Cambridge Companion to Reformed Theology

The reviewer has more of a "Confessional Calvinist" mindset than I do. However, the reviewer makes some useful points:

http://www.meetthepuritans.com/blog/book-review-cambridge-companion-to-reformed-theology

Scholasticism and the Gospel

https://frame-poythress.org/scholasticism-and-the-gospel/

"Beginner-level mistakes"

Responding to Craig's "Does God Have both Necessary and Contingent Properties?", Mark Jones, on Facebook, exclaimed: "Wow, does he even do theology? Like those are beginner-level mistakes."

Here's what Craig said:

Basically, what your question asks is whether God can have some of His properties necessarily and some of them contingently.  It seems to me that He can and does.  Those who deny this would typically appeal to the doctrine of divine simplicity, which in its strongest form asserts the identity of God with His properties. But so strong a version of the doctrine has no biblical basis, is unintelligible, and has no compelling arguments in its favor. Given that God is not in this radical sense a simple being, he can have a plurality of properties, some of which He has necessarily and some contingently.

For example, God is essentially existent, omnipotent, omniscient, eternal, good, and so on, and so has such properties in every possible world. But God has only contingently the properties of being the Creator of the universe, knowing what time it now is, being incarnate in Jesus Christ, being my Redeemer, and so on, since He has these properties only in possible worlds in which He wills to create a universe, which is the free and contingent choice of His will. Jews as well as Christians will recognize that God may have both sorts of properties. 

https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/question-answer/does-god-have-both-necessary-and-contingent-properties

According to Jones, Craig committed "beginner-level mistakes". Jones didn't bother to explain or correct Craig's alleged mistakes. He treats that as self-evident. Let's compare Craig's objection to this statement:

But it is very difficult to understand how a simple being could be free in the unconditional 'could have done otherwise' sense. If God is simple, then he is pure act in which case he is devoid of unrealized powers, potentialities or possibilities.  To act freely, however is to act in such a way that one (unconditionally) could have done otherwise, which implies unrealized possibilities. 

http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2012/01/dolezal-on-divine-simplicity-does-he-make-a-mysterian-move.html

Vallicella is raising the same basic objection as Craig. Does Jones think Vallicella is making beginner-level mistakes? Vallicella authored the entry on divine simplicity for the prestigious Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 

And here's yet another example:

But if His essence is identical with what he does, then He would become a different being as He did different things…It seems that there are all sorts of contingent truths about God. If he created freely, then He might not have done so, and that God is a creator is a contingent truth….But if God's power and His knowledge are identical to the eternal act of being which is his nature, how could He do and know other than He does and know without being other than God?

"There are possible worlds in which God wills not to create…" But it is very difficult to see how God in the actual world could be the same being as God in some other possible world, if (1) God in the actual world is identical to His eternal and immutable act in this world, (2) God in a different possible world is identical to His act in that world, and (3) God's act in the actual world is not identical to His act in the other possible world."

A second possibility is to deny contingency in God…Given God's nature He could not do other than He does. There is no contingency in God, so there are no other possible worlds, whatever we may be able to imagine." Kathrin Rogers, Perfect Being Theology (Edinburgh U, 2000), 32,34.

Once again, that's the same basic argument as Craig. Does Jones think Rogers is making beginner-level mistakes? 

Ironically, her proposal to relieve the tension preserves simplicity by ditching impassibility:

Any systematic philosophy of God which incorporates free choice on the part of creatures would have to hold that God is somehow affected by and responsive to something outside Himself (37-38). 

So she resolves the dilemma by sacrificing one fixture of classical theism (impassibility) to salvage another fixture of classical theism (simplicity). Given a choice between simplicity and impassibility, she opts for simplicity. Given those alternatives, I'd opt for impassibility. 

Pruss on God's simplicity

Some modern-day Calvinists are touting Thomistic simplicity. I'd like to partially interact with a sophisticated defense of divine simplicity:

http://alexanderpruss.com/papers/On3ProblemsOfDivineSimplicity.html

The Fourth Lateran Council teaches that God is a “substantia seu natura simplex omnino”—an “altogether simple substance or nature”—and the First Vatican Council reiterated the teaching. 

