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Thomas Aquinas For Arm Chair Theologians Summary

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My reading journal assignment was Aquinas for Arm Chair Theologians by Timothy Renick. I have a lot of respect for Thomas Aquinas. He argued against men like John Calvin and Martin Luther on subjects like man could still have free will and at the same time God could still be all knowing. He also created a theory that explained why there is evil in the world but allowed God to stay all powerful and all good.
Aquinas’s theory on the existence of evil was very interesting. He said that there is no such thing as evil. What we perceive as evil is goodness actually leaving an object. The article used an example of a flower to illustrate Aquinas’s theory. Imagine a healthy pretty flower, full colorful petals standing upright with its’ stalk and leaves green. This flower would be example of goodness. Let’s say that you left for the weekend and forgot to water this plant while your gone. You come back to see the same flower not as healthy. It is a little wilted, the stalk is slouched slightly leaning and the leaves are turning from a dark green to slight brown on the edges. This flower that was once the example of goodness has had some of goodness leave. The flower is not completely evil, but …show more content…
On this topic Aquinas had some tough critics. John Calvin and Martin Luther argued that man does not truly have free choice. That everything is predestined to happen. Your born, you live your life good or band it was already in place and then you die and go to heaven or hell. Our lives and where we end up in our afterlives are predestined. Aquinas disagreed with them. Aquinas believed humans have free will. God rewards us with heaven or punishes us with hell depending on the choices that we are free to make. If God predestined someone to go straight to hell and if that was out of their control that in Aquinas’s eyes would make God

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