MW's point is a good one. Those who articulate the "Great Tradition" as holding to Thomism or Realism are neither dealing with Christianity prior to the Reformation nor how it was exegetically and systematically developed in post-Reformation Reformed dogmatics. The dogmatics were neither purely Realist nor Nominalist.
Muller writes in PRRD-4:
4. Essence, attributes, and Trinity—issues of development, discontinuity, and continuity. When we raise the issue of continuity and discontinuity in the development of the Reformed understanding of God from the era of the Reformation into the era of orthodoxy, the stage is set for a discussion of a highly variegated and complex historical development, framed by a set of fairly stable basic exegetical and doctrinal assumptions on the one hand and a series of shifts in emphasis, alterations in approach to detail, changes in method, and differences in historical context on the other. Thus, on the side of change and what might be counted toward discontinuity, the expositions of the earlier Reformers, with several notable exceptions (viz., Musculus, Hyperius, and Hutchinson), tended toward rather brief expositions of the doctrine of God in which the language of essence and attributes was stated and a lengthy discussion avoided, whereas the expositions of the Reformed orthodox, beginning with the generation of Ursinus and Zanchi became increasingly lengthy and began, rather quickly, to draw overtly on the definitions and distinctions employed by the medieval scholastics. The methodological discontinuities are relativized to a certain extent by the presence of scholastic elements in the thought of the Reformers themselves and by the development of method throughout the later Middle Ages and late Renaissance, with the result that, if the methods of the Reformed scholastics were not identical with those of the Reformers, neither were they identical with those of the medieval scholastics.
On the side of continuity, there are the trajectories of biblical interpretation that pass through the Reformation into the era of orthodoxy, the notable respect for the results of the Reformers’ work of biblical interpretation, and the issue already alluded to at the beginning of this paragraph, namely, the stable doctrinal assumptions held by Reformers and orthodox alike, in accord with the churchly theological tradition. If, moreover, the orthodox theologians tended to develop concepts like simplicity and immutability or, in the case of the Trinity, personal properties and relations, in more detail than the Reformers had done, there remains, nonetheless, the continuity of the concept itself—a continuity running through the Middle Ages, into the Reformation, and into the era of orthodoxy. In the doctrine of the Trinity, there is a striking continuity of an Augustinian or Western line of argument, mediated through the medieval scholastics, codified at the Fourth Lateran Council and the Council of Florence, respected by the Reformers, and developed as well by the Reformed orthodox. Nor, indeed, on this point, is Calvin and exception: his trinitarianism does not read out as following a “Greek” rather than Western, Latin model.3
9 Despite, therefore, the changes in method of presentation and in density of argument brought on by the institutionalization of Protestant theology and by the debates of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, basic assumptions concerning the simplicity of God, the meanings of various attributes, and the patterns of definition of the Trinity remained constant.
Given this fairly constant set of basic assumptions, we conclude, therefore, that those scholars who have argued that the doctrine of the attributes provides, together with the doctrine of the eternal decree, the initial point of departure for a purely deductive system of theology have thoroughly misunderstood the Protestant orthodox system. Neither the doctrine of God nor any other
locus in Reformed orthodox theology was logically deduced—rather all the
loci were elicited from Scripture in the context of a long tradition of biblical interpretation that had, for centuries, worked in alliance with theological formulation. One is struck, not by a newness of logic in the Reformed systems, but by a massively traditionary pattern and substance that stands in the line of patristic orthodoxy, with the Augustinian tradition of the Middle Ages nuanced in various Thomistic, Scotistic, and sometimes nominalistic ways, and with the teachings of the Reformers. One is also struck by contextualization of these patterns in the seventeenth century, where the background for use of the traditionary materials is the shifting ground of early modern philosophy and the problems of deism, skepticism, and the new rationalism.
An example of this contextualization is found in the proofs of God’s existence, where elements of the Thomistic “five ways” are used in rhetorical rather than in formally demonstrative arguments. Given, moreover, that God has been identified as the
principium essendi of theology, the nominally Thomist a posteriori arguments no longer assume that God is not
per se nota, not self-evident: rather, in a structure of argument that is profoundly anti-Thomistic, the arguments assume that God, as
principium, is both self-evident and indemonstrable. In the Protestant orthodox model, the “five ways” (or remnants of them) serve, along with purely rhetorical arguments like the argument from universal consent, to confute the deist and the “practical atheist.” Similarly, the modified forms of the ontological argument—which can be understood against a distantly Scotist background—have been mediated to a few of the Reformed by Descartes and belong to the quest for indubitable
principia as well.
