What is “theology”? Richard Muller shows how the Reformed Orthodox began to define the term in using some pre-existing categories; in doing so, he also fleshes out the difference between an epistemology of Thomas Aquinas and that of other writers.
A. To “define theology”: Muller writes:
The theologies of the Reformers, particularly those that took the form of loci communes, did offer a finely conceived approach to the extraction of topical materials from Scripture and to the gathering of these materials into the topics or loci and did offer a refined sense of method and order for the organization of the loci, in accord with the humanist models of the era.
Still, there remains a formal difference between the large scale theologies of the second generation Reformers and the major dogmatic compendia of their successors, a difference identifiable in part by an increasingly detailed theological definition of the task of theology.
Whereas all of the writers just mentioned devoted some attention to the issue of the human knowledge of God and to the issue of scriptural revelation, none of them saw fit to discuss the character of theology as an intellectual discipline set in the context of a finite world and accommodated to the forms of human knowing: none, in short, define theologia (Muller, R. A. (2003). Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise And Development Of Reformed Orthodoxy; Volume 1: Prolegomena To Theology (2nd ed., pp. 221–222). Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic).
Read more.
No comments:
Post a Comment