in church are intentional about using the word churchmen to describe ourselves as people who are of and for the church. That's not to be put in antithesis to schoolmen, but it certainly has a different flavor to it. And so the schoolmen, and we'll see as they develop over the course of a few centuries, really become about the academy. The institution, now I'm dealing with universities here because this is where the schoolmen were found, the institution of the modern Western university system owes its roots to the Muslim world. A lot of people don't know this, but the Muslim world, especially centered in Egypt, for example, had universities and developed school systems and were further advanced in science and medicine and languages than most of the Western world was, far before Western universities were founded. The Al-Azhar University was founded in Cairo in 970 AD, a good 150 years before any other major universities were really called such. And so the organizational system, as well as the intellectual development of modern Western universities, and scholasticism in fact, owes its beginnings to borrowing from Muslim contexts. These Islamic universities, like the one in Cairo, had a strong influence on the development of European education. For example, the use of Arabic numbering systems rather than Roman numerals. But the greatest impact that Islamic universities had was the way that they acted as channels for advancements in Muslim thinking when it came to science, mathematics, philosophical knowledge, and so forth, which flowed into the Western academic institutions. There were, of course, Christian centers of learning prior to the 12th century, but they evolved into what we think of them as because of the influences we've just described. For example, there was a law school in Northern Italy as early as 890 AD, but it was very uniquely focused on one particular discipline and didn't incorporate into it the multiple disciplines that the Muslim schools of education were systematizing. Many centers of learning prior to the 12th century were connected with monasteries. And so if you wanted to learn, you went to the monastery, which would have a school attached to it, and it would be led by the clergymen of that monastery, or the monks from that particular place. They weren't just for theological education either. It wasn't just the case that a young person wanted to become a monk and so they'd go to the local Benedictine monastery and begin studying. Rather, anyone who wanted to learn would go there, and if you were a local boy from the village, you could go for free. Of course, a lot of them developed relationships with the people from whom they were learning, and so they pursued a monastic life after their education, but they were overseen by the monasteries in local areas. Western universities, properly speaking, didn't begin to form following the Muslim organizational patterns until about the 12th century. By 1500, however, there were over 80 universities in Western Europe. So in just a matter of a few hundred years, you can see the development of the academic institution and the scholastic method, which will become prominent in Western Europe and even today. The organization of these schools, students usually began attending at 14 or 15 years of age. Can you imagine being an empty nester when your youngest kid turns 14? There were only a few requirements in order to attend university. First of all, you had to have a background in Latin. Perhaps you've gone to a school, or perhaps maybe this class has done this to you, where the person teaching assumes the things that you already know. And so there's language used, or there's terms used, or there's context not given, and it's expected that you'll have some background there already. They didn't have time to teach Latin to these young teenagers, and so they had to have a background in the language in which they were going to be required to study. And so Latin was a requirement, and they also had the ability to pay. They had to have the ability to pay. So unlike the monasteries, which were basically a free public education to the local communities, the universities needed to be funded. And so students had to pay. There were no national barriers. So unlike the monastery system where anyone in the local region could attend, you could be from Germany and attend the university in Paris. Now, interestingly, within the university systems, the student body was broken up into nationalities. And each particular nation had a proctor. This was a university officer who governed the rules and regulations of that particular national group. Let's call them a fraternity. So that group would elect from among the faculty a proctor, and they had their own rules and regulations. So it may be that you were from one national background, and as you were studying, the requirements for your student body were different than the requirements for the student body across the court. Yet and still, this is how they were divided up. The university itself was governed by a rector who was elected by the proctors. So there's a bit of a representative republic sort of dynamic going on here. The faculty was governed by a dean. And so the dean was over the faculty and the rector was over the student body. Students remained unmarried during their studies. Now, back when I was in the military, we used to jokingly say that we thought it would be a good idea to not let young Marines get married until they achieve the non-commissioned officer ranks, because it's too much distraction from the basic stuff they're trying to learn. And that was the mentality behind this. First of all, there wasn't housing enough to have families. Second of all, it would certainly be a distraction to a young man to have his wife there or just outside in town when he's supposed to be staying up till late hours studying and learning. Unlike our modern three-quarters on, one-quarter off sort of approach to education, and if you include all the holidays that your average college student gets, it's more like two-thirds on, one-third off every year, right? which if you're a college student sounds great, if you want to be successful, however. Students in the university system in the medieval period were in class 11 months out of the year. They had about a month off every year in order to go home to celebrate the major