Frances J. Beckwith has journeyed from Catholicism to evangelicalism, and back. He told the story in Return to Rome (Brazos, 2008). In Never Doubt Thomas, he addresses a handful of theological topics that have divided Catholics and Protestants, and which have featured in his own intellectual story. He does so in conversation with St Thomas Aquinas: not, for the most part, as an interlocutor newly brought in, but as a figure already of considerable interest to the evangelical authors he discusses. Elements of Beckwith's biography appear from time to time and serve to render a warm and appealing book yet more human.
The opening chapter surveys the shift in the standing of Aquinas among Protestant writers (or at least a good number of them) over recent decades, from representing all that is thought to be wrong with Catholicism, to eminent representative of a shared tradition, a spokesman for earlier sources in an age of theological retrieval. Beckwith emerges as broadly sympathetic to the current (often Protestant) mainstream of philosophy of religion, but also as gently and firmly critical of significant aspects. He rejects ‘supreme being’ theology, for instance, and a modal account of divine necessity, by which God is a being who exists in all possible worlds.
The four central chapters deal with natural law and natural theology, religious pluralism, intelligent design, and justification. Each celebrates ecumenical convergence, with Aquinas as catalyst or template, and addresses what Beckwith sees as typical Protestant misunderstanding about what Aquinas wrote and thought. Most significantly, Beckwith is particularly perceptive at suggesting where theological disagreements rest on divergence at a submerged level, in the way a matter is framed, or set out.
At some point in each chapter, Beckwith diagnoses a fundamental disparity of conception between an author or authors, and what he himself holds. Never Doubt Thomas is valuable on a number of levels, not least as a compendium of well-chosen quotations and citations. Nonetheless, it is for Beckwith's conceptual excavations – that laying bear of differences in underlying assumptions – that this book is most of all to be valued, and here Aquinas is so useful as a source or inspiration.
This means that there is something far more creative going on here than the title of the book might suggest. It may have seemed to warn of a Thomism that stops at Aquinas, treating his writings as bringing theological discussions to a close before we can begin thinking. Instead, Beckwith presents us with an exercise in seeing what the philosophical, theological and exegetical insights of Aquinas offer for fresh, constructive, contemporary theological thought, often by means of what we might call his ‘participatory’ metaphysics.
When it comes to natural theology, Beckwith shows that Aquinas is not proposing a temporal sequence, according to which someone needs first to be convinced of certain propositions by natural reason, and can only then proceed to faith. Rather, the Christian proclamation is grounded on revelation, and the ‘preambles of faith’ are the parts of that proclamation that could be recognised without special revelation – that there is one God, who is creator, for instance – although most Christians take them on board simply as part of what is revealed. A more or less parallel point applies in the relation between natural and revealed ethics, or law, for which Beckwith adopts a gently scholastic style, with objections and responses. Some readers will no doubt think it unfortunate that, in an earlier portion of this chapter, he takes same-sex marriage as his example of the natural law so obviously defied that he need not argue the point. (Beckwith goes on to detail some uses of natural law, which he seems to see as flawed, in favour of same-sex marriage, although they struck me as plausible and convincing.)
By ‘pluralism’, Beckwith does not mean that common theological usage according to which no religious perspective can be judged more or less true than another. His point, instead, is precisely to distinguish between belief in God (and the identity of the God in whom one believes) and the broader or surrounding tenets of a faith. He holds with some fervour that Christianity is true in a way that the other religions are not (and would, I assume, expect members of other religions to hold to the superiority of their own creed with equal vigour). If there is a basic or reorienting philosophical move in this chapter, it is to distinguish between sense and reference, such that the religions may teach a different sense, when it comes to God, but still have the same reference.
With ‘intelligent design’ Beckwith's central move is to argue that supposing one needs to insinuate God into natural processes, so as to complete or augment them, risks consigning the rest of nature, and its operations, to deistic independence. The task, rather, is to see all things as derived from God, and as being and operating as they do by virtue of that divine gift. This chapter belongs on every science and religion reading list.
The chapter on justification stands slightly apart, in that Beckwith's aim there is less to bring together than to separate. The evangelical authors he discusses all stake the claim that Aquinas is with them, and with the Reformers and fathers, with later Catholicism as the outlier. Beckwith wishes to reclaim Aquinas for Catholicism. It is a little disappointing that this chapter comes at the end, being the least irenic. While informative, generous and useful for students, the chapter bites off a little too much, setting justification alongside prayer for the dead and purgatory. These are fascinating themes, but by including them alongside justification, despite their obvious connections, the chapter is given too much to accomplish in the space available.
The conclusion offers a summary of the principal arguments of the preceding chapters. Given the significance of this book, I would have liked to have read something more substantial and synthetic by way of a finale, and therefore more rousing. Still, Never Doubt Thomas is an impressive work of ecumenism, worked out in a theological register. It also offers perceptive discussions of the handful of doctrinal topics it addresses, most of all by revealing divergent philosophical assumptions underlying consequently diverging theological positions, and turning to Aquinas to suggest a way forward.
