Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order (1)

I begin here a series of posts on Margo Todd’s 1987 book, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order. The book is a corrective on the (still popular) scholarship of the 1960s and 1970s. The text below includes her thesis. If puritans were a self-conscious community of zealous religious reformers, they were also possessed of …

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. …