Credo Alliance: Why We Retrieve Thomas Aquinas

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.

Fred Sanders serves as professor in the Torrey Honors College, an undergraduate program in the great books, at Biola University. He has written several books and articles including The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything (Crossway, 2010), The Triune God (Zondervan, 2016), and Fountain of Salvation: Trinity and Soteriology (Eerdmans, 2021). Sanders serves as a Fellow of Credo Magazine.

J.V. Fesko serves as Harriet Barbour Professor of Systematic and Historical Theology at Reformed Theological Seminary. He is the author and editor of several books, including The Trinity and the Covenant of Redemption (Mentor, 2016). Fesko serves as a Fellow of Credo Magazine.

Scott Swain serves as president and James Woodrow Hassell Professor of Systematic Theology at Reformed Theological Seminary. He is the author of several books, including most recently The Trinity and the Bible: On Theological Interpretation (Lexham Press, 2021) and The Trinity: An Introduction (Crossway, 2020). Swain serves as a Fellow of Credo Magazine.

Matthew Barrett is the editor-in-chief of Credo Magazine and host of the Credo podcast. He is associate professor of Christian theology at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and Director of the Center for Classical Theology. He is the author of the award-winning Simply Trinity and his new book is called, The Reformation as Renewal. He is currently writing a Systematic Theology (Baker Academic).