Getting the Starting Points Right

Richard Muller has provocatively titled his section on “the beginnings of prolegomena” as “Setting the Stage after the Production—on the Construction of Prolegomena”. We exist in our own time (just as the post-Reformation writers existed in their own time). The challenge for Christians today (as was the challenge for them, in their day) was, “what …

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 …