So faithful Catholics have to defend divine simplicity. Good thing Protestants aren't saddled with that precommitment.  

The doctrine of divine simplicity had better not say that mercy and justice, in general, are one and the same property. For that would make meaningless a claim that a friend of ours had exhibited more mercy than justice in some situation.  

i) I agree. However, it's hard to see how Pruss's denial in this regard differentiates his position from critics of simplicity like Frame, Craig, Plantinga, and Feinberg. Although he's defending simplicity, what he says here is consistent with what critics say.

ii) His position seems to be different from how simplicity is typically formulated by exponents. From what I've read, it's, in part, an inference. They infer that if God is identical with his attributes, then his attributes are mutually identical. The inference seems to be that if B is identical with A, and C is identical with A, then B is identical with C. 

Pruss is at liberty to dissent from that inference or formulation and strike out on his own, but in that respect he appears to be defending simplicity by taking issue with how that's typically expounded.  

Rather, the claim is that God’s mercy and God’s justice are the same ontologically. What makes it be true that Socrates is just? Surely it is something about Socrates, something that we might reasonably denote by “Socrates’ justice”, id est “that in virtue of which Socrates is just”. Socrates’ justice is not the same as Plato’s justice, because if they were the same, then the same thing would make it be true that Socrates is just as would make it be true that Plato is just. But if that were so, then it would follow that, necessarily, if Socrates is just, then that in virtue of which Plato is just exists, and hence Plato is just. 

The claim that God’s being merciful and God’s being just are identical is, I take it, the claim that the ontological basis of God’s being merciful is identical with the ontological basis of God’s being just. Or, in the above terminology, it is simply the claim that God’s justice is identical with God’s mercy. This does not entail that Cato’s justice is identical with Mother Teresa’s mercy, or even that Mother Teresa’s justice is identical with Mother Teresa’s mercy.

i) That's a coherent distinction. However, critics of simplicity could draw the same distinction. So I don't see how his distinction differentiates his position from those who deny simplicity. His explanation appears to be equally consonant with denying simplicity. 

ii) In fact, I don't see how his distinction is even related to the claim that "there is no ontological composition in God of any sort, whether of matter and form, or of essence and accident, or of this attribute and that attribute considered as ontologically distinct."

Even if his distinction is consistent with divine simplicity, how is that relevant to the question at hand? After all, his own analogy involves comparing attribute-agreement in and between composite beings: Plato and Socrates, Cato and Mother Teresa. How does his distinction demarcate an incomposite God from a composite God like Zeus? Couldn't a Greek polytheist say Zeus's justice is not the same as Cato's justice? 

If Curley freely chooses to take the bribe, then there is some time at which it was causally possible that he not take the bribe if offered it. Moreover, there is a time after which this is no longer causally possible—the choice has been made. Let t be the earliest time with the property that after t it is no longer causally possible that Curley take the bribe.  There is such a time. Before this time, Curley’s rejection of the bribe is causally open and after this time it is causally closed. Moreover, I will assume that this time t is associated with Curley’s decision to take the bribe. The decision happens at t. This is an assumption that might not hold, for it might be that at t Curley made some earlier libertarian-free decision, for example a decision to do whatever it takes to get ahead financially, which causally necessitated that he eventually make a causally determined decision to take the bribe.  In that case, the bribe-taking arguably inherits its freedom from the freedom of that earlier decision. But if we are to avoid a vicious regress, we will come to some decision with the property that the decision is made precisely at a time t such that after that time some deed is causally determined as far as Curley is concerned and before it it was not. This might not in fact be the decision to accept the bribe, but for simplicity I will assume it is.

Thus, at t there was a branching. Before t it was possible for Curley still to reject the bribe and after t this was no longer possible. There are now two models of free will. On the first model, one accepted by Nuel Belnap among others, at t the branching has not yet happened: it is still causally possible for Curley to reject the bribe.  It is only at t+d (for any d>0) that this is no longer possible. The time t is the last time at which matters are still open. On the second model, at t the branching has already happened: t is the first time at which matters are no longer open. I could give the argument for both cases, but that would make this talk unduly long. Instead, I will assume the first version to be correct, and for the purposes of making the talk self contained, I will say that for aught that we know, the first version is correct, and that should be all I need for my conclusions.  Anyway, similar arguments apply in the second case, but are more complicated.

