Jeff Chavez’s Reviews > Reforming Apologetics: Retrieving the Classic Reformed Approach to Defending the Faith > Status Update

In our use of the book of nature, we must never set aside the book of Scriptures. Scripture must always regulate our understanding of the book of nature, lest we abandon the truth and imbibe the world's erroneous and sinful interpretations of the book of nature.

Theologians such as Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) do not actually say what neo-Calvinists attribute to them.11 And as common as the charge of scholasticism is, neo-Calvinist theologians fail to recognize that scholasticism is not a belief system but a methodology that does not predetermine theological conclusions.

...but instead recognized that there are multiple loci within theology, such as prolegomena, Scripture, the Triune God, Christology, soteriology, ecclesiology, and eschatology. Such a method acknowledges multiple doctrines and guards against allowing any one point to swallow the rest of the system."

"Unlike central dogma-dominated systems, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theological systems are superior because they employ the locus method. Theologians did not look for one singular point from which to construct an entire system..."

"Theologians such as Thomas Aquinas do not actually say what neo-Calvinists attribute to them. And as common as the charge of scholasticism is, neo-Calvinist theologians fail to recognize that scholasticism is not a belief system but a methodology that does not predetermine theological conclusions."

when men say that we know God only as He is revealed in Jesus, they are denying all real knowledge of God whatever. For unless there be some idea of God independent of Jesus, the ascription of deity to Jesus has no meaning. To say, Jesus is God, is meaningless unless the word God has an antecedent meaning attached to it.

Aquinas believed that truth was ultimately related to God. Given that God created all things, to understand reality through truth-claims means aligning one’s mind with God’s mind. Aquinas writes: Truth, therefore, is properly and primarily in the divine intellect. In the human intellect, it exists properly but secondarily.

Broadly considered, Van Til and Aquinas employed a similar apologetic methodology. Both spoke to the philosophical trends of their day from the platform of the authority of Scripture: Aquinas spoke in an Aristotelian dialect and Van Til in an idealist one. Aquinas argued for the existence of God in terms of Aristotelian categories of causality, and Van Til in terms of Kantian transcendental argumentation. (73)