Introducing Lombard’s Sentences: The Nature and Method(s) of Scholastic Theology

A lecture with Q&A given by Professor Ryan Hurd entitled "Introducing Lombard’s Sentences: The Nature and Method(s) of Scholastic Theology." Professionalization is the word which best describes the advance from patristic to medieval theology (as the medievalist Philip Rosemann has claimed). But as a consequence, contemporary students stand hopeless until they have been inducted into scholastic theology, and they remain barred even from profitably reading the texts of scholastic theologians. Perhaps no more so has this been the case than for the very textbook of medieval theology itself: Peter Lombard’s Sententiae. In this all-important text, which trained professional theologians for centuries, Lombard gifted all budding theologians sententiae patrum, the sentences of the Fathers. These were the patristic verdicts regarding various theological questions or contradictions. This bequeathed all future theologians with an initial and largely adequate set of truths about theology’s various subjects (such as God himself). Nonetheless, Lombard expected much from his students, and did not issue these sententiae in a straightforward manner. Rather, he marshals authorities and arranges them so that their apparent conflicts are evident. Forced through this gauntlet and constantly pulled in both directions (yes and no), the student theologian was thereby trained to harvest from these sayings the patristic judgments, and to cement their truths in the cathedral of Christian doctrine. The success of Lombard’s Sententiae is attested not only by the centuries it endured as the professional theologian’s training-ground, but also in generating its own eventual replacement: the great summae, especially those of Thomas Aquinas. This lecture introduces Lombard’s Sententiae, considering the nature of its content (sententiae) and method (conflicting authorities), with special and further attention to other termini technici–the many and various medieval “theologisms” which students are required to know. The lecture aims to induct the student initially into the nature and method(s) of scholastic theology, and to begin training him to read its texts as a medieval bachelor would. Ryan Hurd is a systematic theologian whose area of expertise is doctrine of God, specifically the Trinity. His primary training is in the high medieval and early modern scholastics as well as the 20th century ressourcement movement. He has written a number of articles and regularly does translations of early modern theology sources; but his primary project is writing a systematics of the Trinity.