Seeing Things Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion

7 Scholasticism Revisited:Methodological Reflections on the Study of Seventeenth-century Reformed Thought

Scholasticism Revisited: Methodological Reflections on the Study of Seventeenth-­ century Reformed Thought willem j. van asselt The Primacy of Questions over Answers Historical theologians have commonly held that a rather negative connection exists between the two major intellectual movements in the Protestant world of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the Reformation and Protestant scholasticism. These scholars have condemned the writings of the Protestant scholastics as an unfortunate survival of medieval traditions that could be safely disregarded, and argued that the true spirit of Protestantism was expressed in the literature of the Reformers . Protestant scholastics were condemned without a hearing and labelled as empty “quibblers,” followers of a dead past who failed to understand the living problems of their new times. Characterized as the return of medieval dialectic and Aristotelian logic to the Protestant classroom, it was, therefore, considered a distortion or perversion of Reformation theology. Many recent works on the history of Protestant theology still repeat the common notion that scholasticism was a relapse into earlier “concept-splitting school philosophy,” giving some of the charges made against scholasticism by the Reformers a much more 154 7 Scholasticism Revisited   155   extreme meaning than they originally had. The scornful way in which Luther and Calvin treated some forms of late medieval scholasticism is thus taken as an overall hermeneutical principle for this approach to discerning theological truth. As a result, too many historians have read the whole period of post-­ Reformation theology exclusively in light of a modern aversion to scholasticism, and not on its own terms or in light of its own concerns and context.1 Thus, more than one hundred and fifty years of the history of Protestant theology were consigned to the museum of historical curiosities that are no longer worth studying, of use only to conservative Protestants who want to legitimize their own dogmatic prejudices. In this chapter I want to suggest that the antischolasticism of Reformation theology is a later invention and that the assumptions this view makes about Protestant and, especially, Reformed scholasticism have been called into question by recent research. Instead of trying to reduce everything to one issue—Reformation or scholasticism—we should try to develop a sound historical method not influenced by all kinds of prejudices against scholasticism. Problems in historical theology require , first and foremost, historical solutions. Although complete objectivity may be impossible to achieve, it should be the permanent aim and standard of the historian of theology. As Paul Oskar Kristeller observed: “It is easy to praise everything in the past which happens to resemble certain favourite ideas of our own time, or to ridicule and minimize­ everything that disagrees with them. This method is neither fair nor helpful for an adequate understanding of the past.”2 In a certain way, this new approach to Protestant scholasticism reflects the strategy promoted by Quentin Skinner in his historical study of moral and political theory. Following R. G. Collingwood, Skinner argues that in order to grasp the meaning of historical texts we have to ask “what their authors were doing in writing them.”3 Applied to the study of the texts of the Protestant scholastics, Skinner’s method of stressing “the primacy of questions over answers” can be very useful to debunk all kinds of doctrinal mythology surrounding the Protestant scholastic authors . His method implies that our attention should not be devoted primarily to individual authors but to the more general and theological discourse of their times: what issues they were addressing, and to what 156   Willem J. van Asselt extent they were accepting or questioning the prevailing assumptions or traditions of theological debate. In this essay, my main contention is that we should pay close attention to the argumentative context of the post-­ Reformation scholastics in order to rediscover their intentions. To put the point in another way: we need to understand why a certain position was taken up if we wish to understand the position itself. As Carl Trueman put it, “Reformed theology is expressed in historical texts, whether confessions, commentaries , catechisms, or systems; and these are historical actions which need to be understood in context, not isolated from that context and treated as self-­ understanding, autonomous artefacts.”4 Therefore, the claim made in this essay is that we should let the Reformed scholastics define for themselves what scholasticism stands for. For this purpose I will discuss some major methodological—and hence practical—implications for the study of Protestant...