Luther on Aquinas and Aristotle

Just a very brief Reformation Day thought from Martin Luther to help our latter-day Thomists to celebrate.

"...it seems to me this great man (Aquinas) is to be pitied not only for attempting to draw his opinions in matters of faith from Aristotle, but also for attempting to base them upon a man whom he did not understand, thus building an unfortunate superstructure upon an unfortunate foundation."

(From Luther's Babylonian Captivity of the Church, p145 of the little Three Treatises book)

Cutting room floor, 25th Oct 2026

Yesterday I preached from Nehemiah 6 - you can get the audio here if you're interested. The opposition to the rebuilding project takes a personal turn, as the enemies of Jerusalem focus in on Nehemiah himself as the leader of the work. Here are a couple of things that didn't make it into the sermon.

1. It is striking to me that Nehemiah's opponents first try to lure him away from Jerusalem (verses 1 to 8), and then try to frighten him into fleeing into the temple (verses 9 to 14). I don't know if it's pushing application too far to say that the devil in his opposition to Christians would prefer to be able to take them away from safety and do them harm, but if he can't manage that he is content to see them retreat into piety and religious observance without presence and action in the world. So long as Christians are not working on the wall, the enemy is relatively content. The call is therefore not to desert your post, wherever that post is.

2. The structure of the passage is interesting. Verses 15 and 16 feel like a conclusion. Despite opposition, the wall is built. Despite the enemies of God's people trying to cause fear (verse 9), in the end it is the surrounding nations who are afraid. But... Tobiah has links with families in Jerusalem that can't be cut off by the wall. This is a foreshadowing of the ultimate failure of Nehemiah's mission, which points to the need for a greater Restorer and Rebuilder. It is perhaps also a pointer to the fact that there is some opposition which more easily slides by our defences. Maybe the natural melancholic is prone to despair; the naturally anxious prone to fear. Maybe our situation in life - family, career, whatever - makes us vulnerable in different ways. We need to be aware that just because the wall is built - just because our defences are up - opposition can still come in a powerful way.

MLJ, ecumenism, and the evangelical church

In 1966, Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones delivered an address to the National Assembly of Evangelicals which has gone down in history as a bit of a watershed. In it, Lloyd-Jones called for evangelicals to come out of their mixed denominations and to enjoy instead closer fellowship with one another. He was publicly contradicted from the Chair by John Stott, and there was perceived to be something of a parting of the ways. Since then, evangelicals (or at least, evangelicals of a certain type) have debated which of these titans was right.

The audio of MLJ's original address has recently been rediscovered and warrants a listen (despite the unfortunately not very good quality of the recording). I had a number of reflections.

1. Lloyd-Jones made predictions about the future church landscape which have not come to pass. Reflecting on the ecumenical movement, MLJ thought he saw a future in which there would be one, broad national church, in which evangelicals would continue to be a minority pressure group (as he thought they were in the historic denominations). In fact, the ecumenical movement more or less petered out, and the denominations on the whole remain, albeit diminished in size and importance. To that extent Lloyd-Jones was no prophet.

2. On the other hand, MLJ asks whether evangelicals are happy to carry on with the status quo, and suggests that those who imagine they are in with a chance of reclaiming their denominations for the orthodox faith through their influence and pressure as a little evangelical grouping are dreaming. In this respect, perhaps he was a prophet, and like all the best prophets thoroughly ignored. The dreamers are still dreaming.

3. The critiques that Lloyd-Jones makes of evangelicals remain valid today. He acknowledges that evangelicals have not been as interested in the doctrine of the church as they should have been, or as concerned for church unity as they should have been. As MLJ points out, evangelicals have often sought to work together through societies and interest groups, but not through the church. In fact, the 'institutional church' is regarded with some suspicion. To my mind this continues to be the case.

4. In the versions of the story I had always heard, the call to evangelicals to leave mixed denominations was always talked up. However, as I listen to the talk what strikes me is not the negative vision - the need to flee corrupt church groupings - but the positive one. MLJ wanted evangelical Christians who shared a commitment to the historic Christian faith to show their unity visibly by enjoying deep church fellowship. I don't see much concern for that in the here and now. If evangelicals are being asked to leave their denominations, what are they being asked to step into?

