top of page
Reformed Classicalist

Turretin's God and Gospel: Part 1

RTS Papers / Turretin's Institutes / Spring 2018

***Citations are by volume and then page number of the P&R edition.


Francis Turretin (1623-1687) may have been the greatest theologian that “nobody’s ever heard of.” Naturally a student of historic Reformed theology will know the name, and perhaps have even read some excerpts. This is especially true about his doctrine of justification. Turretin became professor of theology in Geneva at the Academy that was founded by Calvin a century earlier. His most enduring work, the Institutes of Elenctic Theology, was a series of disputations written at the request of many who wished to obtain resolution on the main controversies of the day. The Institutes are divided into three volumes. Each volume is divided into a series of topics, and each topic further divided into various questions. Its form is a hybrid of the Scholastic method of Thomas with the more polemical style of Calvin. Like the magisterial Reformer, there was also more reliance on the support of biblical texts. We find him always clarifying: “The question is not x … but rather the question concerns y.” But always in the background lurk the Socinians, Remonstrants, Papists, and even occasionally the Anabaptists and Jesuits.


Controversy and structure aside, what drives the present thesis is the way in which Turretin’s “Reformed classicalism” speaks to our present moment in theology. In the Institutes, classical theology provides form to the gospel. By this I mean something more than simply to say that theology proper makes soteriology. That is generally the case in all doctrinal systems.

More than that, Reformed theology in the classical mode insists that God’s method of salvation is exactly what it is, at every point, because God is eternally who he is.

The conception that this paper will assume of classical theology, and as expressed by Turretin, will have in view both (1) a classical theological method and (2) a classical understanding of certain divine attributes. The three attributes in view will be among those most maligned by theistic philosophers in recent times: simplicity, eternality, and immutability. To defend these three classical attributes is to maintain that God is free from the creaturely limitations of division, succession, and change. Turretin held to these as necessary to the very existence of God. Other related attributes such as aseity, impassibility, infinity, and pure actuality are of great interest, but will have to remain at the periphery.


With his theological method and idea of God firmly established, we will then turn to three elements which logically follow: covenant, atonement, and justification. The way in which these three soteriological concepts follow the theological foundation will show us why method is important for Turretin. There is an absolute kind of doctrine and a consequential kind of doctrine. Some things we will find necessary to the very core of Christian truth. Among those Turretin will divide between what is absolutely necessary, because they are in God, and what is consequentially necessary, that which flows from God. Altogether, this essay will be divided into the following:

(I.) Theological Method — How We Must Proceed; (II.) Theology Proper: What Must Be in God; (III.) Covenant; (IV.) Atonement; (V.) Justification.


It may be thought that the section on theological method is extraneous to my thesis linking Turretin’s theology proper to his soteriology; but I contend that the whole way of doing theology within early Reformed dogmatics is necessary to review. To ground our soteriology wholly in our doctrine of God seems increasingly arbitrary among the postmoderns. Thus the order, no less than the substance, needs to be justified.

THEOLOGICAL METHOD


The two greatest philosophical casualties within the postmodern era have been “realism” and “foundationalism.”


Without bogging the paper down in definitions, I am aware that philosophers will often categorize everyone from Plato down to the Scholastics into categories such as “extreme realists” and “moderate realists,” and that many Christian academics today will identify as “critical realists.” I will refrain from critique of such categorizations, but will simply state my opinion that Augustine provides a way to an unassailable, monotheistic realism. This is my own position, and there are very strong hints of it in Turretin, especially in his distinction between the archetype (archetypon) and the ectypes (ektypa) — cf. I.312


Likewise with the “classical foundationalism” of the Enlightenment. Its downfall was not that some truths really are more foundational than others, but rather in its naive reductionism of knowledge to subjective starting points — whether an axiom or a unit of “sense data” that a sufficient number of “selves” considered to be “self-evident.” Prior to the Enlightenment, starting points were conceived as objects of knowledge (metaphysics) rather than as performances of knowing (epistemology, subjectively defined) — so God is foundational to the world. The attributes of God are foundational to the outward acts of God, etc.


