Tag: Aquinas

Aquinas on What the Psalms Are About

What do you know about the Psalms? They are poems, maybe prayers or songs. There are 150 of them in our Bibles. Many of them were written by King David. We hear them read at weddings, funerals, and Sunday worship services. We could go on and on. But what are the Psalms about?

With sixteen chapters, we can easily say that Mark is about Jesus, especially because 1:1 says as much (“The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”) With fifty chapters, we can say Genesis is the beginning: both the beginning of creation, the beginning of God’s special work to rescue fallen humanity, and even the beginning of the Hebrew Scriptures. With over 150 chapters, can we say that the book of Psalms has one thing that it’s about? Last Spring, I began to read Thomas Aquinas’s Commentary on the Psalms, and although I have much more to read, Thomas seems to think there is a unifying theme of the Psalms: all the works of God.

Thomas was a medieval theologian, and he is best known for his magnum opus the Summa Theologiae. The Summa is an expansive work intended to “treat of whatever belongs to the Christian religion.” Because of the Summa’s role in shaping modern Christian’s understanding of Thomas, many might be suprised to know that he wasn’t a “systematic theologian” vocationally, but instead he was employed as a “doctor of Scripture.” In other words, his primary job was to provide commentary on Scripture to university students. It was in this capacity that Thomas wrote his commentary on the Psalms, which does not sadly cover all 150 Psalms.

I benefited from reading Thomas’s prologue to his Commentary on the Psalms. (Although we have a habit of ignoring and skipping introductions in contemporary books, in all his works, Thomas’s introductions provide important information to understand his work.) In this introduction, he provides a compelling picture of the content and purpose of the Psalms as biblical canon.

The General Content of the Psalms

The Psalms contain mention of all the works of God. Thomas divides God’s works into four parts: creation, governance, restoration, and glorification. Of these four, most readers of the Psalms undersatnd creation and glorification, but it may be unclear what Thomas means by governance and restoration. By governance, he means that the Psalms communicate Old Testament history. He cites Psalm 78:2-3 (77:2-3 in his Bible) to that effect: “I will open my mouth in a parable; / I will utter dark sayings from of old, / things that we have heard and known, / that our fathers have told us.”

By restoration, Thomas refers to the Psalms that speak of Christ. This may be taken as a strange claim to the average reader of the Psalms. Defending contemporary worship music against the claim that it doesn’t use the name of Jesus, I once heard a pastor respond that the Psalms don’t either, and many contemporary worship songs are inspired by the Psalms. For my part, it’s 2025, and I’m happy to embrace the end of the worship wars. That being said, it’s common to think that the Psalms have little to do with Jesus. I will return to this point in the next section. With those four parts clarified, we understand that the Psalms have as their subject matter the works of God.

The Psalms provide beautiful, poetic words about our God that are often emotionally rich and varied. It is no wonder that so many godly men and women love the Psalms. It is also no wonder that copies of the New Testament intended to witness to the lost and begin on the path of folloing Jesus also often include the Psalms (usually along with the Proverbs).

In the Psalms, God’s work as Creator is explained and praised, perhaps most acutely in Psalm 8.

In the Psalms, the most important events of the Old Testament are repeated and explored, perhaps most comprehensively in Psalm 105 or 106.

In the Psalms, the restoration of God and man is revealed as Christ and his work are spoken of and praised. Our church preached through a series of Psalms that specifically looked at Christ foreshadowed in the Psalms. See this link: https://www.fbalcoa.org/sermons/series/the-messiah-in-the-psalms.

In the Psalms, God is glorified. This is why churches historically sang the Psalms in their services. This is a biblically-warranted practice, and although I don’t believe in exclusive Psalmody (only singing the Psalms), I would rather attend a church with exclusive Psalmody rather than a church that excludes the Psalms in its singing.

The Christological Content of the Psalms

Because the Psalms are inspired by God to provide words about his works, they provide an important role in revealing the one, true God to us. We might look at creation and think, “Surely this world must have been thought up and created by someone,” but the Psalms confirm this and explain it through the act of prayer and praise. Of all the works of God, Thomas thinks the Psalms play a particularly important role in revealing Christ to us.

Thomas writes about the Psalms, “For all the things that pertain to faith in the Incarnation are related so plainly in this work that it seems to be a Gospel rather than a prophecy.” Wow! This quote helps us understand that Thomas thought the Psalms provided a great deal of theological content for the doctrine of the Incarnation.