church calendar holidays like Easter and Christmas. Most of the faculty, at least early on, were clergymen. They had come out of monastic orders or they had come out of churches and they began to oversee the educational programs of the universities to which they were called. The process, a young man would enter into university at about 14 or 15 and six years later would get a bachelor's degree. There were master's degrees in between that and a doctorate. A doctorate usually took about 14 years. So you were 28, 29, 30 by the time you would graduate from university and become whatever it is you were going to do, depending on the discipline that you were pursuing. A lot of young men between their masters and their doctorate programs would enter into the teaching faculty, and they would pursue their doctorate while teaching. That's actually not uncommon today. A lot of doctoral students are teachers, or at least they're doing the lecture part of the teaching for a professor, a research professor, under who they study. Most universities had four areas of concentration, theology, which was called the queen of the sciences, law, medicine, and art. These were the four predominant disciplines. Medicine will include science in there, which will include mathematics. Ideally, all four foci would influence the education of every student. So a young man would leave the university with a bit of awareness of all four areas. They were interdisciplinary, in other words. Some schools were known for a particular emphasis, as you can see, like Paris was a school of theology, Oxford science, and so forth. And that's still the case today. Some schools are known for a particular strength, a particular teaching strength, a particular strength of faculty, and those schools are expected to produce material, written material, and thinking material based on that one area. expertise. And so you can see how this is growing throughout the medieval period and even influencing the way our educational systems in the West operate today. What's that? No, not in the east. Do you mean the east coast or do you mean like China? Yeah, well, I would say on the Eastern Hemisphere, those things we've not really dealt with at all here in this Sunday School class, only because we're dealing with the history of the Western Church. Although, it is worth noting that the church in the East, the Byzantine Church, wasn't as influenced in such a radical way by the reappropriation of Aristotelian philosophy, the way the Western church was, because they already bent towards Aristotle in the East. And so there wasn't some mass rediscovery of Aristotelian categories in the churches in the East, the way there will be in the West, which we'll see as we get to guys like Thomas Aquinas eventually. So there were two methods for teaching that would occur within a university setting. So imagine yourself now in a classroom, kind of like this, I suppose. Maybe we'll apply the second one here in a little bit. The first would be lectures. A teacher would read a text to the students. For example, he might read Peter Lombard's sentences. Most university professors by the century after Lombard would have written a commentary on Lombard's sentences. That would have been like the major piece of work that a man would be expected to engage in. in order to have a seat on a faculty. So, for example, a teacher might read a portion of a text from Lombard Sentences and then he would commentate upon it. He would make just comments on the text, similar to what we're doing right now as a lecture, right? There was a bit of information. Everybody had access to it to one degree or another. and the professor would communicate his thoughts, his commentary, his interpretation of a text of theological work or medicine or whatever it might be. The students were expected to take very full notes of what the teacher would say. Now, perhaps you're not a note-taker. I'm not a very good note-taker. It just wasn't something that I learned very young. I don't have good handwriting, and so taking quick, smooth notes that are legible and usable later isn't in my wheelhouse. It's just something that I'll have to figure out in heaven. Note-taking, however, in this day was almost verbatim. And this carried on for centuries, by the way. So if you're familiar with the name Robert Murray McShane, Robert Murray McShane, there's a book of sermons of McShane's called A Basket of Fragments. And it's called that because these sermons are not based on any of McShane's sermon notes, but rather on the verbatim handwritten notes of his congregation, which were taken while he preached. And so someone collated all these. He preached a sermon on Titus 1, 1 through 5, for example. I'm making that up. And they went through all of the notes of people who had taken handwritten accounts of that sermon, and they pieced them together and edited them into his spoken sermon. That's incredible, right? I don't think we could do that today. If it weren't for sermon audio, most of us would have no idea what Rob preached about this morning by Friday. You might take an outline, here are the three points of application I want you to think of, or here's the four sub points in that first point of application I want you to know. But otherwise, we're just not very good at this. It might be worth considering helping our children or our grandchildren develop this discipline. Books were scarce in the days before printing was invented, and so we must not imagine that every student had a copy of a textbook. The university probably had one copy which was kept in the library, which very few people would have had access to. And so handwritten notes were really important. I imagine that the closet prepper in many of you is considering now how to handwrite all these things, or at least print them from PDF before the world ends. So on top of lectures, there would be another practice, and this is one maybe we'll try in a couple weeks, called disputation. A disputation was a public event in which the teacher and student together would set out to solve a perceived contradiction between two apparent truths. Here's what I mean. A problem would be presented, and this problem would have two statements which appeared to be opposing one another, but were both found in some authoritative text, for example, scripture, or a church father, or church