Primary Authors & Sources
From Anselm’s faith seeking understanding through the Summa and Franciscan ascent to Jewish and Islamic dialogue partners, students read medieval scholasticism as theology’s philosophical school. Anselm’s Proslogium, Monologium, and Cur Deus Homo set the program: God, reason, and the incarnation argued with monastic clarity. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica is the great synthesis of sacred doctrine with Aristotelian tools—the reference Reformed students must know even when they dissent. Bonaventure’s Soul’s Journey into God, Tree of Life, and Life of St. Francis join scholastic order to Franciscan contemplation. Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed is the Jewish philosophical theology that shaped Christian reading of Aristotle and Scripture together. Albert the Great, with Thomas in the selected writings, shows the Dominican workshop behind the Summa. Together they serve theological study that can use philosophy without surrendering the gospel.
What You Will Study
Students examine medieval scholasticism from Anselm and Aquinas through late medieval nominalists, studying how Aristotelian philosophy was synthesized with Christian doctrine in cathedral schools and universities. The course covers scholastic method, the quaestio format, debates on universals, proofs for God's existence, and sacramental theology with Reformed evaluation of achievements and errors. Readings include Aquinas's Summa selections, Anselm's Proslogion, and Scotus alongside Protestant critiques from Luther and subsequent Reformed scholastics. Students analyze how scholastic precision aided doctrinal clarity and how medieval synthesis sometimes obscured gospel grace. Attention falls on continuities between scholastic doctrine of God and Reformed orthodoxy despite soteriological divergence.
Course Objectives
Objectives include explaining scholastic method and its role in medieval theology, summarizing Thomistic proofs and analogical theology, comparing Thomistic and Reformed doctrines of justification and grace, and writing essays on the Reformation's break with scholastic soteriology while retaining logical rigor. Students will evaluate whether Aquinas remains useful for apologetics within Protestant bounds. The course cultivates respect for intellectual labor in theology without adopting medieval errors on merit and magisterium. Students will trace scholastic influence on Westminster Confession language and structure. Assessments require careful primary and secondary source engagement with fair representation of Catholic and Reformed positions.
Ministry & Life Application
Scholastic study equips Reformed ministers to engage Catholic intellectual tradition with understanding rather than caricature, strengthening ecumenical dialogue and apologetics in diverse Florida Keys communities. Pastors gain logical tools for doctrinal preaching and catechesis inherited from scholastic clarity filtered through Reformation grace. House church elders learn why Protestantism rejected merit theology while preserving rigorous thought about God, law, and sacraments. Pastoral ministry benefits from scholastic examples of systematic inquiry submitted ultimately to Scripture. Congregations are protected from anti-intellectual biblicism and from uncritical return to Rome when leaders know medieval theology well.