INTRODUCTION
This paper will argue that the soteriological critique of natural theology, under the influence of the via moderna, undermined an otherwise healthy appropriation of Scholastic metaphysics in the maintaining of Reformed Orthodoxy. At the risk of oversimplification, it will be useful to frame this intellectual phenomenon as a trajectory spanning the whole course of the seventeenth century: its central arena being that part of theological works that goes by the name prolegomena. This thesis has several moving pieces. Bringing them all into a single, clear portrait will require some definition, historical background, insights from secondary literature, but mostly, as excellent case studies, an analysis of the relevant prolegomena sections of Franciscus Junius (1545-1602), Francis Turretin (1623-1687), and Petrus van Mastricht (1630-1706).1
A word about recent scholarship is necessary at this point. There is indeed a gap here. While the secondary literature gives some valuable angles of the Reformed Scholastic approach in general,2 and Turretin in particular,3 there is a record of near silence about Junius and Mastricht, the treatment of the archetypal-ectypal division by Asselt being a notable exception.4 The lack of secondary literature is glaring in light of three functions that this historical trajectory could play: (1) as a source for the debate between Classicalists and Presuppositionalists concerning natural theology in the tradition; (2) as a source for the broader discussion on how Reformed theological method might bear fruit on the later, more developed field of religious epistemology; and (3) as a study in how to maintain orthodoxy in a tradition via a proper diagnosis of the essence of false theology.
Having noted the relative silence in the scholarly record, one early clue comes to us in a statement by Asselt:
“It may well be that Reformed thought holding up the salvation of mankind as the end of theology went too far. Theology ought, after all, to be concerned with God.”5
In this one excerpt, we discern a connection between the Reformed soteriological axe wielded against a kind of “natural theology” and the exposed roots of orthodox theology as such. What I want to suggest, moving beyond Asselt’s observations, is that those roots of theological method are planted within the rich philosophical soil of realism. Junius, Turretin, Mastricht wind up taking up this soil and holding it up by other names. That metaphysical framework will be our link between natural theology as the essence of orthodoxy.
However, there is still some truth to the observations that the Reformed Scholastics displayed ambiguity on natural theology. It is unnecessary to swing the pendulum against the “anti-natural-theology” thesis to the other extreme that the Reformed Orthodox “took the same view” of natural theology as did medieval Thomists, for example. The record is one of unfinished production. By inheriting an essentially Scotist take on realism, as well as elements of voluntarism when it comes to the definition of theology, the Reformed prolegomena suffered various weak points against the onslaught of early modern thought.
All of that to say that support for the thesis will move from medieval sources, to an analysis of the relevance of realism and natural theology to theological method, to finally the primary texts themselves. The standard Reformed Scholastic method was to address questions of natural theology within the larger genus-differentia divisions of archetypal-ectypal theologies and true-false theologies.6 These will take up our third and fourth sections. It is in this process that we will start to see the link between relativizing natural theology and lack of clarity on the objective character of theology. The final section examines how our three cases studies attempted to diagnose the essence of theology turning false.
MEDIEVAL SOURCES
Some qualifications about continuities and discontinuities should be made. The Muller thesis is firmly fixed in several respects: scholasticism and humanism are not to be viewed as enemies; Aristotle was not dispensed with by the Reformed; Calvin was not at odds with later Calvinists; and those later systematizers had not settled into a rationalist-deterministic system revolving around predestination. Likewise, the characterization by Plantinga and Wolterstorff that the Reformed tradition has been overwhelmingly negative toward natural theology is entirely misleading.7 On the other hand, there were genuine discontinuities. To the extent that we fail to recognize these for what they were, we are bound to stagnate in our further studies of Post-Reformation dogmatics.
For example, there were real criticisms and qualifications of the medieval synthesis. While that word “scholasticism” is not used in any pejorative fashion, Mastricht’s reading of Thomas Aquinas on scientia as “perfect contemplation of God”8 seems at least vulnerable to being a misreading. Asselt adds that Mastricht “followed Calvin” in being critical of Scholastic theology, but observes that the “criticism was on the content of the theology, not on its method.”9 Failure to account for these discontinuities can lead to a distorted recovery of classical modes of thought in the early Reformed tradition. We can begin to see this in the matter of defining theology.