dogma. And so these authoritative texts, which would have had two apparent contradictions, the technical term we'll use is antinomies, not paradoxes, would be quoted and given to the student. For example, a church father might be quoted as saying, God cannot die. But then another church father is quoted as saying, God did die on the cross. And so these are both authoritative statements that are accepted as true by the church. The student would then have to give all of the arguments both for and against each statement. This is still common in research, which I don't think it's as common as... Leave it to Jeff. This is not as common. Oh, hey, Jeff. This is not as common today as perhaps it used to be that in a persuasive essay, you don't just make an argument for your position, but you make the best argument for the counter position and then refute it in your argument for your position, right? And this is what good polemical discourse looks like rather than just taking shots at straw men. So the students would be required to give arguments for and against each statement by quoting from passages of Scripture, from other great theologians, and then offering his own commentary on these texts. The teacher would then make remarks on what the student had said and then offer his own solution. And the grade or the quality of the student's education was dependent on how closely aligned they were. This disputation was a powerful method for training students in the art of logical thinking and arguing, enabling them to master the areas of knowledge which they studied. This is not too dissimilar to the modern day dissertation, where a student will have a professor who oversees their work and who edits and makes recommendations to their work during the process of pursuing a doctoral degree, after which the student is required to defend his or her thesis in front of a panel of faculty who are allowed to ask questions and interact with the student's arguments and counter arguments. Lecturers would engage in disputations over debated subjects, so it wasn't always, you know, ideally they're dealing with topics that the previous class hadn't just dealt with. You know, you don't want, you know, Jim's in his junior year and Jeremy's in his senior year. I'm not going to give Jim the same question I gave Jeremy because he might have listened to him answer it last year. And so we want to deal with debated, hotly debated subjects, which they would utilize rarely or only once in order to develop the thinking of these theological positions. One second. Stephen, you had a hand up? Honestly, I mean, I imagine there's some of that. They're dealing with logical argumentation and so forth, but I'm not familiar with the origins of a formalized debate. Yeah, Josh. Yeah, the disputation would typically serve as the exam for a student in a particular discipline or for a particular class. So this is just prior to the invention of the Scantron system. And so they weren't doing those things then. Yes? Were there practices of censorship like there is today? No, I don't believe so. The question was, were they censoring opposing viewpoints? I don't believe so. I haven't looked into the question, but just based on the information we have, the reason I would say likely not is because they were meant to engage with even-handedly engage with counter positions and counter arguments. So if the school held a particular position, which would have been a Catholic position, on a topic like the incarnation, there may be arguments from secular philosophy or from heresy that would argue against it that the student would be required to interact with. ideally, if the university is doing its job, because they're supposed to be indoctrinating. I mean, not blindly, but they're teaching from a perspective, from a worldview. And so there should be very little opportunity or resulting heretical positions coming out of those disputations. But it's a good question. There's a transition happening here. The growth of the universities had shifted the ownership of education and intellect from the monasteries to the public sphere. And so rather than the monasteries being the centers of learning and the leading theologians being monks who were in those monasteries, who studied theology in an isolated monastic life, the universities began to challenge this. They began to offer an opportunity for people outside of...now, don't get me wrong, the universities were religiously based. and influenced, but outside of the sort of hyper-spiritualized religiosity of monasticism, which we dealt with a couple of weeks ago, theology has now become an intellectual subject in its own right, rather than a religiously intellectual discipline. People studied it in the academic context of university life and outside of the constraints of monastic disciplines. So the great theologians were shifting from monasteries, these men who were regarded highly, not simply because of their intellectual ability and writing, but because of their religious life, and because of their spirituality, now the heroes of the day were academics who were getting paid to be an educator, to be a teacher, to be a philosopher, or a thinker, or a doctor, or a mathematician, or whatever it might be, or an artist, although not paid very much, I understand. And so this is shifting, and people are now pursuing this as a living, as a vocation, the vocation of teaching. In one way, this had a liberating effect on Western theology, releasing torrents of intellectual energy, debate, and writing in the stimulating atmosphere of free academic discourse. So to your question, Sam, people of different positions are now having open public debate. right, which was a lot more likely to occur in the view of or in hearing of the world than what's going on in the monasteries where people are submitting to orders and regulations and theologies that can't be questioned. In another way, it introduced a certain element of division between the spiritual life and the intellectual life. And so now no longer, even as I said a moment ago that theology was the queen of the disciplines, it is a rapid downward trajectory from that belief to theology as one of the disciplines. whereas previously it was above all the disciplines. And so whatever it is that you wanted to learn, whatever it is you wanted to do for vocation, whatever it is that you wanted