Thus, at t Curley is deciding, but it is not yet true that he has decided. Let S be Curley’s state at t, i.e., the conjunction of all of Curley’s purely intrinsic properties at t (or, if we wish, the conjunction of all purely intrinsic properties occurrent up to and including time t). This state S occurs both in the actual world where Curley takes the bribe and in a possible world where he refuses it—I will call such a world “the alternate world”. Now, at any moment of time after t, the actual and the alternate worlds have already diverged.  Curley has already done something: something he is morally responsible for. Perhaps his hand has not yet reached out for the money; maybe his enraged voice has not begun to refuse the bribe. But he is now in a state such that he is set to take or is set to refuse the bribe. (I am simplifying of course by assuming he can’t also temporize.)  A deed has been done: his will has set into motion a causal chain leading up to the taking or the refusing of the bribe. Now the important thing to note is that the cause of the two different causal chains, the one in the actual world and the one in the alternate world, is the same as concerns intrinsic properties. Or the cause is Curley at t in state S.  Since this state contains all of Curley’s intrinsic properties at t, and these are the same in the actual and the alternate world, it follows that we have one and the same person in one and the same intrinsic state being in one world responsible for setting into motion one causal chain and in another, another.

But this seems to severely undercut the objection to divine simplicity based on the contingency of what God chooses. For we now see that one and the same person in one the same state could be in a position to initiate either of two incompatible causal chains. Moreover, note that Curley’s actual deciding was at t.  During the deciding itself there was no difference in his intrinsic properties between the actual and the alternate worlds. The difference only appeared extrinsically to the decision, though as a result of the decision.

While his analysis is interesting in its own right, I don't see how that solves the problem. Doesn't a different result require a differential will? So we have to take the explanation back a step. 

Scholasticism for Evangelicals

https://frame-poythress.org/scholasticism-for-evangelicals-thoughts-on-all-that-is-in-god-by-james-dolezal/

“Reformed Scotism”

John Duns Scotus

In response to my “Reformed Thomism” post, an “Unknown” commenter who identified himself as a “Reformed Scholastic” asked, “can you name one pre-20th century influential Scotistic or nominalistic Reformed theologian?” (he was of course suggesting that scads and scads of Reformed Orthodox writers (those from 1550-1750) were “Thomists”).

As a matter of fact, Muller suggests that it was Scotist influence, rather than Thomist, that shaped the “Orthodox definition of the discipline” of theology. What follows is from Muller, R. A. (2003). Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy; Volume 1: Prolegomena to Theology (2nd ed., pp. 222–224). Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic:

In the decade following 1590, a distinction between theologia archetypa, God’s knowledge of himself and his works, and theologia ectypa, creaturely knowledge of God and works, entered the systematic conceptuality of early Reformed orthodoxy. Althaus correctly points to Franciscus Junius’ De theologia vera (1594) as the first work to employ this distinction and to make a threefold division in the theologia ectypa: the theologia unionis, visionis, and viatorum.

No such thing as “Reformed Thomism” among the Reformed Orthodox

The concept of “Reformed Thomism” is thoroughly wrong-headed.

There’s a Facebook group (and I suppose a movement) that calls itself “Reformed Thomism”. I think that’s a wrong-headed concept through and through. “Thomism” has had a lot of different iterations, and most of the contemporary ones rely heavily on (and work to support) Roman Catholicism.

Elsewhere, I’ve cited Richard Muller regarding the phenomenon known as “Reformed Scholasticism”, something that was a mark of the “Reformed Orthodox”:

The term “scholasticism,” when applied to [the scholarly practices of the Reformed Orthodox] indicates primarily, therefore, a method and not a particular content: the method could be (and was) applied to a wide variety of theological contents and it could be (and was) applied to other academic disciplines as well. As Masson has remarked, borrowing Chenu’s definition of medieval scholasticism, this relatively uniform method of exposition, with its clear structure, its patterns of reasoning and standard practices of making distinctions, neatly dividing and subdividing topics, its brief citations of texts, its monotonous use of formulae, and its impersonality of style, serves to hide the variety of its actual contents (Muller, R. A. (2003). Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise And Development Of Reformed Orthodoxy; Volume 1: Prolegomena To Theology (2nd ed., pg. 34). Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic.).

