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Reformed Classicalist

The Definition of Theology: Part 1

I.1.i. The Classical Definition


1. Thomas Aquinas gave us the classical definition of theology as the science of God and all other things in relation to God. More specifically, he added, it is the “doctrine of God, primarily, and of creatures according to the respect in which they are related to God as to their source and end.”1 Since this is the definition we will be defending, we need to examine each part. Note that there are three main parts: (i.) Theology is a science; (ii.) Its chief Object is God; (iii.) All other objects of this, or any other, rational science must derive all of their meaning in reference to their First and Final Cause: namely God.


Augustine and Peter Lombard are conceived, by Bavinck, to have a wholly different definition, dividing theology between things and signs, the former being God and the primary things of God, the latter resting in the sacraments. Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine and Lombard’s Sentences appear to be making a grander argument about the nature of God and biblical interpretation to leave things at this, and thus I do not find Bavinck’s summary to be helpful at this point.2 Consequently it is my position that the definitions of Augustine, Anselm, Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas, and the best of the Reformed Orthodox are to be understood as constituent elements of a unified definition.


2. To which genus does theology belong? The problem arises once a definition of theology has been given. From Aristotle, five genera of intellectual dispositions were assumed: 1. Understanding and intelligence (intelligentia), 2. Knowledge or science (scientia), 3. Wisdom or discernment (sapientia), 4. Prudence or discretion (prudentia), and art or technique (ars).3 The position of the Reformed Classicalist is that theology is a SCIENCE. Among the Reformed Orthodox this had the agreement of Daneau, Trelcatius, Perkins, Stoughton, and Walaeus.4 Some among the orthodox have argued that theology is more like WISDOM than science, and this for an understandable reason.

Concisely stated, wisdom is truth for life. On the definition of eternal life given by Jesus—that they know you the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (Jn. 17:3)—it must follow that theological knowledge, above all kinds, ought to be directed toward reconciliation with God and that everlasting blessed state.

Such proponents of this latter definition among the Reformed Orthodox include Junius, Scharpius, Polanus, Alsted, and Leigh.5 It is interesting that those who most rigorously brought the Reformed prolegomena in line with scholastic method and questions cast the discipline as sapientia over scientia. While wisdom is never without knowledge, wisdom is that rightly ordered knowledge for all of life and especially toward man’s chief end.


Thus to speak of a wisdom at the expense of science is a category mistake. The position of “wisdom-not-science” is undercut in this: that even this proper use of knowledge is rightly ordered in relation to an object of the mind, and so, considered as an intellectual discipline is a knowledge to that extent. If, in order to argue that theology is really wisdom, we appeal to the classical use of habitus mentis, then while wisdom may be preferable for theological “use,” such is to deviate from the discipline of theology per se.


3. “What is science?” asked R. L. Dabney: “Knowledge demonstrated and methodized.”6 Again, the word science is derived from the Latin for “knowledge” (scientia). But before such knowledge can be according to either demonstration or method, we must establish that there is such a real knowledge. There is, in the first place, the knowledge of God in all creation. We call this general revelation. However we are not yet to that natural theology that studies the communication of general revelation. Where Paul most clearly speaks of it, there is immediately a problem, since he discusses this knowledge in the context of fallen man: “For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened” (Rom. 1:21). Nevertheless, real knowledge does not become non-knowledge when it is distorted and abused. If that was all that Paul said, the theologian would be of all men most miserable. However there is also a spiritual knowledge: the theology of the regenerate;

For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual (1 Cor. 2:11-13).

That Aristotle used “theology” as a synonym for “metaphysics” is equally unimportant. For metaphysics is the study of first things. God alone is the first being: the only being who has being in himself, and thus the real end of a pure use of metaphysics. W. G. T. Shedd said that, “The true method of investigation in any science in natural. It coincides with the structure of the object … The true method of investigation is logical. Nature is always logical, because in nature one thing follows another according to a preconceived idea and an established law.”7


It will help us to know that Shedd meant by the word NATURE its primary sense of predication and not the physical world per se. So to say that God “has a nature” is only to say that that God is real and, as such, has an essence: a way that he is. Taken as a whole, Shedd’s two points require that theology studies both an object of knowledge in itself (nature) and each of the relationships between various predicates of that subject (logic). That the object is real essence implies a science and that such knowledge is consistent with itself implies a logical science.