to study was studied or learned or done under the umbrella of I'm a Christian and my worldview is Bible. And now it simply becomes adjacent to all the other disciplines, one that you can kind of take or leave, which obviously the outcome of that is obvious. So let's talk about the contributions of scholasticism. Again, and I want to talk very briefly about some of the scholastics, which we'll get to, but that's probably the least of my concerns for our hour this morning. Over the course of the few hundred years that we're describing here this morning in Sunday school, probably the late 10th through the late 15th century, we'll call it, I don't think I have anybody on your list that even goes that far. I mean, I don't even include Duns Scotus or William of Ockham in their early 14th century at the latest. So this couple hundred year period What were they providing that we've benefited from, that the world around them benefited, or from which the world around them benefited, I should say? First of all, the relationship between faith and reason. This was a primary pursuit of the scholastics. They were deeply concerned about the relationship between faith and reason, between what we believe to be true that we can't see and what we know which we can experience and see and touch and feel. They wanted to see how far pure reason could discover or prove the doctrines of the Christian faith. Now we hear that and we're colored by several hundred years of interpretation, so don't hear me saying what they were trying to do is undo the need for faith. and establish the beliefs of the Christian faith based on pure reason, but rather discover how much pure reason married with or was hand-in-glove with the Christian faith, which they believed. This wasn't a pursuit of rejecting faith, but rather saying, God has also given us brains, how do these two things work together? What could the human mind find out about God by investigating the created world without referring to God's special revelation in the Bible? So if we were to isolate ourselves from divine special revelation and just use what we would call general or natural revelation, how far would our minds get us? Does the Bible say anything about these things? For example, what could unaided reason discover about the existence of God as the creator or as a trinity or of providence? would the unaided-by-faith human mind get to where we get with the Bible? And to some degree, in some cases, the answer comes from a legitimate curiosity or desire to understand passages like Romans 1, which says that things about God can be discerned to everybody just in the things that were made. The fact that there is a creation, the fact that the leaves are changing color, that the weather's changing, that the earth tilts 23.6 degrees one way and then the other every six months or so. How in the world does that happen? The Bible says that God's eternal power and divine nature are perceived in these things which were created. And they say, okay, well, so how far could we get with just our minds, with pure reason? Could we deduce from that something else, something more, right? And don't assume that the answer to all of them is yes, right? The scholastics didn't conclude that you could get to Trinitarian Godhead using pure reason. But they also argue that you couldn't get to Trinitarian Godhead without the aid of some philosophy and reason. And so what's the relationship between faith and reason? If reason alone could not discover or prove a particular doctrine, could it still be shown to be in harmony with reason? For instance, if we cannot discover the Trinity by pure reason, can we demonstrate that the Trinity does not contradict reason? Can something be false from the viewpoint of reason, but true from the viewpoint of divine revelation? And different schoolmen gave different answers to these questions, but they were united in their desire to ask these questions to see insofar had God given us minds that could interpret his world. Again, as I've already mentioned, not to be misunderstood as a rejection of faith for reason, but rather an incorporation of reason into faith. And this, by the way, this is the beginning of it. So what I'm giving you now is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a thorough accounting of the discussion about the relationship between faith and reason. In fact, as late as the, well, even the early 21st century, but apologists and theological philosophers have been asking these sorts of questions all the way until the modern era. And so some of the bigger, more well-known names and circles in which we run, for example, Cornelius Vantill, there's more modern guys like John Frame, give or takes on some topics, James Anderson. These guys are asking these questions and trying to provide answers that accord with confessional historical orthodoxy, reform theology, what the Bible teaches, although I use those two things synonymously, and reason. And they're doing a good job of it. So it's a whole discipline to be studied. Scholastic theology or scholasticism also gave us systematic theology. Now, not to be misunderstood, early creeds and confessions, so we've talked about the Apostles' Creed and the Niacine Creed and the Athanasian Creed and the definition of Chalcedon, for example, these things are systematized expressions of theological truth. They work through different topics one by one by one. You can follow a progression in each of them, some more robust than others, and some of them require a little bit of awareness of the context in which they were written. What was the pressing debate concerning Trinitarianism or Christology at the time? You need a little bit of understanding to get why things were framed the way they were. Jump forward from this 500 years, 1642-43, the Westminster Assembly is being held in England. The Westminster divines are gathering together, rejecting the 39 Articles of Faith, reestablishing a position paper on Reformed theology, which will come to be known as the Westminster Confession of Faith. It follows, especially the shorter catechism and larger catechism, follow a system not unlike the Apostles' Creed, the Ten Commandments, and the Lord's Prayer. It's just a systematic investigation of each of these things. Systematic theology was born out of a desire to offer a systematic account of Christian truth, which