Israel and the Shape of Thomas Aquinas’s Soteriology

The Thomist 63 (1999): 65-82 ISRAEL AND THE SHAPE OF THOMAS AQUINAS'S SOTERIOLOGY MAITHEW LEVERING Boston College Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts THE CONTEMPORARY understanding of Thomas Aquinas's soteriology has been succinctly expressed in a recent study, Christology, by Gerald O'Collins, S.J. O'Collins divides his treatment ofChristology into three sections: biblical, historical, and systematic. In his historical section, he offers a brief appraisal of Thomas Aquinas's views. He concludes that Aquinas made both positive and negative contributions. On the positive side, Aquinas "mitigates" Anselm's theory of satisfaction by emphasizing the role of charity. Second, rather than focusing only on Christ's passion, Aquinas treats Christ's entire "human story." Third, Aquinas recognizes the redemptive role of Christ's resurrection. These positive points are followed by three criticisms. The first is that by including the question as to whether Christ would have become incarnate had Adam not sinned Aquinas separates the order ofcreation and redemption. O'Collins is concerned that the incarnation not be seen as a "divine rescue operation, mounted subsequently after an original plan of creation went astray." His second criticism is directed against Aquinas's theory that Christ, because of the grace of the hypostatic union, possessed the beatific vision. O'Collins speaks for many modern theologians in arguing that this theory posits a docetic Christ. His third criticism is that Aquinas contributes to the development of the notion of penal substitution. Anselm had proposed that Christ's death restored the divine order of justice; Aquinas adds a new emphasis on 65 66 MATIHEW LEVERING Christ's penal suffering. This emphasis on Christ's suffering is seen as helping to "open the door to a monstrous version of redemption: Christ as the penal substitute propitiating the divine anger." Aquinas thus stands as the unwitting predecessor of Luther.1 Without unfairly singling out O'Collins, I wish to challenge his approach to Aquinas's soteriology. Given the breadth of his project, O'Collins could only be expected to offer a summary of the scholarly consensus about Aquinas's soteriology. Precisely for this reason, his treatment is representative of a widespread misappropriation of Aquinas. Aquinas's treatise is viewed as a collection of propositions from which the modern theologian may select the propositions that remain valuable today. This approach is justified by the assumption that Aquinas's greatness lies in his ability to collect the best Scholastic propositions and organize them according to Aristotelian rules.2 Such an assumption is not entirely unwarranted: Aquinas certainly desired to assemble the best insights of his predecessors, and he sought to give theology scientific form. And yet, this approach fails to give due credit to Aquinas's theological gifts. When we seek what unifies the propositions of one of Aquinas's treatises, we should look for theological as well as philosophical intelligibility. In this article, I will argue that Aquinas's soteriological propositions are unified by his insight into how Christ's passion fulfills the Old Law.3 By overlooking this unifying factor, O'Collins misunderstands Aquinas's reasons for emphasizing Christ's charity, beatific vision, and penal suffering. The main task of this essay, therefore, will be to examine the role of the Old Law in Aquinas's treatise on Christ's passion. Before we undertake this 1 Gerald O'Collins, S.J., Christology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 206-7. 2 A theologian as great as Hans Urs von Balthasar fell into this mistake. He treats Aquinas as "more of a philosopher than a theologian," whose gift lay in philosophical organization rather than theological insight (cited in James J. Buckley, "Balthasar's Use of the Theology of Aquinas," The Thomist 59 [1995]: 517). 3 For Aquinas, since Christ is the incarnate Word, everything that he does (from his coming into the world to his resurrection and ascension) has redemptive significance. Nonetheless, Christ's passion represents the apogee of his redemptive work, since it is primarily here that he brings the Old Law to completion. ISRAEL AND AQUINAS'S SOTERIOLOGY 67 task, however, we should briefly summarize Aquinas's conception of the place of the Old Law in the history of salvation. The rational faculties of...