5. Theology has GOD as its essential object: “but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, declares the Lord” (Jer. 9:24). The etymology of the word suggests God as principal object. It is constructed of θεός and λόγος. Since logos has been taken as the “rational ordering principle” among the Greeks, it came to be used as a suffix (-logy) in English words such as anthropology, biology, psychology, sociology, and so forth. This denotes the “study of” any subject matter, or as philosophers would say it, any object.


6. A word about the meanings of objective versus subjective. To say that a science or study is “objective” is not to claim any unbiased or other privileged position of the student or human knower. The word objective has long been used in two ways, and, yes, one of them refers to a lack of prejudice in one’s subjective stance toward some proposed fact or controversy. But that use has taken up exclusive residency over the past few decades; and if it is used equivocally when the question is over the nature of the truth of things, then this actually perverts the meaning of the word into its very opposite. To say that some truth is “objective” in the classical philosophical sense means that this particular truth is wrapped up in the reality of the object, independent of our finite perspective. Whereas to say that this truth is “subjective” means that what we are calling “true” is really nothing more than the preference or opinion of one mind or group of minds and not the truth as it really is. In short, the former is a synonym for the way we commonly use the word “absolute” whereas the latter is a synonym for the way we similarly use the word “relative.”

The Bible conceives of God’s truth as objective-absolute, and not as subjective-relative: “Let God be true though every one were a liar” (Rom. 3:4).

Naturally any science undertaken by finite minds will have both a subjective and objective dimension: a knower and the thing known. Hodge divides these between “facts and ideas; or, facts and the mind.”8 But the great Reformed Scholastic, Francis Turretin, endorsed and elaborated upon Thomas’ definition, that it treats God “objectively,”9 that is, as he really is, independent of our minds.


7. Theology subordinates ALL THINGS to their relationship to God. This too is implied by the classical definition. All things are God-ordained things, God-explained things, and God-directed things, as follows from Romans 11:36, that, “from him and through him and to him are all things.” Elsewhere Paul more comprehensively says the same:

For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross (Col. 1:16-20).

Even the definition of Petrus Van Mastricht, which is in his title, Theoretical-Practical Theology (1682) assumes that the practice of life is defined by the character of God. So even where wisdom crowns the completed project of theology, the exercise itself is a science as a motion directed to its end. This is exemplified in the letters of Paul in which, as a rule, he sets forth the doctrine first and application second. So it is a live issue of historical theology to investigate whether Bavinck was right to see a shift toward subjectivism among the “further reformations” of the Dutch Reformed and English Puritans.10


So William Ames preceded Mastricht in defining theology as “living for God through Christ, religion, and the worship of God.”11 No doubt theology should always have this experiential posture toward the God whom we contemplate, but our posture, however pleasing to God, is not equal to God, nor is it even the completed journey of the finite theology. In this way the issues of kinds of theology and kinds of knowledge were debated among the Reformed Orthodox as inseparable from the definition of theology.



1. Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologica. I. Q.1. Art.3,7

2. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics. I.34

3. Richard Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, Volume One (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2003), 325.

4. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, I.333.

5. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, I.333; cf. 157.

6. R. L. Dabney. Systematic Theology. 6

7. W. G. T. Shedd. Dogmatic Theology. 43

8. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology. I.1.1

9. Francis Turretin. Institutes of Elenctic Theology. I.2

10. Bavinck essentially agrees with Thomas’ definition and aptly dissects Kant’s rebellion against knowledge of God’s essence, but then he dichotomizes objects in the world and objects of eternity. There is a way to mean this that is absolutely correct. We need, however, to keep an eye on it, especially in light of how in our day, those in New Calvinist circles, following Frame, relegate “objects” and “facts” to what is called the situational perspective, namely, in the world, as if the primary (or exclusive) meaning of objective facthood is being-in-the-world (or as phenomena), rather than being-as-such. In short, we must watch to see whether or not there are seeds of anti-Realism in Bavinck and in the whole stream of thought after him. The exact quote from Bavinck is: “not reality but truth, not the real but the ideal, the logical, the necessary” - RD. I.37

11. William Ames. The Marrow of Theology. I.1

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