New Credo Alliance! Why We Retrieve Thomas Aquinas
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ou’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
Fred Sanders is a systematic theologian who studies and teaches across the entire range of classic Christian doctrine, but with a special focus on the doctrine of the Trinity. He has taught in the Torrey Honors Institute since 1999, and is an amateur historian of Biola’s institutional history. He and his wife Susan live in La Mirada with their two children, Freddy and Phoebe. They are members of Grace Evangelical Free Church.
J. V. Fesko
J. V. Fesko (PhD, University of Aberdeen) serves as professor of systematic and historical theology at RTS Jackson. He has been an ordained minister since 1998 in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church serving as a church planter, pastor, and now teacher. Dr. Fesko has authored or edited more than twenty books including Reforming Apologetics: Retrieving the Classic Reformed Approach to Defending the Faith, The Trinity and the Covenant of Redemption, Death in Adam, Life in Christ: The Doctrine of Imputation, Justification: Understanding the Classic Reformed Doctrine, and The Covenant of Works: The Origins, Development, and Reception of the Doctrine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
Matthew Barrett
Scott R. Swain
Scott R. Swain is President and James Woodrow Hassell Professor of Systematic Theology at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida. Dr. Swain has served on the RTS faculty since 2006, having previously taught at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. He serves as co-general editor of two series: Zondervan Academic’s New Studies in Dogmatics and T & T Clark’s International Theological Commentary. Dr. Swain is the author of several books including Retrieving Eternal Generation, Trinity, Revelation, and Reading: A Theological Introduction to the Bible and Its Interpretation, Reformed Catholicity: The Promise of Retrieval for Theology and Biblical Interpretation and The Oxford Handbook of Reformed Theology (forthcoming). He is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church in America. He and his wife, Leigh, have four children. Dr. Swain blogs on a regular basis at Common Places.
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