Whereas few Christians today think of the Psalms as a theological text or as about Jesus, Thomas views the Psalms as speaking clearly the doctrine of Christ. For him, Christ’s person and work are beautifully spoken of in the Psalms.

Is Thomas Right?

When I was a kid, I liked history. I still do. I think studying history and literature has value, but in theology, I want to learn what is true not just what someone else thought was true. On this issue, is Thomas right? Specifically, are the Psalms, at least some of them, about Christ? I suspect that Thomas is right. A plain, cursory reading of the Psalms may not reveal the deeply foundational Christology below, but the New Testament moves upon us to read deeper and with Christ as an interpretive key.

In Matthew 22:41-46, Jesus quotes Psalm 110:1 to make a theological point about his own identity. In Acts 2:34-35, Peter does the same thing to show how Jesus was greater than David. This text finds its way into other New Testament passages too.

In Acts 13:34-36, Paul quotes Psalm 2 and 16 in a sermon to speak about Jesus.

Many places in the New Testament quote or allude to the Psalms, but the book of Hebrews provides us with a masterclass in apostolic exegesis of the Psalms. In other words, Thomas agreed with the apostles that the Psalms contained teaching about Christ. The apostles, like Thomas, believed this to the degree that they interpreted who Jesus is and what he did in light of the Psalms.

Just mentioning those few quotes, really only scratches the surface, and more needs to be said. But I hope this brief introduction helps you see how the Psalms speak about our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. May his named be glorified through all the earth!

Mary, the Mother of God with Timothy and Faith Pawl

In this article, I interview Drs. Timothy and Faith Pawl on Mary. Tim Pawl is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of St. Thomas. He has published two books In Defense of Conciliar Christology and In Defense of Extended Conciliar Christology, and he will soon release a book in the Cambridge Elements series on the philosophy of the incarnation. Faith is an adjunct instructor in philosophy at the University of St. Thomas. She is the author of numerous academic papers, and along with her husband Tim, she earned her PhD in philosophy from Saint Louis University.

Thank you to Drs. Timothy and Faith Pawl for taking the time out of their schedules to answer these questions for us. My questions and comments appear in bold font, and their responses follow them.

Why should we call Mary the “mother of God” instead of just the “mother of Jesus”?

In the history of the church, there have been some claims that have been theological lightning rods. They took on great importance as tools for demarcating the limits of orthodoxy. For instance, at the first ecumenical council of Nicaea in 325, the promulgated creed included a final anathema which cursed those who, among other things, thought that “there once was [a time] when he [the Son] was not” (Tanner 1990, 5). This sentence, contrary to the full divinity of the Son, was affirmed by the Arian party; the orthodox bishops made use of it to counter Arianism.

So likewise, Nestorius, Archbishop of Constantinople, claimed that while Mary bore the Christ in her womb, she didn’t bear God in her womb – that is, she was not the theotokos – i.e., the Godbearer. At the ecumenical council of Ephesus in 431, the promulgated documents include the claim that Mary is the theotokos. This claim, affirming the singularity of person in the incarnation, was denied by the Nestorian party; the orthodox bishops made use of it to counter Nestorianism.

Why is this affirmation of the singularity of person important? Well, it safeguards the claim that it was really someone divine who became incarnate, really someone divine who entered creation for our redemption, really someone divine who suffered the ignobility of the cross.

Finally, the claim that Mary bore God follows straightforwardly from the orthodox understanding of the incarnation. Not only is it affirmed in the ecumenical councils, as I noted above. One can see how the claim must be included, given the traditional understanding of the incarnation. Whatever happened to the man, Jesus Christ, happened to God, on the traditional view. For that man, Jesus Christ, was no other than the God-man, the Word, the Second Person of the Trinity. And so, given that the man gestated in the womb of Mary, and given that the man is no other person than the Second Person of the Trinity, it must follow that a divine person gestated in the womb of Mary. But a divine person is rightly called “God” on traditional Christian teaching. So, God gestated in the womb of Mary. (For Aquinas on this question, see here.)

If we call Mary the “mother of God”, do we not make her greater than God or at least at the same level as God?

Mary is not greater than God or on the same level as God in any theologically pernicious way, even if we do call her the Mother of God. We must remember that when thinking of Christ, we can consider him with respect to his divinity, but we can also consider him with respect to his humanity. With respect to his divinity, no created thing is greater than him or at the same level as him. None could be.