would have been called a Summa. So many of you have heard of Thomas Aquinas' Summa. That's what it means. It's a systematic theology. It's a summary of what truth we know. Systematic theology, at least in its birth here in the medieval period, required examining every particular doctrine logically from every point of view. So a lot of early systematics, if you're to read early systematics, you'll discover that nine-tenths of the material that you're reading are things that they reject. but they're bound by their system, no pun intended, they're bound by the design of the way that they're systematizing to work through all these questions and different perspectives and positions. And so much of what early systematic sounded like was we affirm one, we reject two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, all these different angles at which the topic was investigated or from which the topic was investigated. Does that make sense? And so systematics were very cumbersome early on because they went through as much refutation as they did affirmation. In their pursuit of a universal system of doctrine, the schoolmen often spent a great deal of time and effort inquiring into questions which most Christians in later ages would even find pointless. So as they're dealing with the doctrine of God, Downstream of that is the Trinity. Downstream of that is the second person of the Trinity. Downstream of that is the incarnation. And so one of the questions that might be asked is, could Jesus have been incarnate as an animal? Right? Now, that's never even crossed our minds probably, but in an attempt to deal thoroughly and fairly with all the possibilities, why do we believe these things? Is this a possible option? If it is, we need to ask questions about it. If it's not, we need to come together and reject it so people in future ages won't adopt it. And so systematics was aimed at this and it asked all these silly questions. Could Jesus have been a woman? It's funny that this was a question asked in the high middle ages and one that today is actually debated. And there are people in the world, there are theologians in the world who would even argue the answer is not only yes, but he was. And so don't think, don't jettison these things as just silly questions of the past. They're relevant, they have contemporary relevance. A couple other questions just for fun. Can one angel be in two places at the same time? So what sort of omnipresence do angels have? Can two angels be in the same place at the same time? How many of them can dance on the head of a pin? Systematic theology has been a key feature in theological education ever since. Systematic theology is sometimes, I think, unfairly and unhelpfully, especially today, there's a drive for this, it's unnaturally and unfairly pitted against what we would call biblical theology. Systematic theology provides the best accounting of particular doctrines within the whole scope of theology, but it's a sister discipline to biblical theology, which looks at the scope of the whole rather than the particulars, usually. And there are some within the systematic world who say, we don't really need biblical theology, and some within the biblical theological world who would say the same for systematics, but both of them are wrong. Thirdly, scholastic thinking gave us a recovery of ancient sources, particularly ancient philosophy. Again, I'm speaking of the West, so a little bit to what Nancy had mentioned earlier. I'm not particularly addressing questions of what's going on in the Eastern religious world. The schism, the great East-West schism of 1064 has already happened, at least as far as I'm teaching it here. There's a division between the church in the East and the West. Their philosophies are different, their languages are different, their politics are different, much of their theology is different. Some of the division is based on all of those things together. But the theologians of the West in particular, scientists, artists, scholastics, they were considered the philosophers of their day. And so they were interested in recovering the ancient philosophies which had served to create the foundations on which they stood, even though they may not have realized or most people didn't realize they were standing on them. They were interested in recovering the ancient philosophies that sought to answer questions such as who are we, what are we, what is being, what does matter? And so the scholastics pursued this truth wherever it might be found. And this primarily, primarily meant Aristotle. Of course, Plato is a part of the equation and some Platonic thinking is rediscovered and reinvigorated in the medieval period, but really Aristotelian philosophy in the 13th century saw the greatest recovery of his writings and thinking in the Christian world. The rediscovery of Aristotle by Western scholastics had a huge impact on Western thought and the university educational systems. In Aristotle's writings, Christian thinkers found interpretations about God, about humanity, and about the world which seemed logical and convincing and comprehensive. Aristotle wrote so much on these topics that they were finding suitable answers to one degree or another in Aristotle's writings. And he had worked all this out without any reference to what? The Bible, with no reference to scripture at all. And so let's jump back 10 minutes. What was one of the things that the scholastics were trying to provide or to investigate? What's the relationship between these things? Can a man like Aristotle use his big brain and come up with things that the rest of us should nod our heads in agreement with, even though he did it without the Bible? And so there's a gut instinct in people to say one of two answers. Some of you, when I asked that question, gut instinct, no way. Your gut was to say, absolutely not, jettison Aristotle and everything he came up with because he didn't use the Bible. And other people, gut instinct went, yeah, sure, insofar as it accords with the Bible, right? There's probably a third instinct out there that maybe I didn't account for, but there's a third instinct that says, yes, adopt what Aristotle said wholesale. And I doubt there's very much of that here. But among us, there's probably two different groups, people who say, jettison it, it's secular, it doesn't, he didn't base it on