Pagan Civil Righteousness

The following are quotes from Reformed theologians on the possibility of pagans achieving civil righteousness (see my previous post on the subject). “In political life even an infidel may be called just, innocent, and upright because of [their external and civil life of words, deeds and works], since they have “natural knowledge of and inclination towards …

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 …

The Breadth Of The Reformed Orthodox Phenomenon

The Calvinist philosopher Paul Helm has recently published a brief review or commentary on Oliver Crisp’s “Deviant Calvinism” on the discussion between “freedom of the will” and “state of grace”. He states the issue: “An attempt will be made to show not that there are two rival metaphysical views of human freedom side by side …

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 …

The Geographic Expansion of Post-Reformation Orthodoxy

International dimensions and interrelationships in the rise of Reformed orthodoxy. It is also during the early orthodox period that Reformed theology assumed truly international dimensions. The systems of Calvin, Vermigli, Musculus, and Bullinger had extensive circulation not only in Switzerland but also in German Reformed territories, the Netherlands, and England. Writers of the third and …

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 …

From Reformers to Reformed Theology

There is a bit more to say in the digressions on Aristotle but I wanted to get back to Richard Muller’s Post Reformation Reformed Dogmatics. Muller seems to have been attempting to provide a thorough understanding of the ways that the theology of the Reformers became more complicated and sophisticated than merely polemics with Roman …

Richard Muller’s Operating Assumptions

Among other things, Muller is going to look for, and find, continuities among the Medieval church, the Reformation, and the “Post-Reformation” Reformed writers. An operating assumption of the work has consistently been that the theology of the Reformers is not utterly identical to the theology of their orthodox successors, and that continuity between the theologies …

What is ‘the church’? What was ‘the church’?

“The Lazy Man’s Way” In asking the question “what is the church?” in the context of 2000 years of church history, we have to also ask the question “what was the church?” And in asking the question “what was the church?” we have to also further ask the question, “what was the church at different …

More on the nonsensical distinction between “Mortal Sins” and “Venial Sins”

There is still a bit of a discussion going on, in a thread that’s several months old, between a Protestant writer Curt Russell, and Bryan Cross, on the topic of sin. More specifically, it involves the nonsensical distinction between “mortal sins” and “venial sins”. I know, I know, the interlocutor is “Curt” Russell”, not “Kurt” …