A Reformed Perspective on Natural Beauty

The universe is before our eyes like a beautiful book in which all creatures, great and small, are as letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God. ~ Belgic Confession of Faith Swiss Alps The Protestant Reformers spoke often of the beauty of creation. Indeed, natural beauty[1] plays an important role in some …

The Rise of Post-Reformation Systematics

I’ve been working through Richard Muller’s “Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics”. Some time ago, Muller was discussing the rise of “a revised scholasticism”, “as a result, not of doctrinal change, but of the participation of [Protestant] theological faculties in the academic culture of the age”, and as “a more suitable systematic vehicle in and through which to …

Natural Theology 3: Vermigli on the Natural Knowledge of God

Richard Muller rounds out the Reformers’s view of “natural theology” with a section on Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499-1562). Vermigli was a “Thomist-trained” Italian who, “of all the early Reformed codifiers of doctrine, produced the most extended treatment of the problem of the natural knowledge of God in relation to theology.” It is telling that “in …

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 …

Luther’s Theology of the Cross and Metaphysics

One of the elements of late medieval Scotist and nominalist theology that had a profound impact on Luther was its denial of any analogy between God and man and its consequent recognition of the impossibility of formulating a rational metaphysic concerning God. All knowledge of God must rest on authoritative testimony, primarily on that of …