scripture, and others who say, sure, insofar as it agrees with divine revelation. And the scholastics were not united on the answer to that question, similarly to how probably we aren't. I'll show my cards, I'm in the latter camp. Yeah, and so far as what he says agrees with Scripture, borrow it. He's giving categories through which we can interpret things, grids with which we can investigate things, comments that are reconcilable with the truth of divine revelation, and God is sovereign over all these things. Don't forget some of the names in your Bible who are quoted Spirit-inspired who are writing things, saying things with very little awareness of who God is. There are names in the Bible that if you were to just read it twice and think about what's being suggested here, you might fall over. You might want to sit down first. In Isaiah chapter 45, God mentions to the prophet Isaiah a fellow named Cyrus, the king of the Persians, one of the most brutal men who ever lived, military genius, slaughtering people all over the world, ruling the whole known world at his time, who God, through Isaiah, refers to him as his Mashiach. What's that word? Messiah. Okay, so hold on a second. He's the one that's gonna say things at the end of 2 Chronicles that sound pretty legitimate. I mean, they're coming from God. The Jews weren't like, hold on a second, that wasn't one of our prophets that said that, we're not going back to Jerusalem. And so we wanna be careful here. This is a tough question and it's one of the reasons that this scholastic period and the recovery of scholasticism in the modern age is creating so much friction, even among Reformed Christians. We'll come back to maybe some of this in a little bit. Many Catholic theologians originally preferred Plato to Aristotle, and they led a campaign to ban the study of Aristotle's writings. For a time, they even enjoyed some success. However, by the 13th century, the tide had turned in favor of Aristotle, and scholastic theologians were hailing him as the great pagan forerunner to Christian truth. Don't get me wrong. The scholastics weren't like, you know what? He had a lot of good stuff. Maybe he was actually a Christian. They knew he was a pagan. The question was whether or not he was saying things that were legitimate and usable. His philosophy was almost perfectly suited to undergird, express, and explain the theology of the church. As I mentioned earlier, there was no such recovery of Aristotle in the East because Byzantine philosophers were already biased in his direction. It is not surprising, and I'll mention this now, I don't know that I'll have time to get to this properly, There is a modern, and by modern I mean right now, happening. pursuit of recovering Aristotelian categories and thinking as they were systematized by Thomas Aquinas among Reformed theologians. And they refer to themselves as the retrievalists. They're trying to retrieve from Thomas the things that he gleaned from Aristotle, as Thomas's primary goal in his four-volume Summa was to demonstrate the relationship between Roman Catholic dogma and Aristotle's philosophy. That was what Thomas was trying to do. Thomas was thoroughly Roman Catholic. And so don't mishear me. None of these good reformed men who are in this camp are saying, you know, Thomas wasn't Roman Catholic. They're kind of saying about Thomas what Thomas was saying about Aristotle. You know, sometimes he got it right. And so we want to borrow from that when he got it right. There's some danger, however, because uncritically, what ends up happening, and I've watched this happen with a couple men, is they end up going either to Rome or to the East. because they see these things as being inherently theirs. And so since these good thoughts originated in Aristotle or in Thomas or in the East, for example, they think that that's a safe space theologically. And so a lot of these movements out of, in particular, Presbyterianism, out of reformed thinking into Rome or into the East, come through an unhealthy interest in Aquinas and Aristotle. It's good enough that many of us are leaning on some of the good things that they discovered and said that ought to be good enough. For the average person, I don't heartily recommend buying a copy of Thomas's Summa. I'd rather recommend you scrape your eyeball with a fork, first of all, but besides that, it's probably not gonna benefit you to the degree that reading good puritan commentaries on scripture and reformed theologians' writings on doctrines of justification will have for your soul. So there's a group of people that this matters to, and most of us in here aren't among that group, to include myself. Aristotle was opposed to Christianity on many fronts, but this does not mean that all which he said was false or is unusable. And I'll mention, if we don't get there, in my comments on Thomas, that he also acknowledged that, where Aristotle rejected things that the Bible says are explicitly true. Now, I think, in my limited investigation, that Thomas missed a number of those things that Aristotle got wrong, and he should have rejected them. But for example, Aristotle believed the world was eternal, and Thomas said, no it's not, it was created. Good, we're good there. So Thomas didn't uncritically wholesale adopt Aristotelian categories, okay? And anyone who says that he did is just not giving a fair, objective interpretation of Thomas. But he did go too far in a lot of ways, I would suggest, based on his writing. Here's a couple scholastics we'll deal with very quickly. Excuse me, very quickly, only because I'd like to give you a couple names and a few of the major categories and topics that have been brought up that might be familiar to you. Anselm of Canterbury, 1033 to 1109. He is referred to as the first of the schoolmen or scholastics. Excuse me. Born in Northern Italy, became a monk in the French monastery at Lebec, was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 1093. So Anselm's contribution is that he tried to prove the existence of God from pure reason. That was what he was trying to do. He made what is, some of you may know, what is referred to as what argument? The ontological argument, okay? He did this in two different writings, one called the monologueon, which just means monologue, it's him talking, and the proslogueon, which is a discourse or meditation on his