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 …

Natural Theology 1: Toward Clarity and Apologetics

Muller goes on at some length about distinctions among archetypal and ectypal theologies, and I may or may not return to that topic, but next in his queue is the question of “natural theology”. Commenting on “Calvin’s view of general and special revelation”, Stephen cited Warfield “that while fallen man continues to receive natural revelation …

How Reformed Scholasticism differed from Medieval Scholasticism

For the Orthodox Reformed writers working in the generations after the Reformation, “scholasticism” was a method of doing things, not an appropriation of earlier doctrines. These writers and theologians worked with the “broad brush” provided by the Reformers, as they sought to “establish … systematically the normative, catholic character of institutionalized Protestantism.” The term scholasticism …

Reformed “Orthodoxy”: Toward Definition

Richard Muller describes a two-phased process: first, the early reformers sought to correct “a host of abuses and nonscriptural doctrinal accretions” that they tried to correct. And second, the later writers, and indeed the process of “confessionalization” (the writing of and attempts to organize their lives by confessions), sought to “provide definitions of all doctrines …

More Definitions of Terms

As I continue to work through Richard Muller’s “Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics”, I’ll likely be stumbling across a lot of names and concepts that simply aren’t familiar to 21st century believers. So it’s good that Muller helpfully explains a lot of these terms. A comment is also necessary here concerning the terms used throughout the study. …