God's Spirit and Revelation

Lest you think I'm neglecting my blog for frivolous reasons, I'm attempting to get a complete draft of my dissertation off to my committee by the end of this week. (If you get annoyed by sorry-I-didn't-blog/update posts, my apologies! I get annoyed by them too, if they show up too frequently. I don't expect finishing a dissertation to be a repeated event in my life, however.) In the meantime, here's what's on my mind this week (beside the dissertation, teaching, the job market, and my family and church, not necessarily in that order).

In his work Summa Contra Gentiles, Thomas Aquinas makes the following comment:

...it was necessary for the real truth concerning divine things to be presented to men with fixed certainty by way of faith. Wholesome therefore is the arrangement of divine clemency, whereby things even that reason can investigate are commanded to be held on faith, so that all might easily be partakers of the knowledge of God, and that without doubt and error. Hence it is said: Now ye walk not as the Gentiles walk in the vanity of their own notions, having the understanding darkened (Eph.4;17, 18); and, I will make all thy sons taught of the Lord (Isa. 54:1, 5).

In context, Aquinas has been making the point that for all that philosophers have worked out some truths about God's existence and nature by reason alone, few people have the luxury of this kind of study, and it could never give us complete, certain results. God in his wisdom, however, has revealed himself and his purposes to us, and they are recorded in scripture.

One question I've gotten from several of my students when they read Aquinas' discussion special revelation is whether Aquinas recognizes a role for the Holy Spirit in guiding a believer's reading of scripture. I haven't studied Aquinas' material in-depth, but the review I have done doesn't seem to include this idea. Anyone know if it was present in the thought of the Protestant Reformers, or if it is a more recent idea?

Jesus says in Matthew 18:20 that when two or three gather in his name, he is with them, and I can see how you could extrapolate from that that God is present when believers study scripture together. In John 14:25-27 he promises that the Spirit will come and teach them all things/remind them of what Jesus has taught. Does this provide a scriptural basis for the idea that the Holy Spirit is a sort of scripture-study-buddy? 1 Corinthians 2: 12 shows that we are able to understand God's revelation because we have been given the spirit. Is this power to understand God and his will a general result of our sanctification, or a specific ongoing sort of prompting and dialogue with God's Spirit "in our hearts"? (Cary, remember, argues that it doesn't make sense to talk of the Spirit as a "voice in our hearts.")

Are there other scriptures that address this?