Jaarboek Thomas Instituut 1995 - Thomas Instituut te Utrecht

THEOLOGY OF PROVOCATIVE RECEPTIVITY 33
dedicated to prof. J. de Graaf, who was president of a society called
"Church and Peace". The editors used that name as theme and title
and asked people for specific contributions. But for the others such an
occasion is not indicated. In both articles, though, some clues can be
found. After clarifying and expounding Thomas' intentions in De
Regno, De Grijs concludes that Thomas wants to work as a
theologian. In a footnote he comments; "it might cause some
wonderment that I calI De Regno a theological opus and not, like
Chenu, a piece of political philosophy. There are after all passages
without any religious terms. But Thomas never suffered from the
misapprehension that theologians should limit themselves to religion or
that they are only allowed to interpret profane realities religiously.
Every reality, he wrote in the Scriptum (In I Sent., Prol.) is as such ex
Deo and ad Deum. This does not alienate the reality but brings it to
itself. Thomas can write about government without turning it into
religion, while he also searches for the ex Deo and ad Deum of it (42,
p. 250, note 9). This theological interest returns in the third article,
but there it is, as already mentioned, concentrated on the
methodological question about the use of Scripture.
This theological interest in the question of power and
government is a recurrent theme in De Grijs' work. That De Grijs
choose De Regno for his contribution to the 700th anniversary of
Thomas' death is not so strange, for power was, as I already
mentioned, the main theme of our doctoral program in that period,
and De Grijs supervised six licentiate's theses related to that
program." When one searches in earlier works one discovers that he
discusses that theme there too (cf. 8, 1/, 18, 23). And it returns in
later articles, in articles about the church (40, 49) and in an article
about God's government of the world (47). But before turning to that
broader discussion, I want to pay attention to these three articles on
De Regno, for they contain elements that return and can be considered
as keys to that broader discussion.
The three articles can be viewed as three different lectures of the same
Cf. Het Utrechts theologencollectief, Wat hier gebeurt is macht. Een
actueel theologisch onderzoek, Hilversum, 1975.