Jaarboek Thomas Instituut 1997 - Thomas Instituut te Utrecht

16 PIM VALKENBERG
wanted to investigate the literal sense of the Old Testament".
The considerations given in this introduction result in the following
hypothesis, part of which will be tested in the rest of this article".
Polemics, apologetics and dialogue are three historically
determined forms of a literary genre. This literary genre,
which was frequently used by Jews, Christians and Muslims
in the Middle Ages, is the defence of one's own faith with a
view to another faith. In such an apologetics, as it is named
in most of its historical forms, the theologian using this
literary genre "uses only methods of argumentation and
criteria of knowledge acceptable to the adversary"?',
Therefore, a Christian may use arguments from reason and
arguments from Scripture when talking to a Jew, but he/she
can only use arguments from reason when talking to a
Muslim. That is why, in the Middle Ages, philosophy as the
art of. reasoning and theology as the art of explaining
Scripture" are the most important forms of interreligious
communication.
In the next section of this article, I shall concentrate on the
characteristics of this literary genre, apologetica or its Muslim
equivalent 'ilm al-kaläm. In this section, I want to show how Aquinas
mentions the basic characteristics of this genre in the famous
19 The most important book on this issue is still Beryl Smalley's The
Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 3rd• ed., Oxford 1983. Cp. also P.
Riché / G. Lobrichon (dir.), Le Moyen Age et la Bible, Paris 1984. For the
senses of Scripture, see H. de Lubac, Exégèse Médiévale: les quatre sens de
l'Écriture, 4 vols., Paris 1959-1964.
20 The hypothesis will be tested in more detail in a monograph on
Aquinas and Forms of Interreligious Dialogue in the Middle Ages, that will be
published, God willing, in 1999.
21 Griffiths, An Apology for Apologetics, p. 15.
22 I use the word theology in the sense of sacra Doctrina, holy
teaching, which is equivalent to sacra Scriptura in the introductory question to
Aquinas' Summa theologia. See W.G.B.M. Valkenberg. Did Not Our Heart
Burn? Place and Function of Holy Scripture in the Theology of St. Thomas
Aquinas, Utrecht 1990, p. 7.