In the doctrine of God itself, we have seen an emphatic biblicism in the foundational use of divine names and a pronounced a posteriori element in the doctrine of the divine attributes. Thus, the orthodox Protestant emphasis on the will of God derives as much from the importance of the will of God in the temporal economy as from any abstract consideration of the being of God. What is more, the character of God’s will as just toward all mankind but merciful toward those elect in Christ represents as much a reflection founded on the scriptural revelation of an
ordo salutis—and then applied to the discussion of how God must be granting his revelation—as it does a preliminary speculation concerning the divine essence. As such, the doctrine of the divine attributes, as governed by the discussion of the distinction between the attributes, is concerned primarily to show that the nature of God is consistent with the pattern of divine revelation without ever being restrictively confined within it. There is also little or no evidence in the subsequent
loci of the orthodox system that their place in the system or their doctrinal content rests on a process of deduction: like the doctrine of the essence and attributes itself, the primary reason for the presence of these other doctrines in the orthodox system is that they were received from the tradition as elicited from the text of Scripture.
Similarly, Gründler’s assertion that the “christocentric orientation of Calvin’s thinking” gave way to a “metaphysics of causality” and, consequently, Reformed theology “ceased to be a theology of revelation,” simply does not fit the evidence.4
0 Had he presented Zanchi’s doctrine of God in full, Gründler would have found far more exegesis than his study indicates and, more to the point, far more interest in the Trinity and far less in metaphysics and causality per se—and had he offered a genuinely representative discussion of Zanchi’s
De natura Dei, he would have found far more interest in Trinity and Christology within Zanchi’s doctrine of the divine essence and attributes than his conclusion admits. And, of course, Zanchi did write extensive treatises on the Trinity and the Incarnation.
As for the simple contrast between, for example, Calvin’s
Institutes of the Christian Religion and Zanchi’s
De natura Dei or Turretin’s
Institutio theologiae elencticae, the former having no extended discussion of divine attributes, the latter offering a lengthy and detailed discussion, we note that there is a contrast but that it can be (and has been) much overdrawn. It is not the case that Calvin’s omission of the attributes was utterly characteristic of the Reformed theology of his day: his contemporaries Musculus and Hyperius offered extended discussion of the topic. There is also no correlation between what might be called a purely metaphysical interest and the expansion of discussion of various attributes: thus, the Reformers confessed but did not elaborate greatly on the concept of divine simplicity, and the Reformed orthodox did elaborate on the concept at length—but it is also the case that the divine holiness received little attention from the Reformers and a good deal from the orthodox. If discussion of simplicity is viewed as primarily metaphysical or speculative (a debatable point), it is clear that the discussion of holiness is primarily exegetical. In addition, as we have seen, the Reformed orthodox discussion of the attributes stands in broad exegetical continuity with the exegesis of the Reformation. Nor is it the case that the Reformed scholastic presentation of the attributes marks the only point at which the scholastics offered more extensive discussions than Calvin: they also discussed the covenant of grace and Christology more extensively. The orthodox discussions are more detailed; they are clarified and developed through use of scholastic method—but the doctrinal content of such topics as divine simplicity, eternity, omnipotence, and the divine affections in fact changed little. Indeed, the diversity of the later orthodox formulations reflects the diversity of the medieval background and, insofar as the Reformers themselves offer clarity on these issues, the diversity of the Reformation-era teaching as well.
