Studying “Theology Proper” As a Means of Avoiding Chaos In Our Thinking

People have asked me, “why do you focus only on Roman Catholicism?” My wife used to ask me, for example, “why don’t you talk about Islam the way that you talk about Roman Catholicism?”

I’ve been thinking about the best ways to answer those questions. I’d have to say that, because of my own personal struggles in leaving Roman Catholicism, I came to research it with a thoroughness that few people get into. And further to that, I’ve always believed that Christ is the only hope for our world.

But recently, Van Til has provided me with the words to understand why I feel as strongly as I do about Roman Catholicism. I’ve frequently said that Roman Catholicism is a bastardized form of Christianity. But more specifically, it introduced a kind of chaos (Van Til’s word) into Christianity, beginning with some of its appropriations (plural) of Greek philosophy – most profoundly, with the additions of Aristotle via Aquinas, but also by placing its own “Tradition” (largely “Thomism”) alongside of Scripture, and even, for practical purposes, ahead of Scripture.

It’s that Roman Catholic chaos, which Luther and the first Protestants understood, through its “authoritative” anathematization of the Gospel at Trent, but continuing today in the recent pronouncements of crazy “Pope Francis” that’s causing a major hindrance in the ability of Christianity to be “good news” for the world in the way that its Founder intended.


Philosophy: A History of Wrong Turns

Thomas the Train Wreck and the Analogia Entis

The word “theology”, as everyone knows, is derived from two Greek roots, from θεός, God, and λόγος, word or reason. Thus it is “a word or rational discourse concerning God, and therefore as human wisdom or knowledge concerning God” (from Muller, R. A. (1985). Dictionary Of Latin And Greek Theological Terms: Drawn Principally From Protestant Scholastic Theology (p. 298). Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House). Muller continues with this definition:

The Protestant orthodox systems, both Reformed and Lutheran, consist in revealed theology, and manifest little or no attention to the exposition of a positive natural theology. This characteristic is manifest in the identification of Scripture and not reason as the cognitive foundation or principium cognoscendi [the principle of knowing or cognitive foundation] of theology. This revealed theology, inasmuch as it is a reflection of the divine self-knowledge or theologia archetypa, is also characterized as a form of theologia ectypa, or ectypal theology, and as theologia in via, theology on the way to God, or theologia viatorum, theology of pilgrims or those on the way.

The alternative to this way of understanding theology is known as the analogia entis, or “the analogy of being”. This is primarily the Thomist method of reasoning from things that we know on earth to, primarily, arrive at a knowledge of God “from below”, as it were. Muller gives this definition:

The Reformed Orthodox were anti-Thomist in their epistemology

One of the main problems with the Thomist metaphysic is the Thomist epistemology.

Edward Feser begins his work “Scholastic Metaphysics” with what he calls “a basic philosophical truth, which is that metaphysics is prior to epistemology” (pg 27). But why is this the case? He doesn’t say. “Metaphysics” has been roughly defined as “what there is” or “what really exists” (Michael Rea, London UK and New York, NY: Routledge Publishing, 2014, pg 29). How can we understand metaphysics if we don’t know how we understand and precisely what it is that we are trying to understand?

John Frame, in his “History of Western Philosophy and Theology” (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2015) writes that “metaphysics, epistemology, and value theory (ethics) are not independent of one another and influence each other”, and that “one type of epistemology will lead to one kind of metaphysics, another to another kind”.

He also cites Aquinas (who cites Aristotle) from his early work “Being and Essence” to the effect that “a small error at the outset ends by being great” (pgs. 146, 154).

That is precisely the complaint against Aquinas’s work, which create in his own thinking, and later in Roman Catholicism, the enormous distances we see between those systems and biblical and historical Christianity (of which the Reformation is a part).

“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.