With respect to his humanity, Mary and Jesus were at the same level in some senses. They were both truly human in a full and complete sense. In some ways, too, she was greater than him – again, with respect to his humanity. As a human son (but not a merely human son) of a human mother, he owed her obedience according to the Law. (For Aquinas’s take on Christ’s submission to the Law, see here.) This should not surprise us, as scripture itself notes Christ’s submission to his parents in Luke 2:51.

We might say that, as her son, she was above him in authority; as her God, he was above her in authority. If we measure greatness all things considered, the whole and entire Christ measured against the whole and entire Mary, we get the answer we expect: Christ is God, and God is greater than Mary in every respect. We should expect that there would be something difficult to wrap our heads around in Jesus’ relationship to Mary. After all, how could a creature be the mother of the Creator? As the 11th century Marian hymn, Alma Redemptoris Mater puts it, “to the wonderment of nature, she bore her creator.” But the fact that this really happened is no more shocking or awe-inspiring than the fact that God became man, that God entered into the ordinary human way of being in the world.

Can we learn anything about God because the Son of God was born of a woman?

Numerous things, no doubt! We see God’s faithfulness to his covenant. This might not be us learning a new thing, but it counts as yet another reason to affirm something we already knew about God. We learn God’s willingness to enter into the quagmire we’ve created for ourselves in being born to a woman, like all of us, and being born to a woman of low standing. (For Aquinas’s take on the value of being born to an espoused virgin, see here; for his take on being born into poverty, see here.) Were he to have simply appeared somewhere, full-formed, one might question his true humanity. Such a birth safeguards his lineage.

Could God have been born a woman?

Yes. Undoubtedly. The medieval disputes about the incarnation were often about whether rationality was required for assumption (“Assumption” is the technical term for what the divine person does to the created nature when that nature is united to the person in a hypostatic union; “hypostatic union” is the technical term for the relation that holds between the divine nature and the assumed nature in a case of incarnation.) This question was disputed. (For Aquinas on what’s required for incarnation, see here.) Whatever the answer to that question, the assumability of a created, rational nature was universally affirmed by Christian thinkers. And so, a female human nature’s being assumed is no more impossible than a male human nature’s being assumed, as both are rational natures.

How is Mary an example for Christian life?

In this time of Advent, we can learn from Mary about saying yes with joy to what God asks of us, and about waiting patiently to see how God will work out His redemptive purposes in our lives and in the world around us. It’s of critical importance that when the angel Gabriel came to Mary, Mary gave God her permission, her fiat, to cooperate with God’s plan for salvation. She used her freedom to offer all she had to be part of God’s work of bringing Christ into the world. There’s a venerable tradition of considering Mary the New Eve, acknowledging the unique way she is able to participate in God’s plan to unravel the harm brought about in the Garden. We see in that tradition both the affirmation of Mary’s freedom and dignity, and her exemplarity in giving her all to God. Twentieth century British author, Caryll Houselander, writes beautifully of Jesus and Mary while Mary was waiting to give birth, “By his own will, Christ was dependent on Mary during Advent: he was absolutely helpless; he could go nowhere but where she chose to take him; he could not speak; her breathing was his breath; his heart beat in the beating of her heart…. In the seasons of our Advent – waking, working, eating, sleeping, being – each breath is a breathing of Christ into the world.” (Houselander, Reed of God) We, like Mary, are called to bring Christ into the corners of the world we inhabit, and to do so with joy and patience.

Thank you again to Drs. Timothy and Faith Pawl! Look for more interviews with the Pawls and others in the near future! If you haven’t read it yet, you can read my interview on Christian Apologetics with Dr. Tawa Anderson here.