So “Reformed Scholasticism” was a genuine phenomenon. However, taking the word “Thomism” and plugging it in where the word “Scholasticism” appears is buying into a lot of things that the Reformed Orthodox did not buy into.

Agricola, “Loci”, and the Birth of Systematic Theology

The question may be asked as if by a youngster: “Daddy, where did systematic theology come from?”

(For the benefit of the Roman Catholics in our audience, I am making a joke: I’m taking the question that is frequently asked, “where do babies come from”, and applying it to “systematic theology”. This should not be construed as if I’m suggesting that Protestant theologies only came into existence in the 16th century. They did not. The bases for these theologies had existed since Old Testament times. The problem is that Rome, because of its supposed position of authority and influence, had not only allowed but actually fostered some fairly distorted viewpoints and doctrines to flourish; and so the Reformers and the Reformed Orthodox, interested in “how to think rightly about God and the things He is doing in the world”, had to disentangle all of the distortions from all of the right thinking that also been carried through the centuries…)

This blog post will seek to show how the Reformed Orthodox writers (those who wrote in the generations after Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin) came upon their method first of all for understanding what the sources of theology were, and then what the topics of theology were.

Keep in mind that once you reject “Church authority” as a principle of “how we know what to believe” – and that is precisely what was done at the Reformation – you have to try to understand really what it is that you understand, and how you understand it.

That involves understanding the long-term relationship that God, who has the genuine authority, has sought to create and foster with sinful mankind, and also how He communicates to us.

Richard Muller describes “the development of theological method in the mid-sixteenth century…”

“The art of speaking in a probable way”

Down below, in response to the question “how do you know?” Steve Hays commented:

Why must we “know” that we have the right interpretation? Why is it not enough to have the most reasonable interpretation?

If God holds us responsible for what we can know, and if our interpretations come down to the most reasonable or probable interpretation, then that’s all that God requires of us.

A Roman apologist like Bryan Cross will tend to propose that God’s method for creation and revelation involves rigorous logical deduction. The problem with that is, the history that God has given us is not a rigorous sequence of causes and events; Scripture and history are not comprised of rigorously logical arguments or sets of arguments.

For Rome, and for Bryan following, however, “the Church” (meaning the “Roman Catholic Church”) was given by God in a logical and an ontological way in Matt 16:18, never to change. The same exact ontological structure that it has today was ontologically in place at Matt 16:18, and therefore it (and all of its rules and strictures) must be obeyed as if Rome’s rules and strictures come to us directly from the very mouth of Christ.

That, of course, is merely an assumption: it is an empty, unprovable assumption upon which the whole Roman edifice is resting: all of its historical claims to authority, its claims of epistemological certainty, its sacraments, its treadmill of religious practices – all of the Roman Catholic “things you gotta do” to appease God are resting upon a meaningless claim of authority.


There is a way of thinking about these things that is more respectful of both the natural ordering and the history of things, bypassing strictly logical deduction in favor of a more inductive, inferential way of thinking.

This is outlined by Richard Muller in his work “The Unaccommodated Calvin”:

“How do you know?” – How do you begin to know?

Before we go too far into PRRD, Muller clarifies a couple of things about how the Medievals thought about religion. Keep in mind, too, that Muller is distinguishing “the Reformers” from those writers who followed, the “Reformed Orthodox”, in order to show both “continuities and discontinuities” from the times of the Reformers (including Calvin) until the later “Reformed Orthodox” writers of the later 17th and early 18th centuries, from their actual writings. He does this as a response to some of the “Calvin vs the Calvinists” writers of the 20th century who sought to create a wedge between these two.

I want to reiterate that I’m not picking up this information to suggest that we go back to living and worshiping as these men did. Theirs was a completely different era. And yet today, there is a notion that we must “recover” their “Confession” and their “Theology, Piety, and Practice”.

I’m suggesting that there are tremendous things that we can learn from these generations of writers, without “recovering” their every move.

