“You Made All Things in Wisdom”: The Role of Sacred Scripture in Thomas Aquinas’s Doctrine of Divine Freedom
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis considers the place of Scripture in Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine of divine freedom. Thomas taught that God’s act of creation was brought about through free choice; nothing in God’s power, wisdom, or goodness necessitated that God create the world. Thomas also held that this doctrine was clearly taught by Scripture. In this thesis I examine Thomas’s interpretation of three Scriptural texts that he relied on to articulate his doctrine: Ps. 135:6, Eph. 1:11, and Ps. 16:2. My aim in doing so is twofold. First, to better understand how Thomas read Scripture through attention to the sources, tools, and strategies that he used in his efforts to grasp the meaning and doctrinal significance of the biblical text. Second, to evaluate his interpretation of these three texts, first in light of three common Protestant criticisms of Aquinas’s exegesis, and second in comparison to alternative readings of the texts drawn from the history of Protestant exegesis and recent biblical studies. I conclude that Thomas’s interpretation of these three texts is preferable to the alternative readings, and that the general criticisms of Thomas’s exegesis fail with respect to his interpretation of these three texts. I then draw some implications of this study for future constructive work in Protestant doctrines of divine freedom. Chapter one surveys the exegetical practices employed in the Latin West in the thirteenth century and outlines three recent Protestant critiques of Thomas’s use of Scripture. Chapter two examines the development of the Christian doctrine of divine freedom, concluding with a preliminary sketch of Thomas’s account. Chapters three, four, and five provide an analysis of Thomas’s interpretation of Ps. 135:6, Eph. 1:11, and Ps. 16:2. These begin with a series of vignettes of the reception history of these texts, and then turn to an examination of how Thomas interprets these texts across his corpus. They conclude by evaluating the Protestant critiques of Thomas’s exegesis and alternative readings of these texts. The final chapter brings the conclusions of the previous three chapters to bear on our understanding of Thomas’s doctrine, and then draws out implications of this study for Protestant theology.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".