While Aquinas famously argued in the Summa Theologica that “Sacred doctrine is a science,”10 in his Commentary on Sentences I, there is some relevant nuance. Theology is theoretical first, and thus scientia. This is seen in that “the noblest of sciences is sought for its own sake. Practical sciences are not sought for their own sake, but for the sake of a work.”11 However, Thomas also says this is a wisdom, and that because it addresses every human perfection.12 At least at this point he is at one with Mastricht.
A few things are important to note about the Thomistic breakdown. First, both theory and practice had their “science,” in that there was a theoretical science and a practical science. In other words, it is too simple to pit “practice” and “wisdom” against “theory” and “science.” There is more overlap in Thomas’s conception. This at least suggests a great deal more nuance than the idea that Thomistic theological method issues forth into mere intellectual apprehension of objective essence. He seems only to have been saying that while wisdom is more that science, it is never less. But theology itself is “speculative rather than practical, because it is more concerned with divine things than with human acts, though it does treat even of these latter.”13
Two ideas associated with John Scotus Duns were influential, though in a somewhat indirect way. Those two ideas are univocity and voluntarism. I say that this influence is “indirect” because the Reformed Scholastics generally agreed with Thomas on the doctrine of analogical predication. They also tended to see the problem with a voluntarist doctrine of God, that of privileging the divine will over against the divine intellect (or divine nature as a whole).
However, due to the fixation on restraining the claims of natural theology, the primacy of will over intellect came in through the side door, so to speak.
Tracing this out in great detail would be a separate project. For our purposes, it is enough to note Asselt’s rooting of the archetypal / ectypal structure back to Scotus.14 Likewise with the distinction between that perfect theology in itself and “our theology” which is finite and imperfect15: a Scotist influence which Muller also detects.16 Polanus even made this connection in Junius’s own day, citing in particular the commentary of Lombard’s Sentences by Scotus.17 The relevance is that as divine and human knowledge became an increasingly “unbridgeable gulf” so too would the corresponding pairs of theology and philosophy, revelation and reason, wisdom and knowledge, and the practical and the speculative.
Now we move into First Philosophy. Scotus defended a brand of realism, but not the same as the Thomist sort. Realism is the metaphysical doctrine maintaining that universals—e.g. oneness, justice, truth, beauty, goodness—are not merely names that we invent (Nominalism) but that these must be eternal, immaterial, and immutable realities.18 Now without getting into the details of Thomas’s exact brand of realism, what matters is that it was wholly consistent with his doctrine of analogy.
For example, when we say that “God is good” and that “Man is good,” the predicate term good possesses neither exactly identical meaning (univocal) between the subjects, nor is it without any common meaning (equivocal) between the two. Rather, the two uses of the predicate term are sufficiently like each other for the common field between Creator and creature to be intelligible. That sufficient likeness is analogy. Now Scotus defended realism on a different ground. He held that we cannot predicate a subject of the same genus except univocally. He defined univocal predicates between two things “so that to affirm and deny it of one and the same thing would be a contradiction.”19
At this point, we ought to rule out a thesis that could be confused with my own. Roman Catholic authors will often charge the Reformed tradition with embracing nominalism and thus compromising the Western philosophical commitment to objective truth. While there are some parallel threads to this notion in what I am saying, it is also misleading. Copleston is among those who point out that William of Occam may not have actually held to the crass nominalism that is often attributed to him.20 For another, Luther was really the only Reformer of note in whom one can discern significant nominalist threads. More crucially, however, there is nothing at the core of Reformed theology that requires any metaphysical view other than the most robust form of realism.
At any rate, it was nominalists who would more obviously separate philosophy and theology.21 The rejection of universals is simultaneously a denial that there is a common field of metaphysical essence and thus a real unity of truth.
Now voluntarism made inroads not in theology proper but in theological method. Simply put, Thomists stress the intellect over the will. Scotists stress the will over the intellect. Why would any of the Reformed have sided with Scotism on this point? If one was emphasizing the practical dimension of theology as wisdom, then the sphere where the will participates in theology is broader than the sphere of mere insight with the mind. Asselt observed a general trend in the course of seventeenth-century prolegomena.
