  All this has implications for theology. Taken up with their abstruse questions and writing in a language which More characterizes as Latino-Gothic, scholastic theologians have increasingly forfeited their pastoral relevance. Against this he advocates a “positive” theology founded on study of the Scriptures and the Church Fathers; it is a typically humanist return to the sources, and it fits with More's conception of the church as a community embedded in history and process. As he observes, the church flourished for more than a thousand years until “the Trojan Horse” of Peter Lombard's Sentences released its army of arcane problems, and this he sees as the era of the Fathers (among whom he would probably wish to include Thomas Aquinas). In his “Letter to Oxford” he describes the true theologian as one who has gained a preliminary understanding of human affairs from his study of poets, orators and historians, and can add to this a proficiency in Latin, Greek and possibly Hebrew. The letter is an endorsement of Erasmus' efforts to revive classical eloquence and patristic exegesis in the service of a theology which can both instruct and inspire. At the centre of this shift lies the issue of Greek studies, which is much more than a curricular option. When More introduces Raphael, his witness to Utopia, he is described as more at home in Greek than Latin: being primarily interested in philosophy he finds little of value in Latin apart from some works by Cicero and Seneca. The Utopians themselves become passionate students of Greek, and for the very same reason. As More reiterates in his aggressive championing of the humanist curriculum, Greek is the essential source both for secular wisdom and for the New Testament.  While he admits translation as an aid, it cannot equal the impact of reading—say Aristotle—in the original (CWM 15,101). As for those critics of Erasmus who allow the Latin Vulgate a sacrosanct status and regard his corrections from the Greek as unwarranted and even blasphemous, More counters with a pragmatic view of textual reception. The church, whose sense of the Gospels precedes any written text, accepts the Greek original as the true Gospel and may extend its approval to Latin translations, but never to the extent of ruling out the human fallibility of the translator. Even one of the Fathers like Jerome can err (CWM 15, 87, 217), so there is a vital need for philological engagement with the sources. From More's perspective, Greek is the key element in a major cultural shift.