Thomas Aquinas For Arm Chair Theologians Summary

My reading journal assignment was Aquinas for Arm Chair Theologians by Timothy Renick. I have a lot of respect for Thomas Aquinas. He argued against men like John Calvin and Martin Luther on subjects like man could still have free will and at the same time God could still be all knowing. He also created a theory that explained why there is evil in the world but allowed God to stay all powerful and all good.
Aquinas’s theory on the existence of evil was very interesting. He said that there is no such thing as evil. What we perceive as evil is goodness actually leaving an object. The article used an example of a flower to illustrate Aquinas’s theory. Imagine a healthy pretty flower, full colorful petals standing upright with its’ stalk and leaves green. This flower would be example of goodness. Let’s say that you left for the weekend and forgot to water this plant while your gone. You come back to see the same flower not as healthy. It is a little wilted, the stalk is slouched slightly leaning and the leaves are turning from a dark green to slight brown on the edges. This flower that was once the example of goodness has had some of goodness leave. The flower is not completely evil, but it is not the embodiment of wholeness any more. The last example would be if you were to go on vacation for a week and your friend completely forgot to water your flower while you were gone. You come back to find your flower’s once vibrant petals to be pale and falling off the flower. The stem is limp, and leaves are brittle and brown. All of the goodness has left the flower. This is how we humans interpret evil. God is not creating evil therefore maintains his omnibenevolence. The article does mention people called Manichees. The people where self-professed Christians who followed the teachings of Mani. The people believed that God and Satan are cocreators. Evil according the Manichees was created by Satan and that Satan is responsible for evil. Aquinas disagreed with this theory. He believed that putting Satan on the same level as God was not correct. God is all powerful and putting Satan and God on the same footing was unacceptable. He goes further saying that Satan is not responsible for evil because of his belief of evil is the absence of goodness in something. Critics of Aquinas would rebuke that if evil was just the decaying of goodness from a being is God responsible for that? Aquinas said yes, he or she is essentially responsible. God is the creator and the source of all motion. God is supremely good. He would not be able to make his creations supremely good as well because if that were to happen God would no longer be omnibenevolent. That would be someone asking God to create a rock that was too heavy for him or her to lift. This is a paradox that is logically impossible that was mentioned in our week three media links. Why do people do evil acts then? My interpterion of Aquinas’s theory is that God does not want us to do evil acts. He gives us the tools to do good. He also gives us free will. When goodness leaves someone one and that person decides based on their own free will to commit an evil act God is not responsible. The other theory that the author wrote about was Aquinas’s theory of how man could have free will and God still be omniscient. …show more content…
On this topic Aquinas had some tough critics. John Calvin and Martin Luther argued that man does not truly have free choice. That everything is predestined to happen. Your born, you live your life good or band it was already in place and then you die and go to heaven or hell. Our lives and where we end up in our afterlives are predestined. Aquinas disagreed with them. Aquinas believed humans have free will. God rewards us with heaven or punishes us with hell depending on the choices that we are free to make. If God predestined someone to go straight to hell and if that was out of their control that in Aquinas’s eyes would make God unjust. The issue