Why We Retrieve Thomas Aquinas: Credo Alliance with Swain, Sanders, Barrett, Fesko
You’ve most likely been told that Thomas Aquinas is off limits, a theologian who will corrupt Protestants and turn them into Roman Catholics. And yet, Protestant history tells a different story: many of our Protestant forefathers did not merely retrieve Aquinas but thought of him as part of the same tradition they belonged to in the end. This new episode of the Credo Alliance brings together John Fesko, Fred Sanders, Matthew Barrett, and Scott Swain to share their personal experiences studying Aquinas, explaining when and why they first engaged with his works. Moving beyond uninformed caricatures of Aquinas, these four theologians explain why it’s so important to engage Aquinas as Protestants, both for the sake of recovering orthodoxy today and for the sake of understanding the Reformed tradition itself. Engaging Thomas should be an exercise in Reformed catholicity. All four of these theologians also give advice to college and seminary students, instructing them how to read Aquinas for the sake of renewing theology today.