ARTICLE: INEVITABLE SCHOLASTICISM: A REVIEW OF "INTRODUCTION TO SCHOLASTIC THEOLOGY"

Friday, July 13, 2018

Excellent book review on the importance of Scholasticism from First Things:

Leinsle shows that many truisms that animate the standard narratives of Catholic theology are false. For example, he refutes the notion that Scholastic methods were introduced into theology as an alternative to scriptural reading and biblical commentary. On the contrary, from the sixth century onward, collections of theological sentences were gathered within glosses on Scripture precisely to help readers interpret the sacred text. Patristic citations were assembled by monastic communities in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in order to facilitate understanding of the discrete senses of Scripture (the literal sense, the typological, the moral, and the analogical). The first concordances of terms and Bible verses were created by twelfth-century Scholastics in order to compare terms and analyze the meaning of Scripture as a coherent whole. 

More decisively, Leinsle shows that our presumption that Scholasticism encourages an insular and isolated mentality is exactly the opposite of the truth. The theology of the high Middle Ages was focused on a central question: In light of the discovery of Aristotelian philosophy, what is the scientific status of Christian theology? In other words, in what sense is Christian theology the queen of the sciences, the most complete view of the world available to human beings? How does it relate then to philosophical or scientific knowledge that derives from natural experience as such—in a respectful and critical way? These are not easy questions to contend with. But they are also unavoidable for an intellectually serious Christian culture.

Read the full article here:  INEVITABLE SCHOLASTICISM: A REVIEW OF INTRODUCTION TO SCHOLASTIC THEOLOGY

P-B