5. My overall reflection is that Lloyd-Jones shows an interest in and concern for the visible catholic church, whereas we are often content to limit our interest to our own individual congregations (and imagine we have some sort of 'spiritual' unity with other congregations that doesn't need to have visible expression). I think that is one reason why we are content not to enjoy real communion with other churches at all. Our evangelical 'fellowships' and 'alliances' become essentially badges that we can wear without requiring actual, real engagement with one another, concern for another, and mutual interest. To that extent, I prefer Lloyd-Jones' vision.

Building in the rubble

We have been preaching through the book of Nehemiah recently, and I've been really struck by how directly relevant it is for us. Nehemiah is engaged in rebuilding Jerusalem after a devastating fall. The city wall lies in ruins, and consequently the remnant living in the city "are in great trouble and disgrace." (1:3) To rebuild the wall is more than an infrastructure project; it is in a sense to rebuild the people, to restore a sense of identity and security.

To me this resonates with the situation of the church in the West in the twenty-first century. Those who are engaged in building the church - the people, of course, not the physical buildings - are not building on clear ground. In the apostle's image of the building site in 1 Corinthians 3, we are not starting with a nice clean, level site. Rather, in the post-Christian West, we are building amidst the rubble of the past. Our ancestors built much - some of it was good, some of it was less good, and now it is mostly in ruins. Not just the church, but the civilisation that sprang largely from the church's influence, is everywhere reduced to little more than rubble.

I frequently recall T.S. Eliot's words:

Thus your fathers were made
Fellow citizens of the saints, of the household of GOD, being built upon the foundation
Of apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself the chief cornerstone.
But you, have you built well, that you now sit helpless in a ruined house?

I think we have to admit we have not built well. But there is no point bemoaning that fact. We have not built well, but Christ will build his church. If we want to join in, if we want to participate in his great work, that will mean a certain amount of sifting through the rubble to work out what from the past is still usable. (There is no point, by the way, in complaining that the rubble gets in the way. If the Lord had wanted to start again, to just condemn the teetering walls that are left and move to a new site, he could have done that. But he is faithful, and more patient with us than we are with ourselves, and calls us sometimes to strengthen the things that remain rather than dash on into new and more immediately profitable endeavours). It will also mean, no doubt, some new building that recognises the new circumstances in which we build.

Many things will fall under that heading of building the church - evangelism, of course, and the numerical rebuilding of the church. But also renewal - of liturgy, of church discipline, of church government, of preaching and catechesis. And aesthetic renewal, cultural renewal - seeing the church develop into something which might again be a cornerstone of a wider culture that is blessed by the gospel. Not all this renewal will be retrieval. Some of the rubble deserves to be left on the heap, either because it was never great or because it will no longer serve in the new situation. That means fresh invention as well as discernment.

There is plenty of work to do.

And the Church must be forever building, and always decaying, and always being restored.

Church and World

Off the back of my reflections on the Pope's recent encyclical (part 1 and part 2), I've been thinking a bit about the relationship between the church and the world, and how that relationship might be construed theologically.  I noted in those reflections that the stance of the encylical is very much openness to the world, and a recognition that the church is itself a historical factor and one of the drivers of history.  In my view, this stance sometimes trips over into the church becoming only a historical factor, stripped of its eschatological qualities, and to a certain extent losing its distinctness from the world - for example, when the concept of 'catholicity', which the creed applies to the church as the church, seems to be extended to embrace all of humanity without distinction.  To caricature, the Roman approach to the church-world relationship appears to be to situate the church very firmly within the world, as part of the world, and to locate it as a historical phenomenon; the institution founded by Christ, visibly persisting through history via its structures and organisations, influencing history in such a way that Christ's kingdom is increasingly spread across and throughout the world.

Sean MacEntee, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

By contrast, and again with something of a caricature for the sake of making that contrast, the view amongst many evangelicals is that the earthly, historical form of the church is largely irrelevant, or at least to be downplayed (hence the indifference often seen to questions of church government, liturgy, etc. - or at least, theological indifference; these are often viewed as merely pragmatic questions).  The impact of the church in world history is also downplayed (to an extent), perhaps seen as totally mixed in its outcomes and anyway as irrelevant to the real being and mission of the church.  I think that is because there is still in the background of much evangelical thinking a model in which the gospel really only glances off the edge of human history, scooping off a few believers for better things but basically leaving the world untouched.

