Chase J Cloutier

Deeply informed by the biblical witness and his ecclesial faith, Aquinas held that Christ’s humanity is an instrument of divine agency.  Because Christ’s human will is always aligned with his divine will, every human action of Christ gains divine efficacy by virtue of the fact that his humanity never ceases to be the instrument of his divinity. Here Aquinas builds upon Athanasius and Cyril of Alexandria in their use of the Greek word ὄργανον (i.e., organon, Ln., instrumentum) to highlight Christ’s humanity as a conjoined, living, and intelligent instrument.
Aquinas’ understanding of the humanity of Christ as instrument of the divinity beautifully illumines the unity of the whole edifice of the faith. In particular this doctrine preserves the divine transcendence, human exemplarity and sacramentality, and soteriological significance of Christ and his actions.

Augustine's apparently strict phenomenology of time in Conf. 11 ch. 14-28 has been misinterpreted without the eschatological context of Conf. 11 as a whole and the Christological dimension explored in De Trin. 2-4 and 13. The human person can begin to overcome a fallen experience of time characterized by dissipative immersion in fleeting satisfactions. In its stead, one can taste contemplation of eternity in this life in a redeemed experience of time in which the image of God is renewed in its dynamic relationality to the Trinity.

Augustine and Aquinas were absolutely pivotal in the development of the theological understanding of the reality of grace in the history of Christianity. Augustine first deferred to an unsearchable mystery and later became overzealous against the Pelagians, erroring on the side of God’s initiative in grace. Aquinas, on the other hand, integrated all of the profound and legitimate insights of Augustine on grace but balanced the scales, so to speak, between God’s omnibenevolent, omnipotent will and the fully free human cooperation with his will.

Ignatius saw the world and its history as an ordered whole governed by God that is suffused with meaning. Every human person finds fulfillment by living up to their part assigned by God in salvation history, the real drama of creation and redemption unfolding through the history of the Church. In order to evaluate the SE in its contemporary context, Ignatius of Loyola’s view of the human person in history must be put to the test by existentialist and postmodernist theories. Rather than excluding subjectivity, Ignatius grounds the diversity of personal narratives within the transcendent objectivity of salvation history.

Joseph Ratzinger, from his study of the Trinity and revelation to his understanding of the Incarnation and redemption, built the edifice of his theological project upon the foundational cornerstone of the Logos. In an era of anti-intellectual fideism, subjective individualism, and materialist empiricism, he retrieved the rationality of faith, dialogical communion, and incarnational liturgy.

While Christians are called to responsible citizenship in support of justice and the common good, political change can never reach the eschatological horizon of hope. This paper will briefly consider a few theological influences on the emergence of liberation theology (Joachim of Fiore, Jürgen Moltmann, Marxism), offer a Thomistic response distinguishing theological hope from moral justice, and point to Thomas’ treatment of the Ascension as a Christological counterexample to liberation theology’s exegetical strategy.

When personal liberty is given the autonomy to determine a private definition of the nature and meaning of existence and human life, the nation's legislation and adjudication on human life will necessarily disintegrate to the point of justifying the marginalization of the most helpless: the infirm and the unborn. In order for bioethical law to be truly just, it must reflect the truth about the human person and personal existence. But the truth about personal existence and the mystery of human life is at once intersubjectively lived and verified as well as objectively measured against reality. Delineating a public definition of human life and existence will thus require an approach that is both existential and ontological, subjective and objective, intentional and teleological.

This detailed outline conveys Ignatius’ general principles for the discernment of purported prophecies (private revelations) and a particular consideration of the extrinsic and intrinsic factors of a purported prophecy in a Jesuit community of Gandía, Spain.