, “The question is simply what counts as science—and, so, whether or not the paradigm of ‘scientific’ exegesis that dominates Scriptural interpretation today is indeed sufficiently scientific. Ultimately, this question hinges on the nature of history.”Footnote ³¹ This seems to me to be exactly right. If the Christian life is a graced participation in God, then so is history. As I have argued elsewhere, Aquinas's theology of history relies upon “participation.”Footnote ³² Re-reading Aquinas with Abraham's concerns in mind may thus, happily, foster a renewal in soteriological, not epistemological, biblical interpretation.