You can see the difference in outcome between these two very clearly.  The Pope sees the church building the kingdom of God, and transforming history from the inside; he therefore addresses - not only the church but also - the world as a whole, expecting it to listen and to change.  For many evangelical leaders, the world is not addressed at all, except insofar as it is called to stop being the world and become the church, and societal transformation is not expected.  I have, in fact, heard senior evangelicals express a preference for a secular state over a 'nominally' Christian one, and have often heard that we must not seek to 'legislate Christian morality'.

I can't help feeling that both approaches are wrong, and for a corrective I turn, naturally, to the Church Dogmatics, and especially IV/3, from p 681.  I won't make many detailed references to the section, and I haven't always followed the line of thought there, but its very much in the background of the following.

First of all, the church certainly is a historical factor, and its history and role in the world matters; but this is not the heart of what the church is.  The church can't be defined by anything visible in its history, because the church lives from its connection to Jesus Christ, by the Holy Spirit.  This is what I mean when I talk about the 'eschatological qualities' of the church.  The church is already the new creation, even in the midst of the old, but not as if some historical process had been initiated by Christ which would gradually transmute the old world into the new.  No, the church has its reality as new creation directly from Christ by the Spirit, because new creation always comes straight from heaven.  The church is a historical factor, but the new creation is not; it is always a breaking in to history from above.  However, that breaking in is not ahistorical, but is the revelation of the true meaning of history in Jesus Christ.  In Christ, the situtation of humanity as a whole is radically changed - the gospel doesn not strike the old creation a glancing blow, but puts sinful humanity to death at the cross - but that is only known in the sphere of the church.

The church then exists in the world but does not have its being from any factors in the world, not even its own insitutions, history, or culture.

The church also exists for the world.  It is sent into the world as the fellowship of those who really know the world - as the world cannot really know itself.  The church knows the world, not only in the depths of its rebellion (the world must always deny this knowledge), but also as the world for which Christ died, the world which God so loved that he gave his one and only Son.  The church is for the world because in a sense the church is the world knowing itself.

The church is for the world in that it stands in solidarity with the world.  This does not mean conformity to the world - that would be to compromise the church's spiritual foundation - but a real being with the world in all the pains and struggles and strivings for better things.  (Barth suggests, incidentally, that being overly concerned with maintaining the purity of the church and thus separating from the world, refusing this solidarity, is fundamentally a conformity to the world - for when does the world not want to show itself to be righteous by comparison with 'these sinners'?)

And the church is for the world because, knowing the situation of the world in its depths but also the hope given to the world in the resurrection of Christ, the church goes to the world with good news, and dares to hope for the world even when the world has despaired of itself.

The church which knows itself to be distinct from the world, because it knows itself to belong to Christ and to live by his Spirit, is the church which will also commit itself to the world.

One interesting way in which I think this perspective might play out is that it could make the concerns raised in the Pope's encyclical actionable, in a way that I'm not sure they are otherwise.  The Pope addresses the world as if the world was the church, and expects change which he is never going to see; the world is not listening.  The evangelical pastor doesn't bother with the world, and therefore doesn't address even the church on topics which seem worldly.  What if instead we saw the church as genuinely the provisional representation of the new humanity in Christ, and therefore thought seriously about what it means to be human - for example, how human beings might respond to the challenge of AI - and then committed to living as a church community in a way that reflected that vision for humanity?  We could hope for societal change in a wider sense, but we could express our hope by being the humanity we would like to see, because we believe it is humanity as it is in Christ.

On AI in particular, I think there is too much money to be made for the world to listen to the Pope.  But the church might decide - I'll put my cards on the table and say that I think it should decide - that until a genuinely human-centred way of using AI has been developed the church will be an oasis, a place where AI is excluded as far as possible, despite whatever practical inconveniences this causes.  And in this way, we might bear witness to the reality of human life.

Magnifica Humanitas (2)

 See part 1 for thoughts on methodology and stance.