Everything I want to say about Turretin’s prolegomena material can be reduced to these two old pillars of Western thought in one way or another. Granted that various pagans have had their own version of these; nevertheless, there is a distinctly Christian variety of both. A concise summary of how these functioned in theological method can be made as follows.


First, to realism, classical theology held that all created particulars are what they are because of either (1) attributes of God or (2) ideas in the mind of God. This is monotheistic realism: i. e. universals, such as beauty, goodness, justice, oneness, etc., are either divine attributes or divine ideas; and the latter is rooted in the former. Psalm 19:1-2 and Romans 1:19-20, in addition to being texts supporting general revelation, imply that created particulars receive all of their sense from the invisible things of God.


Second, to foundationalism, classical theology proceeded as if some truths were more necessary than other truths. This was because the objects that such doctrines were about were more necessary as being, or else more necessary within the decree of God, than more contingent objects. This too is scriptural. Paul’s argument to the Corinthians is a case in point. The very possibility of the resurrection in general determines Christ’s resurrection in particular. Following from this, Christ’s resurrection, as the firstfruit, determines our resurrections as a consequence (cf. 1 Cor. 15:12-19). Right order largely answers to rightly perceiving the order of being.


What Turretin does in the first topic, in Volume I, is to set forth two things that situate my thesis. First, there is a true theology and a false theology, which will also imply a correct order and an incorrect order. Second, there are two principal sources for theological knowledge: general revelation and special revelation; and we will note that this division is not between reason (as if that meant “autonomous reason”) and revelation (as if that meant only the written word of God). Rather the two sources are the two fields of divine speech about divine objects: nature and Scripture.

Such a theological method is a Christian realism because the attributes and ideas of God (universals) are that which provide meaning to all of the things that have been made (particulars) [I.17-18]. These divine objects are what all the lesser objects are about.

And such a theological method is also a Christian foundationalism because all that is in God is, to put it simply, foundational to all of the effects of God. The effects are wholly dependent on their ultimate cause. The typical order of a systematic theology textbook is not arbitrary. It has to do with the subject matter at the start being determinative for that which follows. There will be overlap, but such will not disprove the rule.


How does Turretin speak of theology, true and false? He says that a false theology is one in which “the greater part is false and the errors fundamental” [I.4]. This draws attention to a theology’s scope and its critical points. As with articles, so with errors — not all are of the same necessity. Not all will disintegrate the system as fast (or even at all). There are three kinds of error, he says: against the foundation, about the foundation, and beside the foundation. The first directly contradicts the essential doctrine; the second overthrows it by implication, whether intentional or not; and the third is about a genuine non-essential.


So in the first two kinds there is a law of unintended consequences: “They who quietly rest in the terms of an implied contradiction where there is opposition [to an essential] … are to be regarded as overthrowing the foundation no less than those who directly attack it” [I.50]. But the key for true method is this: “The criteria for distinguishing fundamental and non-fundamental articles can be derived from the nature and condition of the doctrines themselves” [I.52].


How we understand the scope of theology determines how well we do it. He says there are three senses of “theology”: 1. metaphysical (“God in general”), 2. explicitly Christological, or else 3. the whole system of doctrine concerning God, contained in revelation. This third way, Turretin says, is the correct way to think of it because it takes in the whole and yet keeps God at the center (or the foundation). Turretin’s method has long been criticized as the embodiment of a general movement away from the spirit of the Reformation back to the Aristotelianism that characterized the medieval schoolmen. If such criticisms were consistent, they would have to say the same about everyone from Owen down to Shedd and Berkhof. At the heart of the criticism is the notion that faith is made subservient to reason. If generally revealed truths “come first” and are made a determinative factor in one’s theological method, then the fear is that reason is the judge in matters of faith. But he says, “we must observe the distinction between an instrument of faith and the foundation of faith” [I.25].


