Common Places

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