There is a story from an old book that meant a lot to me as a young man, “The Perfect Joy of St. Francis”. This was a “biographical novel” about Francis of Assisi, who, as we know, embraced a simple life of itinerant poverty, and after whom “Pope Bergoglio” seems to have fashioned himself.

Yes, this is directly to address Scott Clark, and the method of “recovery” that he has adopted and that he has been advocating. But Clark is not imitating Francis of Assisi. In this respect, Clark rather reminds me of “Brother Jack”, a character from that novel (and for all I know, a real-life character) who sought in a very simple way to imitate Francis:

Everything was a peaceful as a scene in the Gospels. Francis was in the little chapel, praying. And Brother Jack was behind him. Whenever Francis bent over, Jack bent over too. When Francis sighed, Jack sighed also. When Francis coughed, Jack coughed after him. That was simply Jack’s way of following Francis …

Thereafter he imitated Francis in everything he did … Jack, like the simple dove that he was, merely said, “Francis is a saint. So if I imitate him, the devil will have no hold on me” (pgs 119-120).

The theologians of this era served their times by thinking through what the Christian faith meant to their own times. They did it using a language (Latin) and a philosophical thought-system (largely Aristotelian) that was prevalent in their own era. They wrote “confessionally binding documents” not for people who would live three and four centuries later, but for themselves … to set themselves apart from their own world, in terms that their own world would understand.

They lived at times when “being a Christian” (and specifically, “being a Protestant”) meant going to war and standing up to persecutions while at the same time producing “a clearer identification of the theological task in its university setting. From the very beginning of Luther’s protest, the university and university-trained theologians were at the center of the movement”.

The great mark of this era was not that the great theologians had somehow conformed themselves to some kind of outward “Piety and Practice” or another (although those things were important too, but not in the “Brother Jack” kind of way). It was because they had thought through the challenges of their own day, and they sought to address those challenges in their own terms.

“How do you know?” – Early definitions take shape

From: Muller’s PRRD Chapter 5: The Parts or Divisions of Theology

5.1 The Identification of the Discipline: Changes in Style and Definition between Reformation and Orthodoxy

A. Reformation Era Backgrounds
The theology of the Reformers, even when it attained relatively full systematic expression, as in Melanchthon’s Loci communes, Calvin’s Institutes, Bullinger’s Decades, or Musculus’ Loci communes, did not include a self-conscious definition of the nature of theology as discipline in the traditional sense—whether as scientia or sapientia, and as a theologia in via—or to offer formal prolegomena apart from brief methodological statements.

This is not to ignore the several treatises from the period on the manner or ratio of studying theology, which do offer considerations of the methodus and the loci for study.

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.

“How do you know?”

It is said:

“The task of giving an authentic interpretation of the Word of God, whether in its written form or in the form of Tradition, has been entrusted to the living teaching office of the [Roman Catholic] Church alone” – quoting CCC 85.

In light of recent blog posts of mine that repeat statements to the effect that “The [Roman Catholic] Church is founded on the Word Incarnate, that is, on a divinely revealed truth” and that Rome, and Rome alone, can define “true biblical faith”, it’s important to look at these presuppositions on the part of the Roman “Church”, and to talk about how such a happy situation [not!] may have come about.

The question of “how do you know?” comes up frequently. It’s a question that is at the heart of Rome’s dismissal of Sola Scriptura, and at the same time, it appears to be at the heart of its own claims for authority.

I’ve been reading through Richard Muller’s “Post Reformation Reformed Theology”. His “Volume 1: Prolegomena”, discusses how the Reformed Orthodox (those writers in the period following the Reformation) thought about their task of understanding God and theology.

Writers from this period genuinely thought about that question, and went to great lengths to respond properly to it.

Getting clear on Reformed determinism

http://analytictheologye4c5.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/getting-clearer-on-reformed-theology-determinism-and-necessity/

Ridgley on the Trinity

http://paulhelmsdeep.blogspot.com/2013/05/ridgley-ii.html

Interview with Richard Muller: Recovering the Past for Use in the Present

http://wscal.edu/resource-center/resource/reformed-scholasticism