Retrieving “Natural Religion” in Aquinas: Giving Religion Its Due in the Theology of Religions

This study reintroduces the Christian theology of religions to Thomas Aquinas’s understanding of religion as an acquired moral virtue. Aquinas’s treatment of religion as a moral virtue challenges the norm of revelation-centric theological methods across the positional spectrum. The category of natural religion and a religiosity acquired through reason has been cited either as a negative contrast for supernatural theologies of universal religious origins, or utilized in support of apologetical arguments to promote Christian uniqueness. This study, on the other hand, will retrieve Aquinas on natural religion in order to support appropriate autonomy in theological discourse about other religions. Following a review of problematics in theological method in the theology of religions and a consideration of recent, salient scholarship on Aquinas and religion, the argument will turn toward an exposition of religion in the Secunda Secundae. A retrieval of Aquinas’s theory of acquired religious virtue highlights the corrective meaning of appropriate autonomy in natural religion as a strategy for doing rhetorical justice to the reality of universal religious acts, and as a metaphor for the exigent task of a theology of religions that does not absorb religion into a supernatural monism. The relevance of this study for practical theology will be considered in the concluding section.