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  • Aquinas on Paul’s Use of the Old TestamentThe Implications of Participation
  • Charles Raith II (bio)

Is the attempt to understand Paul’s use of the Old Testament a metaphysically neutral inquiry? Or are interpretations affected by one’s metaphysical commitments? Within contemporary New Testament scholarship, Paul’s use of the Old Testament has become a topic of study in its own right with numerous methodological options now being offered.1 When the scholarship is analyzed, we find that those who adhere strongly to a historical-critical approach to Scripture continue to assume an objective stance to the raw data of the text that yields various scientific results.2 For some, right method and adequate literary skills alone are thought to yield an accurate analysis of how Paul uses the Old Testament.3 In the main, whether the approach is of a conservative or progressive bent, metaphysical considerations are at best secondary issues to be explored only after the particular method has yielded its results. The problem with this situation is that approaches to Paul’s use of the Old Testament are in fact deeply affected by prior philosophical and theological judgments—judgments that are intrinsic to the approach itself.4

The topic of Paul’s use of the Old Testament is uniquely interesting because any scholar who explores this will also indirectly reveal his [End Page 66] or her convictions and assumptions, sometimes stated but more often left unstated, pertaining to the doctrine of inspiration, the metaphysical involvement of God in history, the locus of authorial intent, the Christological linking (or lack thereof) of the canonical writings, and the metaphysics (and not merely literary qualities) underlying the doctrine of the different senses of Scripture.5 Not surprisingly, the burgeoning scholarship on Paul’s use of the Old Testament has largely avoided premodern accounts; if premodern accounts do appear, they do so often only to highlight the superiority of modern exegetical methods.6 But premodern engagements with Paul’s use of the Old Testament help reveal the metaphysical and theological commitments implicit (and often undetected) in modern approaches—commitments that are simply assumed by most scholars and readers. And recovering some of the participatory dimensions of premodern approaches can aid contemporary exegesis in exploring the full depth of Paul’s engagement with the Old Testament.

In what follows, I focus on the basic “fundamental commitments” (to use Steve Moyise’s term7) about Scripture that inform Aquinas’s approach to Paul’s use of the Old Testament, most of which revolves around his theology of participation.8 A participatory approach to biblical exegesis understands the order of creation not only as the linear unfolding of individual moments—the approach taken by modern historical-critical methods—but also as an ongoing participation in God’s active providence, both metaphysically (i.e., in the order of creation) and Christologically-pneumatologically (i.e., in the order of grace). The biblical texts and their authors, then, “are already historically caught up in a participatory relationship, however obscure, with the trans-temporal realities of faith.”9 A participatory approach to Paul’s use of the Old Testament calls into question the naturalist assumptions of most critical scholarship, in which “not only the empirical findings of science have been conflated with metaphysical naturalism, but also . . . historical-critical textual criticism has uncritically assumed naturalism as a dogma rather than as a merely abstractive methodological assumption of scientific inquiry.”10 [End Page 67] Insensitivity to the metaphysical differences between much of modern exegesis and Aquinas’s exegesis has led, as we shall see, to the erroneous claim that Aquinas is a forerunner to modern (and sometimes postmodern) methods of exegesis due to his emphasis on the literal sense and the role that virtue formation plays in his theory of cognition. But Aquinas’s emphasis on the literal sense and the role of virtue for proper interpretation presupposes a participatory ontology in which the world is guided through its participation in God’s providential activity in a way often bracketed by modern (and postmodern) approaches to Scripture.

The following is an exploration into Aquinas’s participatory approach to Paul’s use of the Old Testament in conversation...

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