Medieval Answers to Modern Questions: Renewing Trinitarian Theology Today | Prof. Bruce Marshall

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 30 November 2022

⏱️ 48 minutes

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Summary

The handout for this lecture can be found here: https://tinyurl.com/4jsmdu2j. This lecture was given on October 19, 2022, at Oxford University. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Bruce D. Marshall is the Lehman Professor of Christian Doctrine at Southern Methodist University. He holds a masters from Yale Divinity School and a doctorate from Yale University. His teaching interests include medieval and reformation theology and systematic theology. His research interests include doctrine of the Trinity, christology, philosophical issues in theology, sacramental theology, and Judaism and Christian theology. 559080

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Thomistic Institute.
0:03.3	For more talks like this, visit us at tamisticinstitute.org.
0:11.0	In the last century, in the 20th century, there was a narrative about the history of
0:17.4	Trinitarian theology that became quite dominant or widespread.
0:22.6	And in that narrative, St. Thomas Aquinas is the main villain in the long history of Christian thought about the Trinity.
0:32.6	In many versions of this standard narrative, he competes with St. Augustine for this dubious honor.
0:41.3	But even if he's only the second worst Trinitarian theologian of all time,
0:46.3	St. Thomas is the clear paradigm according to this narrative of Western scholastic error on the Trinity. He embodies, so the story goes, all the bad features
0:59.0	of the Western Scholastic attempt to systematize Augustine's
1:04.0	already misguided Trinitarian theology of this reading.
1:09.0	Theologian who tell this story thereby ignore to be sure the remarkable
1:13.6	richness of medieval trinitarian thought from, say, Anselm to Akham, for example.
1:21.6	More precisely, they tell their story in more or less complete ignorance of this complex and sophisticated
1:28.3	tradition of reflection in which Thomas is one voice among others.
1:34.3	Situating Aquinas in this tradition of reflection greatly helps us understand his accomplishment,
1:40.3	but that is a story for another time.
1:43.3	St. Thomas is at present by far the most influential theologian of the medieval scholastic tradition.
1:50.0	And so here I will focus on him, and on the way he can help us toward a genuine renewal of Trinitarian theology.
1:58.0	Before the renewal, though, we need to think a bit about the errors attributed to Thomas
2:04.2	by the dominant narrative.
2:07.6	Aquinas' deepest and most destructive mistake on this telling is to have completed the process,
2:15.0	begun with Augustine, of turning the doctrine of the Trinity from
	...

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