The content of Magnifica Humanitas has been reported in terms of a critique of AI; actually I think it is rather broader, and therefore actually more helpful, than that.  The encyclical is concerned with the spread of "technological paradigm" for understanding human life, "the tendency to let the logic of efficiency, control and profit alone shape personal, social and economic decisions." (92) The point - and here I am reminded of Jacques Ellul - is that technology "is not simply a tool", but shapes our way of thinking about reality. (92) Can human beings be regarded as ends rather than merely means in a world which is radically shaped by the technological paradigm?  "When efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value, human beings are tempted to see themselves as a project to be optimized rather than as persons called to relationship and communion." (112) That, I think, is really the problem which the encyclical addresses (and it is worth noting that this is not a specifically Christian question; framing it in terms of means and ends, as the encylical does, sounds rather Kantian).  Insofar as AI tends to supercharge the technological paradigm, it has to be particularly considered as a potentially problematic development.

On AI in particular, the encyclical lays out some helpful groundwork.  Nobody, not even the human developers, really have an exhaustive knowledge of how AI works. (98) It is important to stress that AI is not intelligence in the way that this word can be applied to human beings - rather, AI systems "merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence". (99)  This strikes me as a particularly important point, because the way that popular AI interfaces work is precisely to mask themselves as human or human-like - that is why you can have 'chat' with ChatGPT. We ought to resist this.  We should also acknowledge that AI tends to concentrate power in the hands of a few, especially as it turns out those who already have power, and this requires action to regulate and direct.

Another key insight of the encyclical relates to limitations.  In a society overcome by the technological paradigm, human limitation is bad and is something to be transcended wherever possible.  (The encyclical links at this point to the transhumanist and posthumanist agendas, which are rightly identified as anti-human - see 115-117).  There is some slightly confused stuff, in my humble opinion, about the relationship between limitation and suffering here - I think based on the lack of a clear distinction between humanity as created, as fallen, and as redeemed - but the basic point that limitation and even suffering open us to relationship with God and other human beings is well made. (122) For the Pope, there is a way to transcend nature, and that way is called grace. (127-128) I personally think this is the wrong way to think about both nature and grace, despite its long pedigree in the church, and I think again that a clear discussion of fallenness would have offered a better way to think about it.  But I take the point that the calling of God's kingdom on our lives is to be more human, not less.

Chapter Four of Magnifica Humanitas sets out to apply this train of thought in particular ways, under the heading of "Safeguarding Humanity".  It touches on the need to combat disinfomation (which "did not begin with AI, yet today it finds a powerful amplifier in AI" - 132), the need to safeguard the value and dignity of work (which is much more than just the problem of jobs lost to AI; it is also about ensuring that work is a human and humanising activity and not just slotting human beings in as part of the machine - 149), and the need to protect freedom when AI and other technologies potentially (and sometimes already actually) lead to greater social control.  "At the root of these problems lies a technocratic and post-human mentality that tends to regard the human person as an object to be manipulated or a resource to be optimized." (172)

Finally, Chapter Five considers conflict, and the danger of human decision making being removed from decisions about conflict - as well as the way in which technology and the technological paradigm encourages conflict.  This is a helpful warning.

All in all, the encyclical is not completely negative about AI or technology, not by a long shot.  I saw one article claim that Magnifica Humanitas made AI 'another Babel'; it doesn't.  Rather, the argument is that human beings are able to build either Babel or Jerusalem, and what we do with AI and other technologies will in part decide which it is that we are working on.  What we have here is a thorough-going work of Christian humanism, and the appeal is simply to ensure that our technology is serving human beings and not vice versa.  It is a pushback against the neo-Darwinian right, with its demands for ever growing efficiency and transcendence of human limits.  In so far as it sounds those warnings, this is a very positive contribution.

Magnifica Humanitas (1)

The Pope has recently issued an encylical, Magnifica Humanitas, which has been widely reported as dealing with issues of artificial intelligence - though I think it is actually has a somewhat broader theme, around technology and the technical society.  I don't often read papal encyclicals, although I have dabbled in one or two, but this is a topic I'm interested in and the Pope's intervention seems to have got some traction, so I thought I'd dive in and offer some reactions.  This post is mostly about method and stance; a second post will get into the details of the content a little more.  References in brackets are to the paragraph numbers in the encyclical.

