ive, the question of God's relation to the world. The basis in scholarship from which the following discussion will emanate is: the Summa Theologica and Summa Contra Gentiles of St. Thomas Aquinas; the Church Dogmatics (specifically, Volume III, parts 1 and 3) of Karl Barth; and, Man's Vision of God, The Divine Relativity, and Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes, each by Charles Hartshorne. These three philosophers, among many others of equal (or perhaps even greater) importance, have been instrumental, in some fashion, in shaping Christian religious traditions and practice, faith, or reasoning, particularly in how we attribute such capacities as omnipotence and omniscience to God's being or how we deal with issues such as the presence and nature of evil.
Aquinas, in the thirteenth century, was among the earliest formulators of a systematic philosophy of Roman Catholic Christianity, principally along Aristotelian lines (he always refers to Aristotle as "the Philosopher"), and adherents of his system continue to be labeled "Thomists." Barth and Hartshorne, both twentieth century philosophers, are, respectively, proponents of two modern movements in Protestant Christianity, neoorthodoxy and neoclassical theism (or, process theology).
Until most recently, the bulk of Roman Catholic dogma has been founded upon Aquinas' teachings. He has long been regarded by the Catholic Church as its most authoritative theologian. Critical of both liberal and fundamental Protestantism, Barth was one among a number of prominent philosophers in the early-twentieth century who argued that man had substituted many of his own institutions for those of God's, particularly with regard to salvation, and demanded a return to moral and intellectual humility. Hartshorne's brand of philosophical inquiry emerged partly in response to the work of the neoorthodoxists, arguing that mankind lives in a world full of sensory objects and that the exp...