With practical sciences there is a method both analytical and inductive, which, “does not begin with knowledge of the subject that is to be studied, but rather with the end (finis) at which the particular practical science is aimed, after which the means (media) to that end are treated.”22 This “analytical” method came out of Padua and was advocated by Vermigli, Zanchi, Zabarella, and Keckermann.23 To set the course of theological method according to the ends of the whole soul can eschew many questions concerning the objectivity of theological truths in themselves. Such truths are true in their own right, quite apart from our practical response to them.
We will see how analytical-voluntarist method was appropriated with the definition of theology given by Junius. He says that theology is “wisdom concerning divine matters.”24 Note his reason. It encompasses “intellect, knowledge, and saving experience.”25 Although more holistic, this represents a preference against Thomas’s notion of theology as a science. With Mastricht, theology is “the doctrine of living for God through Christ.”26 Such has precursors in Ramus, Perkins, and Ames.27 But this will loom large in the TPT, because if the “object” of theology is not merely God, as to a science, but to one’s whole life to God in Christ,28 then the seeds of what is false will be more holistic as well.
Although this could be fruitful in giving insight into a fuller “psychology” of embracing error, it may be asked whether this is properly theological in the same sense. Interestingly, Bavinck would take issue with both Ames and Mastricht over this.29
As one last footnote to Junius’s appropriation, it was observed by Asselt that he saw in Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine a preference of practical wisdom over theoretical science.30 But both the context and Thomas’s reliance on Augustine (On the Trinity, 14)31 suggest that Augustine’s eternal things and Thomas’s theoretical things were one and the same.
(#ReformedOrthodoxy #ReformedScholasticism #Junius #Turretin #Mastricht #realism #prolegomena)
1. Franciscus Junius, A Treatise on True Theology (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2014); Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, Volume 1 (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 1992); Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, Volume 1: Prolegomena (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2018)
2. Martin I. Klauber, “Reason, Revelation, and Cartesianism: Louis Tronchin and Enlightenment Orthodoxy in Seventeenth-Century Geneva,” Church History, Vol. 59, No. 3 (Sep., 1990), 326-339.
3. Sebastian Rehnman, “Theistic Metaphysics and Biblical Exegesis: Francis Turretin on the Concept of God,” Religious Studies, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Jun., 2002), pp. 167-186.
4. Willem van Asselt, “The Fundamental Meaning of Theology: Archetypal and Ectypal Theology in Seventeenth-Century Reformed Thought,” WTJ 64 (2002) 319-35.
5. van Asselt, Introduction to Reformed Scholasticism (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2011), 98.
6. van Asselt, “The Fundamental Meaning of Theology,” 320.
7. Michael Sudduth, “Revisiting the ‘Reformed Objection’ to Natural Theology,” European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 2 (2009), 39.
8. Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, I, 106.
9. van Asselt, Introduction to Reformed Scholasticism, 67.
10. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I. Q.1, Art. 2
11. Aquinas, Selected Writings, 59.
12. Aquinas, Selected Writings, 51-53, cf. 60.
13. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I. Q.1, Art. 4
14. van Asselt, Introduction to Reformed Scholasticism, 119.
15. van Asselt, Introduction to Reformed Scholasticism, 124.
16. Muller, PRRD, I:227, 387.
17. van Asselt, “The Fundamental Meaning of Theology,” 322.
18. F. C. Copleston, Medieval Philosophy (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1961), 34-41.
19. Duns Scotus, Philosophical Writings, 20.
20. Copletston, Medieval Philosophy, 126-30.
21. Copleston, Medieval Philosophy, 15, 121.
22. van Asselt, Introduction to Reformed Scholasticism, 96.
23. van Asselt, Introduction to Reformed Scholasticism, 95-97.
24. Junius, A Treatise on True Theology, 99.
25. Junius, A Treatise on True Theology, 100.
26. Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, I, 64, cf. 98.
27. Muller, PRRD, I.155, 333, 344-45.
28. Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, I, 101, 105.
29. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, I.35
30. van Asselt, “The Fundamental Meaning of Theology,” 327.
31. Aquinas, Selected Writings, 60.
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