Naturally, I'm approaching this from a Protestant and evangelical perspective, and so it is likely that many of my reflections on theological method will boil down to 'well, this is Roman Catholicism'.  This is most apparent to me in the theological method - in the first two sections of the encyclical, which look at the historical development of the Social Doctrine of the Church and the fundamental principles of that Doctrine, there is precious little Biblical content.  Indeed, although we are told that it is "only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of humanity truly becomes clear" (1 - citing the 2nd Vatican Council; see also 49, where there is a little more flesh put on these bare bones) it seems to me that this statement does not have much operative force in the rest of the document.  It becomes clear that the 'mystery of humanity' does not mean something about humanity which is only true in Christ - as, for example, that fallen humanity is redeemed - but something that is common to human nature which is only seen fully in Christ.  It is about "the grandeur of humanity bestowed upon us and revealed in its fullness in Christ" (15) and not about the grandeur bestowed upon us by and in Christ.  I think this is methodologically important, because it undergirds the regular appeal to the "common good" throughout the encyclical.  There is nothing inherently wrong in an appeal to a shared human nature - a human nature which is revealed in Christ - but it does seem to me quite a lot of weight is put on the shared nature and very little on Christ.  I wonder if there is actually anything in the positive teaching of the document for which the incarnation is a crucial foundation.

To my mind, this lack of Biblical and Christological reference paints a particular picture, of a church locked in conversation with itself.  One misses altogether the sense of a people addressed from above.  (In fact, the idea of the gospel coming "from above" - admittedly in this context mainly with a human imposition of the truth in view - is expressly repudiated in favour of the truth which "grows over time within the concrete interweaving of lives, communities and cultures." [25])  We are told that "this faith-based interpretation of history has never been interrupted" (45) - but I can't help wondering whether it wouldn't have been better if it had been interrupted, by the Word of God!  The Church pictured in the encyclical is open to dialogue with the world around it, but gives no indication of being open to the Word.  One consequence of this is that the overall impression given, when it comes to turning to the world, is that what is offered is simply the deliberations of a particular sub-section of humanity, which - drawing on ancient wells of wisdom and centuries of accumulated reflection - offers to its fellow human beings some proposals for ordering life and society.  But where is the 'thus says the Lord' in all this?  And without it, what authorises this sub-section to speak?  And what can compel the rest of us to listen?

This seems to me to overflow into the approach to history.  So we can read that under the guidance of the Spirit "the People of God come to recognize in cultural and social transformations both the signs of the presence of Christ, who comes and guides history toward its fulfilment, and those aberrations that obscure his face." (22) To be sure, this spiritual discernment is to involve interpreting the times "in the light of God's word" (22), but I can't help feeling that the specificity of the incarnation has gone missing here.  The history of Christ in his birth, life, death and resurrection seems to have been dissolved into Christ in history.

Openness to the world defines the stance of this document, which is what you would expect given the method (or perhaps the influence flows in the other direction).  A huge contrast with the evangelicalism with which I am familiar is that for the Pope the Church is a historical factor, one amongst many in driving the history of the world. (19) This has positive and negative aspects, I think.  Negatively, there is a huge amount of talk in this document about the responsibility of the church to build the kingdom of God - the two building sites (Babel and Jerusalem) which run through the encyclical form the basis of a call to be careful how we build.  (An appeal which could, of course, go back to the Apostle Paul - except that the Apostle is clear that what is being built is the church - the encyclical seems to be talking much more broadly than this; see 229).  There is a lack of eschatology in this document, and what there is seems to me to rely on the progressive growth of the kingdom through the activity of the church and its allies.  There is a lack of crisis, of the judgement on the world, which seems to me to characterise the NT message.  On the other hand, positively, the idea that the church might have something to say to society is a welcome corrective to some evangelical thinking which essentially sees the world as something to be escaped from into the church.  To put it another way, if the encyclical seems to present the church as standing in absolute continuity with humanity, with no sense of the rupture of the new creation, evangelicalism sometimes sees the church as standing in complete discontinuity with humanity, as a sect escaping the doomed world rather than as the provisional representation of the new humanity to be revealed at the eschaton.

More to follow...