Jacob Joseph Andrews

William of Auxerre’s religious epistemology appears radically individualistic: faith is based on what God alone reveals to one’s soul, without any human teachers. However, he develops a social epistemology when discussing whether baptized infants have faith. Against the intuitively more plausible claim that infants can’t have beliefs, he says that they have the habit of faith, but cannot put it into act. When a teacher tells children about religion, this prompts them to look within themselves, see what God has placed in their soul, recognize that it corresponds to what the teacher is proposing, and then assent to it. Their beliefs are still grounded in God’s revelation to their soul and not the authority of their human teacher, but they need a teacher to articulate that revelation propositionally for them. Even though faith is strictly speaking something that happens between God and the soul, one requires a religious community in order to make a conscious act of faith.

Sir Isumbras is a medieval English poem about the fall and redemption of a knight. Sir Isumbras is a proud knight who is punished by God in order to make him humble. Sir Isumbras loses his sons to wild beasts and his wife to the villainous Sultan. After working in obscurity for many years as a blacksmith, he joins the war of Christendom against the Sultan. Then, after wandering in poverty as a pilgrim in penance for his sins, he rescues his wife and, with the help of his miraculously returned sons and their beast companions, conquers the Sultan’s empire and makes it Christian. Besides being an exciting tale of knightly adventure, Sir Isumbras raises questions about gender and class, belief in the supernatural, providence, moral transformation, and interreligious relations.

Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) was an Italian Jesuit and one of the first Christian missionaries to China in the modern era. He was a genuine polymath—a translator, cartographer, mathematician, astronomer, and musician. Above all, Ricci was a missionary for the gospel. As we briefly examine his 1603 seminal work, The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, our hope is that we, as evangelical educators, will perceive some of the deeper principles necessary for our own missionary work among unreached people.

The goal of this paper is to show that Thomas Aquinas, in his _Disputed Questions on Evil_, presents a theory of free will that is compatibilist but still involves a version of the principle of alternative possibilities (PAP) and even requires alternative possibilities for a certain kind of responsibility. In Aquinas’ view, choosing between possibilities is not the primary power of the will. Rather, choice arises through the complex interaction of various parts of human psychology, in particular through the indeterminacy of the intellect and through the interaction between reason and passion. Both of these ways provide cases where Aquinas not only allows for alternative possibilities but thinks that they are necessary for moral responsibility, all the while remaining, strictly speaking, a compatibilist.

The classical Confucian philosopher Xunzi proposed a naturalistic virtue ethics account of ritual: rituals are practices that channel human emotion and desire so that one develops virtues. In this paper I show that William of Auxerre’s Summa de Officiis Ecclesiasticis can be understood as presenting a similar account of ritual. William places great emphasis on the emotional power of the liturgy, which makes participants like the blessed in heaven by developing virtue. In other words, he has a virtue ethics of ritual closely aligned with that of Xunzi. Xunzi’s writings on ritual illuminate and enrich one’s reading of the Summa de Officiis. But unlike Xunzi, William is not a naturalist with regard to ritual: although much of William’s language about the causal power of liturgy can be explained in Xunzian terms, Christian liturgy has an irreducible supernatural element.