thinking about God. Here's the ontological argument, which I'm not gonna answer. It's hotly debated whether or not this is even legitimate. But by definition, what Anselm said is that God is the most perfect of all possible beings. He is the best of all which could be. Okay, or be thought of. If God does not exist, he would not be the most perfect of all possible beings, for a God who does exist would be more perfect than the God who doesn't exist. This guy had a ton of friends. Therefore, if God is by definition the most perfect of all possible beings, he must exist. That was his argument. Theologians and philosophers for a thousand years have debated whether or not this is legitimate. So our church last night had a square dance, or a Scottish Ceilidh, with chili cook-off and pie-baking contest, which I unashamedly will announce publicly that my daughter won the pie-baking contest last night. I wasn't even here. I was unwell. Thank you. I'll pass it along. I don't know what Anselm was doing on Saturday nights, but it wasn't that. He was wrestling with ontological arguments, and this is what he came up with. Probably more important to us, however, than Anselm's ontological argument is his writing Cur Deus Homo, in which he sought to answer the question, why the god man? Why the God-man? In that, he's dealing with two particular systematic questions. The first one is the incarnation. Why did God have to become a man? And the second one, since he did, the atonement. Those are the two topics that Anselm is dealing with in this famous writing. The necessity of the incarnation, God had to be a man in order to stand in our place. No man could bear the wrath of God. No man could be an able substitute for either himself or for anyone else, and in order to pay the penalty and bear the wrath of God, it had to be God who did it. No God could stand in the place of man, otherwise he wouldn't be a suitable substitute for us. It'd be an unreasonable substitution. So he not only had to be God, he had to be man. You remember from Job 9, 31 or 33, when Job says, there is no arbiter to stand between us, one who can put his hand on both God and man. That's what he's asking for. Job is asking for the incarnation. And Anselm's trying to answer that in his Chordaeus Homo. He's also dealing with the atonement. And so the origins of penal substitutionary atonement can be traced to his investigation of the question here in the 11th century. Peter Abelard, 1079 to 1142, a troubled man, and I'll explain this very briefly in a moment, whose inner life didn't quite match the power of his theological thinking. He was born in France and studied at Paris University, although at the time it was simply the school at Notre Dame. It was still in development to be the University of Paris at the time. Abelard This is the, he was brilliant of course, not the teacher's pet. So what Abelard decided early on in his university education was that his principal teacher was wrong most of the time. And so Abelard began, he ceased attending lecture and began offering counter lectures to his professor for any students who wanted to listen to him. Can you imagine, I mean, can you imagine, can you imagine, okay, this is the best example I have. If tonight at 5.30, Rob's like, anyone who wants to listen to me come to the fellowship hall, I'm gonna do a different sermon. Can you imagine the sort of tension that that would create in an organization like a church or a school? What happened was most of the students followed Abelard. And so his arrogance was second to none and superseded even his intellect. Many students, as I mentioned in your handout here, abandoned their course schedules to listen to Peter. Avalard was given a job as a tutor for a wealthy family because he wanted to pursue their teenage daughter, 17-year-old daughter. And Avalard allowed his desire to get the better of him, and he impregnated his 17-year-old student. He was twice her age at the time. Because of this, her father, and I didn't put this in your handouts, and I won't be as explicit as you can discover if you go look at it, his father hired some ruffians to ensure that Abelard could never do that again. The result was that he entered the monastery, she gave up her child and entered the convent and became a nun. Abelard, after he entered the monastery, wrote his most famous work, Sic et Non, Yes and No, is what it means. In it, he considered 158 theological questions, and he used this sychetnon method, which was common among lawyers in investigating cases. So prosecutorial cases, they would ask yes or no questions, and depending on the outcome of those questions, determine the jury's response. What he would do is he would set alongside each other statements from the Bible, early church fathers, other authoritative statements from church teaching, which appeared to contradict each other. Where did he get this? He's writing a disputation, isn't he, right? Remember that from the university system. His aim was to provoke people to think for themselves and to use reason as a tool for reconciling these apparent contradictory statements. Abelard didn't summarize his answers in his sychetnon. And so what he left the reader to do was to figure out how to think, rather than providing them a systematic theology which said what he or the church believed. And so his aim was to encourage thinking. On the other hand, jump ahead to the next guy, Peter Lombard, who's considered to be the father of systematic theology. He possibly studied under Abelard, by the way. Peter Lombard, he wrote the first and most comprehensive four-volume systematic theology. Does anybody know what it's called? The sentences, the four book of sentences, which just means opinions. And these four books dealt with the major loci of theological thinking, Trinity, Providence, Creation, Sin, Grace, Incarnation, Sacraments, Eschatology, and so forth. Lombard, his sentences was a collection of quotations from the Bible, early church fathers, ecumenical councils, and so forth, dealing with a whole range of theological topics. It was similar to Abelard's Sikhetnon, except Lombard offered solutions to all the difficulties and apparent contradictions. And he did not leave it to the reader to judge between them. Rather, he used his own reason to judge between the differences and landed on a position. And so he was suggesting, in