One of the fascinating aspects of the events surrounding the passing of Pope John Paul II was the almost universal outpouring of grief. The “people’s pope” was also claimed by millions of Protestants, many of whom stayed up through the night to watch his funeral and took his loss as that of one of their own.
A striking aspect of contemporary Protestant theology is the amount of interest shown in the great medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas, who was long regarded as the champion of rationalism and the “natural” knowledge of God—a theology at odds with a Protestant understanding of the limits of reason.
Thomas Aquinas has had a long but, on the whole, not very happy history among Protestants. While some early Protestant reformers were well versed in Thomistic theology, Martin Luther was not among them.