As we will see, he was not oblivious to the noetic effects of sin for thinking. For Turretin, “Although the human understanding is very dark, yet there still remains in it some rays of natural light and certain first principles, the truth of which is unquestionable. . . . These first principles are true not only in nature, but also in grace and the mysteries of faith. Faith, so far from destroying, on the contrary, borrows them from reason and uses them to strengthen its own doctrines” [I.29-30]. So general revelation is operative when studying special revelation.


It is true that special revelation evaluates our interpretation of general revelation; but it is also true that various intellectual derivatives of nature make sense of Scripture. In considering whether we should even use the word “theology” he resurrects the Augustinian distinction between sign (and word) and thing signified. For example, Christians often ask the question, “Is it biblical?” However there are two senses of a word being “in the Bible”: first, “as to sounds and syllables,” and second, “as to sense and the thing signified” [I.1]. Theology, he says, is only in the latter sense. The reason for this is that theology is a science and so treats “objectively” of God [I.2].


That there is a thing (res) behind the words, a reality that the words point toward, does not inherently devalue the word. He probes this further in Question 12 where he asks: Are doctrines to be proved only from the express word or also by good and necessary consequence? Turretin surveys the many heretics who have insisted that a thing be shown in exact letters or word order in the pages of Scripture. It is very telling that heretical positions so often demand exact word replication. But he replies that the orthodox “do not seek for the very letters, but the truth” [I.37].


But the moment we catch this distinction, we are acknowledging that the meaning of scriptural propositions, no less than the meaning of doctrinal propositions, are objects beyond the ink patterns and sound waves. These may be called “objects of reason,” not because reason is their source but because reason is the soul’s point of contact with them. But what elements of reason act upon the data of Scripture and nature to properly order how to think about God and his world? Those elements — logic, science, conscience — are products of general revelation, now in the service of more explicit and self-conscience theologizing. As Rehnman described this rational method: “reason and nature are, according to Turretin, perfected by the Word and by grace,” but likewise, “Supernatural truths conform to natural truths, and, therefore, erroneous opinions can be opposed by reason” [Rehnman, 264].

Note that this is not Scripture being conformed to nature (or reason), but rather our fallible ideas and statements about Scripture being corrected by logic, science, and conscience.

One implication for this is that natural theology is not simply about arguments for God’s existence: though Turretin includes a section on these. Natural theology, as the name would indicate, encompasses the study of God “in the things that have been made” (Rom. 1:20). He first affirms the legitimacy of natural theology, clarifying that the question is not soteriological [I.6]. In other words, Turretin was not resurrecting that “theology of glory” spoken of by Luther.


In a statement that may surprise today’s presuppositionalist, who has been taught to mistrust natural theology, he states, “Our controversy here is with the Socinians who deny the existence of any such natural theology … The orthodox, on the contrary, uniformly teach that there is a natural theology” [I.6]. Secondly, though, natural theology also helps integrate the data of scripturally derived theology. Principles of reason can be “used to exhibit the truth or falsity of conclusions in controversies of faith” [I.31]. “The question is not whether reason can of itself reach into the mysteries of faith … but whether it can judge of the contradiction of propositions” [I.32].


Ultimately, the objects of theology are “God and divine things.” This may be viewed either materially (thing considered) or formally (mode of considering). With Aquinas, theology must be entirely related to God as he is in himself; against Aquinas, theology must be also related to God as Covenant LORD. This perfectly expresses how Turretin is a compound of Thomas and Calvin. The latter’s twofold knowledge of God affirmed this very balance: to know God accurately as Creator, we must also know him as our Redeemer, and vice versa.


Some may criticize Turretin for being an early product of the Enlightenment: a rationalization of the Reformed faith. It should be pointed out in response that he shows great awareness of the relationship between one’s covenant status and epistemology. Unlike the way K. Scott Oliphint would see this same relationship today, the covenant status of mankind outside of Christ, for Turretin, does not vitiate the objective truth made known [Oliphint, 35-36, 41-47]. Within his section on the covenant, he separates the general knowledge of God from the saving knowledge, but does not thereby allow the general knowledge to be falsified [II.13].


3 views0 comments

Comments


bottom of page