Fudging Aristotle: A Digression (Part 7): Logic and Categories

[Subtitle: How Aquinas Fudged Aristotle to Settle Transubstantiation]: In recent posts, I’ve cited Willem van Asselt with an overview of the Works of Aristotle, and also Arthur Lovejoy noting that “the God of Aristotle had almost nothing in common with the God of the Sermon on the Mount”. But that doesn’t mean that Aristotle didn’t …

Fudging Aristotle: A Digression (Part 6): Fudging God?

“The Roman Communion is a creature of the 14th century and even more profoundly, of the 16th century (Trent). The sacramental system she reveres is a 14th century invention. As late as 9th century no one knew anything about 7 sacraments. Ask Radbertus and Ratramnus, and ask the latter about transubstantiation; he thought it was …

Fudging Aristotle: A Digression (Part 5): The Starting Point

In this series, and following the work of Richard Muller (“Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics”), I’ve been making the claim that the Reformed Orthodox writers, who wrote in the two centuries following the Reformation, borrowed from Aristotle’s methods, but not much at all from his own lines of thinking. As a reference for those who may be …

Fudging Aristotle: A Digression (Part 3): Borrowing methods, not concepts

In two recent blog posts describing the methodology of the Reformed Orthodox writers, I noted first that it was “nominally Aristotelian”, stressing, however, that it was so because that methodology was ancient and familiar, and second, that while they employed that methodology, they did so while avoiding Aristotelian concepts, employing Scriptural “content” instead. William J. …

Fudging Aristotle: A Digression (Part 2): “’Not Informed by God’s Revelation”

Ever since Tertullian famously asked “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” the relationship between theology and philosophy has been full of ups and downs. And while Christianity emerged from Old Testament Judaism, in Palestine, Christianity itself entered a world that was largely Greek-speaking and “Hellenistic” – that is, one that was shaped by Greek …

Fudging Aristotle: A Digression (Part 1)

My earlier blog post on the formation of Reformed orthodoxy closed with the discussion of “variety and development” among the Reformed Orthodox, including “the scholastic method, the nominally Aristotelian philosophy (emphasis added), and the doctrinal content—all, of course, within certain confessional bounds”. The scholastic method itself varied in the course of the two centuries of …

Aquinas gets this wrong, and much confusion follows

There are a lot of moving parts in this discussion, I admit. Here we have a discussion about a concept, in which the discussion moves from Aristotle to Aquinas to Scotus to Luther to Calvin to Turretin and Warfield. In my recent blog post, Luther’s Theology of the Cross and Metaphysics, I cited Muller as …

From Reformers to Reformed Theology

There is a bit more to say in the digressions on Aristotle but I wanted to get back to Richard Muller’s Post Reformation Reformed Dogmatics. Muller seems to have been attempting to provide a thorough understanding of the ways that the theology of the Reformers became more complicated and sophisticated than merely polemics with Roman …

Trajectories in Aristotelianism and Rationalism in Early Reformed Orthodoxy

I am often asked, “at a time when there is a flood of people leaving Roman Catholicism, why does it seem that so many intellectuals seem to be moving in the opposite direction?” There are a number of reasons for this – some Anglicans are converting because of the rampant liberalism and decline in morality …