What they aren’t telling you is that when you receive Aristotelian Christianity, when you recover Thomist theology, particularly in the Protestant Reformed scholastic flavor, for our purposes, you’re getting a doctrine of grace, and thus God, that thinks grace as a quality, a substance. Grace is depersonalized in this frame, as such the person of Christ is ruptured from the work of Christ allowing for a ‘natural’ space to obtain within a God-world relation. This is the combine of ‘grace perfecting nature’ ‘revelation perfecting reason.’ This is what the scholastic Reformed are pushing onto the “unbeknowing” masses, particularly the younger crowd out there (millennial and younger). I see this all day and all night long on theological social media. Young guys (mostly) and gals eating the doctors’ stuff up on the retrieval of Post Reformed orthodox theology, it is “Thomist,” it is unabashedly Aristotelian by way of formal and material categorization; in other words, it isn’t inherently or even incidentally ‘biblical’ in its offering—it is intentionally philosophical and speculative instead, exactly in contraposition from revelational reality. In this frame, God is a monad, actus purus (pure being), an unmoved substance who relates to the world through an impersonal decretum absolutum (absolute decree) within a substance metaphysical frame. When God is separated from His work in a God-world relation, when grace is no longer inherently God for the world in Christ, but a created quality, a created grace detached from God and located in the humanity’s ‘accidental’ life, whereby their ‘partially fallen’ bodies are ‘enabled’ to cooperate with God through this created grace, through this new habitus (disposition) ‘to be able’ to be for God, this does horrific things to a Christology (which I’ve written of elsewhere). Here is what Helmut Thielicke has to say on these matters:
We would turn now to the process of depersonalization which is initiated the moment grace is ontically separated from God, in order to set it forth with utter precision n the following propositions. In the first place, the grace of God in the Roman Catholic view is impersonal, not merely because as an effectus it has certain autonomy in respect of its author, and not only because as the bearer of a human or material habitus it can become the attribute of an entity which is not God, but primarily because in the theological system as a whole—we are thinking here of Thomas [Aquinas]—it is conceived as being in a measure present even “prior” to God. For the system of nature and supernature derives ultimately from the fact that Aristotelian ontology has taken over. Its antithesis between form and matter (εἶδος and ὕλη) precedes all Christian content. Indeed it provides the framework into which the Christian content is fitted. One might even say, it is discovered to be the most suitable container for that Christian content.
Only thus can we explain how it is possible to enunciate a doctrine of nature and supernature in the form of an ontological construction almost without making any reference to the fall. For it nature and supernature are already there as given factors, the fall can at most be only a disruption in the “inner workings” of this system. It can involve only a “dislocation,” a dislocation in the form of subtraction comparable to the dislocation in the form of addition which we noted in connection with redemption. With these given factors presupposed, theological thinking can never be constitutively determined by “events,” by the contingent historicity of the fall and of redemption in Jesus Christ. It can never be determined by events which, by virtue of their contingency, must always transcend any system we may devise for trying to grasp them. If the system itself is to some extent already given, then the events must be fitted into it. They can only be, as it were, illustrations of an ontic order, and of a history of the world, of salvation, and of judgment which is constituted by this ontic order, a history which may thus in its basic tendencies be understood a priori, in the manner in which the “pagan” Aristotle understood it.
Personalistic thinking rests on contingency. For it relates to personal “events,” eg, to man’s decision at the fall, or to God’s decision to give his only Son (John 3:16). Resolves of this kind are matters of the will. They cannot be postulated. They can be known only a posteriori. They can only be attested. Ontological thinking, on the contrary, rests on regularity, a regularity which is supposed to include personal events. This regularity, e.g., the mutual flowing together of pure form and matter which underlies Aristotelian ontology, is understandable a priori. This is why there has to be, and in fact is, a proof of God in Roman Catholic theology. A clear example of this ability to postulate is the typical ontological attempt of Anselm to answer with logical stringency the question: Cur Deus homo?1
I have been banging this same drum, the material engaged with in this post through Thielicke, since I started theoblogging in 2005. It has NEVER been engaged with in the literature, by those who have interacted with our books, or online in the theoblogosphere, or elsewhere. The only response, beyond crickets, that I have received is by way of assertion: i.e. “Post Reformed orthodoxy IS NOT based in an impersonal substance metaphysics.” The problem is that it is, and demonstrably so as Thielicke, Barth, Torrance[s], Ron Frost, myself and others have now shown over and over again! But we are up against a theological Deus ex machina known as Post Reformed orthodoxy. Its proponents keep reassuring its would-be elect that it represents the orthodox and genuine iteration of catholic Christianity; that it isn’t a variant, or even a duplication of Roman Catholic theology, that it is in fact the “golden chaine” of post-Nicene theological development.
But if God isn’t personally grace for us in Jesus Christ, and for the Thomists He is not, then there is ultimately no hope! Under this framework wherein grace is ruptured from God, Jesus enters the world under the conditions of a decree framed by a doctrine of grace that is definitionally disconnected from the giver of grace; as such, in the incarnation the Logos ensarkos the Son of God becomes a predicate of creation, and insofar that Chalcedonian Christology affirms the inseparably between God and humanity (without admixture) in the singular person of Jesus Christ, insofar as the an/ -enhypostasis is the case in regard to the personhood of Jesus, God becomes a predicate of His own creation in the incarnation. The decretum absolutum makes God’s life contingent upon His own creation even whilst it is attempting to keep Him ‘Simple’ and untouched by His creation; this is quite the conundrum!
1 Helmut Thielicke, Theological Ethics: Foundations (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), 242-43.