ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to consider some examples of how analytically informed readings of Aquinas’s theology and philosophy have been used in contemporary doctrinal and moral theology. The examples are drawn from the work of three theologians: George A. Lindbeck, Bruce D. Marshall and Stanley M. Hauerwas. There are, of course, a number of other theologians whose work would be well worth examining from a similar perspective.1 But although these three are by no means representative of all the various constructive uses of an analytic reading of Aquinas, they do seem to be especially interesting, both because they have been particularly influential and because they illustrate in different ways certain significant moves and possible areas of concern within contemporary theology. It is not incidental that all three theologians have their PhDs from Yale University.2 From about the late 1960s through the early 1990s, the Yale Religious Studies Department was arguably virtually unique in North America in having among its members orthodox Christian theologians who were not only keenly interested in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy, rather than in some form of continental philosophy, but were at the same time attempting to retrieve elements of pre-modern theology, like Aquinas’s thought, as a more fruitful line of approach than the “liberal” theology developed in response to Kant and later moderns.