What Are We Flying Away From? When the Gospel Meets ‘Gospel’ Music

As someone raised in the church and in the “Bible belt”, I have often heard the famous song “I’ll Fly Away.” It has been the center piece of churches, including my own, as well as secular social gatherings where everyone comes alive to sing that beautiful melody which speaks of freedom from oppression. Although many are likely to have heard this song, the lyrics are as follows (I’ll refrain from rehashing the chorus between every stanza of verses):

Some bright morning when this life is over
I’ll fly away
To that home on God’s celestial shore
I’ll fly away

Chorus:
I’ll fly away, oh glory
I’ll fly away in the morning
When I die, Hallelujah by and by
I’ll fly away

When the shadows of this life have gone
I’ll fly away
Like a bird from these prison walls I’ll fly
I’ll fly away
Oh, how glad and happy when we meet
I’ll fly away
No more cold iron shackles on my feet
I’ll fly away
Just a few more weary days and then
I’ll fly away
To a land where joys will never end
I’ll fly away

Having shared the lyrics, I cannot help but wonder: “What, according to this song, are we flying away from?” It seems fairly obvious that, according to this song, the oppression of which we will be freed is an oppression of our earthly state—more specifically it seems our bodies are the prisons. In this brief article, I will first explore the claims made by this song about the ultimate goal of humanity (specifically referring to its goal after death) and the good news about Jesus (i.e., the gospel), and second, I will provide a more biblical picture of these concepts.

The song speaks of “flying away” from the earth to “that home on God’s celestial shore.” It praises God (i.e., “Hallelujah”) for our flying away once we die, and it speaks of this death and flying away as being freed from the “shadows of this life” and from the “prison walls”, or birdcage of the world. It speaks as if one needs only to leave our earthly bodies and return to our original home in heaven in order to receive the heavenly reward mentioned by Jesus. This flying away is a happy occasion hence the words “how glad and happy when we meet” and “no more cold iron shackles on my feet.” Everyday life for the writer is a persistent survival of these “few more weary days” before going to a “land where joy will never end.” All this is expressed with the constant refrain “I’ll fly away.”

The worldview of this song has more in common with ancient Greek philosophy than the Bible. If philosophy reveals truth previously testified to in the Bible then we say “praise God” and “amen”, but when the philosophy does not match the Bible’s claims, then we must remain willing to let it go (here, I clearly display my Protestant leanings on these matters). The philosophy of this song has more in common with Plato than Paul and more in common with Athens than Jerusalem. It provides its listener with the Gospel according to Plato in which “salvation” becomes a matter of escaping the physical word.[1] N.T. Wright describes the Platonic view with extremely similar language to the song “I’ll Fly Away”; he writes, “It [death] is the moment when, and the means by which, the immortal soul is set free from the prison-house of the physical body.”[2] According to this gospel, our souls need to escape our sinful bodies and evil creation to return to a spiritual realm with God.[3] In contrast, the famed German theologian and minister Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in his work Creation and Fall: “The body belongs to a person’s essence. The body is not the prison, the shell, the exterior of a human being instead a human being is a human body. A human being does not ‘have’ a body or ‘have’ a soul; instead a human being ‘is’ body and soul.”[4] As I will contend below, it is not our bodies or creation that are inherently sinful and evil, and God wants to save them as much as he wants to save our souls. 

The story of being a celestial being in the sky by and by with my harp and colorful robes has always bothered me. As a child, I was scared of death because this did not seem like a fun place. It sounded like eternal boredom. In my daily life, I never desire to sit around and play the harp or anything of the sort. I fill my day with activities, hobbies, projects, worship, friendship, etc. I am thankful that I have since learned that the future described in the Bible sounds more like a continuation of the latter on a far grander scale.

According to the Bible, God creates the world and calls it good (Gen 1). Humans and creation only became sinful and evil once they worshiped the wrong thing by disobeying God and desiring something other than a relationship with him (Gen 3).[5] Therefore, he punishes humanity and creation, but with this punishment, he makes a promise to put the world right-side up again (Gen 3:15). Fulfilling this promise, God takes on humanity (John 1:1-18; Phil 2:7-8; and Col 1:15), and he lives the life and dies the death that we could not for ourselves (Romans 5:8). But the story does not end there because he comes back from the dead, and he comes back in his physical body (Matt 28:5-7; Luke 24:36-49; John 20:24-29). This resurrection is supposed to be the first fruits of the new creation (1 Cor 15:20). The Bible promises that one day Jesus will reappear to fully bring heaven on earth and to bring all the dead followers of Jesus back from the grave, and they will rule and reign over the earth with him continuing the project started in the beginning (1 Pet 2:9-10; Rev 21).[6]

If the previous paragraph is remotely true, then it seems “I’ll Fly Away”, despite its beautiful melody, is false. All Christians should affirm at least three things from the previous paragraph: (1) God created everything, and he called it “good”; (2) God took on physical form as a human called Jesus; and (3) Jesus was resurrected thus becoming physical again and forever (ST III q. 54 a.1).[7] If those three things are affirmed, then “I’ll Fly Away” describes a different gospel than the one proclaimed by Paul or Jesus or any other author of the New Testament.