other words, in his sentences, this is the truth. That's okay, by the way. That's what systematic theologies do. You don't want a systematic theology that only offers conjecture or everyone's opinion. There are surveys of theology that do that, which are helpful in their own right, but a good, for example, reformed systematic theology, Turretin, Petrus von Maastricht, Wilhelmus Abrakel, they're gonna offer you outcomes. They're gonna give you conclusive statements at some point in them. By the way, if you've read through Calvin's Institutes one time, if you've read through Calvin's Institutes one time, you'll know that the person he takes the most issue with of all of the scholastics is Lombard. Calvin spills more ink on countering what Lombard writes in his sentences than any other single person in the Institutes. And unlike what's becoming a popular trend right now, which suggests that Calvin is relying heavily on Aristotle, the truth is Calvin only twice in the entire Institutes directly refers to Aquinas at all, let alone positively. Calvin is dealing principally with Lombard, and I'm going on record, anyone who suggests that Calvin is a Thomist is wrong. I've got one minute left, Stephen, so if we can wait, let me keep going. famously is the first to articulate the seven sacraments, which were adopted later in 1439 of the Council of Florence as the official Catholic position on sacramentology. So his seven sacraments, which I think are in your handout, baptism, communion, confirmation, penance, marriage, ordination, and unction. What he originally promoted was not or has not continued to be completely agreed upon by the Roman Catholic Church, but I'm not going to get into that for time's sake. Only it's enough to say that when you hear about the seven sacraments, think Peter Lombard. He's the one in his fourth book of sentences that articulated these positions. Lombard's sentences did, however, become the principal theological text of Western universities until the 16th century. All right, last guy I'm going to mention, and I've got 60 seconds to talk Aquinas. I'll come back, this is probably unsatisfactory, but I'll come back to Aquinas later on in the Reformation period, and I'm probably gonna fire some shots at him next semester as well when we come to some more modern issues that are going on. I've already mentioned the retrievalists a little bit. Look, there are men within that camp that I have the utmost respect for, that I think are brilliant, godly, love the Lord, their brains are, infinitely more competent than mine. They're good thinkers. I simply believe, and I'm just putting my cards on the table, that this isn't a breaking fellowship issue, this retrievalist movement. I just think it's wrong-headed. I disagree with the conclusions, I disagree with the premises, and I think there's a little bit more danger than benefit to what they're doing. However, Aquinas is considered the greatest of the Scholastics. He was called a dumb ox by his classmates, gives hope to some of us. His most famous work was his Summa. It was an attempt to reconcile Catholic theology with the philosophy of Aristotle. Aquinas taught that human reason could discover much of what was true about the world and even about God, and he believed that Aristotle's philosophy was the supreme achievement of human reason, and that independent of special revelation, he had come to so many, if not almost all, true conclusions. Aquinas' distinction between humanity's rational understanding of the world and God's revelation corresponded to what Aquinas called the two realms of nature and grace. So you might become familiar with these terms in the coming months and years. Part of this movement, and in fact I'll say this as well, not just with the retrievalists, but within what's broadly known as the Christian nationalist movement, the movement which is adjacent to, but not directly related to, race realism or kinism or familialism. They borrow this language of grace perfecting nature. which is an Aristotelian category that Thomas subscribed to, that God has made things certain ways and grace does not overcome those things but perfects even the divisions among them. It gets really nasty really quick when it comes to categories of race. and so forth. So just be aware that that's a movement right now, present in our day, and it's rooted in this Aristotelian, Thomistic thinking about nature perfecting grace. I don't have time to deal with Aquinas' teaching on the fall, but that's essentially where it's rooted. Aquinas had a deficient theology of original sin, and he broke from Augustine. And his break from Augustine opened the door to him creating categories of innate goodness, almost semi-Pelagian, which is not surprising since he was Roman Catholic, which allowed for him to say that God gives grace to nature, which creates supernature, which is able to overcome innate deficiencies, which is sacramentology, frankly. It's an ex operae operato. application of God's grace in the life of a fallen person. And so Aquinas, he's a whole can of worms that we're not going to get to any more than that. I hope I've annoyed you by even mentioning him this morning. But a lot more could be said. There are great, great, great men of the scholastic period that are worth investigating, reading biographies. I just picked up a little book called Recovering the Middle Ages, or Recovering the Dark Ages, I think it was called, and it goes through a number of these characters and highlights the positive contributions that they made. This is family tree stuff for us, right? Luther came out of the Roman Catholic Church. All of it traces back here to one degree or another. And so this is, you know, the guy in our family tree who, you know, happened to be like a cattle robber or whatever. They're out there, they're in our history, and it's worth knowing a little bit about them, but that's all we have time for this morning. Let me pray. Heavenly Father, thank you for our time today. Would you open our eyes to your truth, sanctify us with the truth, Lord, which is your word. Your word is truth. Help us to think well about how we borrow, how we consider, how we weigh these things against your word, and help us always to come down on the side of special revelation as it interprets the world around us by your own mouth. And we pray this in Jesus' name, amen.