The End of High Orthodoxy

High orthodoxy, then, is the era of the full and final development of Protestant system prior to the great changes in philosophical and scientific perspective that would, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, utterly recast theological system into new forms. There is perhaps some justification in dividing seventeenth-century orthodoxy into two phases. The first is …

Doctrine and Method in the Era of High Orthodoxy (ca. 1640–1685–1725)

1. General characteristics. The period following 1640 and extending, in two phases, into the beginning of the eighteenth century can be called the period of high orthodoxy, defined most clearly by further changes in the style of dogmatics. The architectonic clarity of early orthodoxy is replaced to a certain extent or at least put to …

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 …