Thy Will Be Done on Earth as It Is in Heaven | Fr. Oliver Keenan, O.P.

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 18 May 2022

⏱️ 65 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given on March 26, 2022 at the Dominican House of Studies as part of the Thomistic Institute's Annual Spring Thomistic Circles Conference: "Our Father: Prayer and Theology." For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Fr Oliver is the Director of the Aquinas Institute and a member of the Theology Faculty at the University of Oxford. As Fellow and Lector, Fr Oliver teaches Systematic Theology at Blackfriars. As Director of the Aquinas Institute, he has responsibility for coordinating its research programme and for organising its annual programme of reading classes, seminars, lectures and colloquia. He completed his doctorate at the University of Oxford (under the supervision of Professor Graham Ward). His doctoral work outlined a semantic ontology for Christian dogmatics, in dialogue with the philosophy of Michael Polanyi. He specialises in theological ontology, theological epistemology, and twentieth-century dogmatics, particularly Catholic receptions of Karl Barth. Together with Dr Daniel De Haan, he is leading a two-year Templeton-funded project on ‘Truth, Aquinas, and the Theological Turn in Continental Philosophy‘. In addition to his work at Blackfriars, he is a Translation Fellow of the Center for Barth Studies at Princeton Theological Seminary; an Associate Lecturer at the Maryvale Institute; Trustee of the Eckhart Society; a member of the Editorial Board of New Blackfriars; and the Master of Students for the English Dominicans.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Tamistic Institute.
0:04.0	For more talks like this, visit us at tamistic institute.org.
0:08.0	After yesterday's brilliant paper by Dr. Harriman, there was a question from over here,
0:17.0	which was along the lines of how in the context of the seemingly relentless advance of
0:23.0	secularism, do we keep hold of the reality of Christ's victory and the inauguration of the
0:30.7	kingdom of God? How can we remain connected to that decisive victory? And this morning, I want to try
0:37.3	and trace out an answer to that question
0:39.8	in relation to the theology of the third petition of the Our Father,
0:44.7	as understood by Aquinas, that God's will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
0:51.5	Now, in the state of original justice, the worship of God would have originated from
0:57.6	an unmodified sense of God's transcendent triune glory and a concomitant recognition of our
1:05.5	creaturely finitude. But for us in the state of the Wayfarer, us for whom the Our Father was instituted, prayer more often than not begins with a sense of frustration or even disappointment, a sense not only of the fragility of the world, of the finitude of creation, but of its radical and sometimes self-destructive precarity,
1:30.3	an intuition that the world is not, or at least not yet, as it should be,
1:37.2	that the times are in some way out of joint, and even sometimes a sense of God's absence from our world. And so this morning,
1:47.3	I'm going to answer yesterday's question by reflecting on one element of St. Thomas's presentation
1:53.4	of the petition by will be done, which speaks directly to that sense of frustration or even disappointment.
2:02.7	And that's in the catechetical instructions where he associates this petition with the
2:08.8	beatitude, blessed are those who mourn.
2:13.1	And in particular, I want to develop an account of lamentation as a practice which is proper to our wayfaring state,
2:21.7	a practice that marks out the distinctively Christian existential by which we are able to entwile that eschatological tension between the already and the not yet, which Dr. Harriman spoke of yesterday.
2:39.0	Lamentation is, I think, one of the keys by which we as theologians and as people of prayer are to grow in Christian maturity and faithfully perform the will of God in our lives.
2:54.9	And so that means that taking up this response of lamentation means that I'm going to have to leave aside,
	...

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