The Reformed doctrine of the divine will offers an instructive example of continuity and development, a highly significant one given the emphasis placed on the orthodox doctrine of the divine will in the attempts of an older scholarship to argue discontinuity with the Reformers and a highly “speculative” or “metaphysical” interest among the orthodox.4
1 We have seen, in general, that the use of term “speculative” in this manner is not at all supported by the view of some of the Reformed that theology is a partially speculative discipline, given that the traditional usage
theologia speculativa did not indicate speculation in the sense implied by the modern scholarship.4
2 We have also noted the major a posteriori component of the Reformed doctrine of the divine essence and attributes. Even so, with specific reference to the divine will, examination of the teaching of the Reformers and of the Reformed orthodox reveals significant continuities. Both the Reformation and the post-Reformation writers taught a doctrine of the absolute, inalterable, and utterly free will of God apart from which nothing can exist. In addition, they also argued a series of distinctions such as those between the ultimate
voluntas beneplaciti and the
voluntas signi, the effective and permissive willing of God, the antecedent and the consequent will. It is not as if the Reformers did not use such distinctions and the orthodox retrieved them from the medieval scholastics in discontinuity with the thought of the Reformation: rather, we have been able to indicate a continuous tradition of recourse to such distinctions extending from the Middle Ages, through the Reformation, into the era of orthodoxy. That tradition, moreover, contained various trajectories of understanding—such as one according to which God antecedently wills one thing and consequently, given his foreknowledge of human choice, wills another; and another according to which God does not alter his will but rather antecedently wills the grounds and conditions of salvation and consequent on his own determination wills to save some people only. Both the Reformers and their orthodox successors allowed the latter form of the distinction, not the former.4
3
There is a similar trajectory of development in the doctrine of the Trinity: except for the very early Reformation tendency to refrain from the use of traditionary terminology, there is a consistency of terminological use in the movement from Reformation to orthodoxy, a continuity of doctrinal interest, and a constant recourse to traditionary exegesis on the part of both Reformers and later orthodox. When, moreover, one examines the second-generation codifiers as a group, the potential contrast between an emblematically employed Calvin and various later writers like Keckermann and Burman on such issues as trinitarian metaphors disappears and a rather different picture emerges: rather than a movement from an antimetaphorical, antispeculative beginning to a metaphorical and speculative development of the doctrine, we can document the use of the metaphors by a minority of the writers, whether among the Reformers (notably Viret) or among the orthodox (Keckermann, Ainsworth, Burman). We also note that differences over this issue within the trajectory of Reformed orthodoxy were not a matter of great controversy.
There is also the issue of the relative uniformity of the doctrine of God in the Reformed orthodox systems: we have examined a large series of minor variations within the Reformed tradition, stemming from different trajectories of argumentation mediated through the eras of the Renaissance and the Reformation, but we have also registered a confessional consensus on such issues as middle knowledge and the relationship of the divine will to the contingent order. This relative uniformity must be measured against the diversity of the other
loci in the system, whether the variety of covenant formulations found among the seventeenth-century divines or the great diversity of Reformed eschatology in the era of orthodoxy. Quite simply, there was no neat deductive process by which the Reformed determined the shape or content of the remainder of their theological systems.
Finally, it is to be hoped that the detail and extent of the analysis of the whole Reformed doctrine of God—essence, attributes, and Trinity—has not obscured the initial and fundamental point that this is a single doctrinal
locus, not a series of
loci in which priority is given to reason, natural theology, and metaphysical speculation at the expense of an emphasis on the “personal” God who is the Trinity. That is a typical modern caricature of the older theology. We have seen that the Reformed orthodox were highly attentive to trinitarian issues in their discussions of the divine essence and attributes, just as they were highly attentive to the issues raised by discussion of essence and attributes in their analyses of the doctrine of the Trinity. The progress of the
locus was determined both by the movement of discussion from the truth of the existence of the subject of discussion (
An sit?), to the question of what the subject of discussion is (
Quid sit?), to the question of what sort of being is under discussion (
Qualis sit?). Nor does this order of discussion avoid what moderns have called the issue of personal identity, “Who,” as opposed to “What.” The issue of personal identity was, in fact, raised immediately with the initial discussion of essence, so typically introduced by a lengthy analysis of the biblical names of God. In addition, it is not only arguable that the older order of system does justice to the way in which the doctrine God connects with the remainder of the theological topics—namely by way of the discussion of the Trinity—it is also arguable that the oneness, soleness, and numerical singularity of the God who creates, sustains, and redeems the world is the fundamental datum of the biblical narrative and that the Trinity of this Godhead is the deeper truth that the church labored to construct out of the christological witness of the New Testament. The order of discussion in the older dogmatics, therefore, has a cogency that is lacking in the modern critique.
39 See above
2.1 (A.3).
40 Gründler, “Thomism and Calvinism,” p. 159.
41 Cf., for example, the often cited definition of Brian Armstrong, which notes among other things that Protestant scholasticism “will comprehend a pronounced interest in metaphysical matters, in abstract, speculative thought, particularly with reference to the doctrine of God. This distinctive Protestant scholastic position is made to rest on a speculative formulation of the will of God,” in
Calvinism and the Amyraut Heresy, p. 32.
42 See
PRRD, I,
7.3 (B).
43 See
PRRD, III,
5.4 (E.5–6).