Before his death, Jesus once said that “the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth…” (John 4:23). How can Christians maintain this duality of worship if they knowingly sing untruth? Many people even sing it with the assumption that they are singing the gospel itself! No small number of sermons, blog posts, and books can convince our people that this song is not the gospel truth because the message has been engrained through repetition and melody in a way that propositional truth cannot be communicated. James K.A. Smith writes that “We become what we worship because what we worship is what we love.”[8] If we want to correct this error, we will need to do so through several greater means.

To eliminate the teaching of false doctrine in our churches, we will have to make several difficult decisions. First, we must stop singing songs that falsely portray God, the gospel, and the human condition. The target song for this blog post is “I’ll Fly Away”. Second, we must correct for these erred ways of understanding Christianity by instilling new repetitions into the life of the local church via intentional liturgies. James K.A. Smith writes that liturgy “is a shorthand term for those rituals that are loaded with an ultimate Story about who we are and what we’re for.”[9] If local congregations would combat the liturgies and narratives of our cultures and intentionally replace them in the worship service with the recitation of creeds and confessions and practices like the Lord’s Supper, then we would have congregations being informed by biblical truth instead of 20th century constructions that have more in common with Phaedo than Scripture. Third and finally, we must specifically teach against these philosophies especially those that cloak themselves in Christianity. We should point out music, literature, films, and other cultural artifacts that claim to present a vision of the world contrary to biblical truth. 

Although each Christian has a personal responsibility to act on these issues (not singing false songs, alerting leadership to these issues, and not presenting these songs as good sources of knowledge for young Christians or non-Christians), the primary responsibility lies on the leadership of the church to teach truthfully and avoid letting our people’s hearts and minds be shaped by false doctrine. It can be difficult as a worship pastor or senior pastor or whatever pastor/leader/minister to shirk our responsibility or to assume that someone else takes the blame on this issue, but we must stand up and represent Jesus well to the world. Many will read this and still sing “I’ll Fly Away” on Sunday mornings. I entirely suspect that the habit and the tune will live on despite the contrary evidence (humans are often bad on acting on the knowledge they gain). We still love this song more than we love truth, which is why we need to instill new habits, new songs to replace the ones that we must reject for the sake of the truth of the gospel.

Citations

[1] N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God, vol. 3) (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003), 48. For a discussion on competing views of the human person, see Paul R. Williamson, Death and the Afterlife: Biblical Perspectives on Ultimate Questions (New Studies in Biblical Theology) (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2018), 33-38. In his discussion of human anthropology, Williamson compares the views from Ancient Greek philosophy, such as Plato’s, and from the Bible for the purpose of explaining the post-mortem fate of the dead. 
[2] N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 48. 
[3] N.T. Wright, The Day the Revolution Began (New York, NY: HarperOne, 2016), 74.
[4] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall: A Theological Exposition of Exposition of Genesis 1-3 (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2004), 76-77.
[5] N.T. Wright, The Day the Revolution Began, 77, 99, 101-103. 
[6] This Christian understanding is articulated by the Athanasian Creed wherein it states, “He [Jesus] will come again to judge the living and the dead. / At his coming all people shall rise bodily to give an account of their own deeds. / Those who have done good will enter eternal life, those who have done evil will enter eternal fire.” https://www.rca.org/resources/athanasian-creed 
For a discussion of how humanity is to rule/reign after Jesus’s death, see N.T. Wright, The Day the Revolution Began, 160-167.
[7] This citation ought to be read: Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, third part, question 54, article 1.
[8] James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Power of Habit (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2016), 22.
[9] James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love, 46.

Bibliography

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica. Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, n.d.

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Creation and Fall: A Theological Exposition of Genesis 1-3. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2004.

Smith, James K.A. You Are What You Love: The Power of Habit. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2016.

Williamson, Paul R. Death and the Afterlife: Biblical Perspectives on Ultimate Questions (New Studies in Biblical Theology). Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2018.

Wright, N.T. The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’s Crucifixion. New York, NY: HarperOne, 2016.

_. The Resurrection of the Son of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God, vol. 3). Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003.