The Calvinist International
In working through the text of Luther’s disputation against scholastic theology, I ran across an intriguing series of claims. It appears in the introduction of the text as it appears in the English edition of Luther’s Works. The introduction is attempting to set up the context for Luther’s engagement with “scholastic” theology, and proceeds to […]
Last week, I posted a couple of excerpts from Richard Muller’s discussion of method among the Protestant orthodox or “scholastics” and their Reformational predecessors. Later in the same volume, he includes a useful summation of their basic philosophical stance. Though “Christian Aristotelianism” remains the dominant stream into the seventeenth century, one must be careful not […]
Toward the beginning of the first volume of his Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, Richard Muller makes an important qualification with respect to the use of “scholasticism” by the Reformed: it was not identical to medieval scholasticism(s), but was instead the offspring of strands of the medieval intellectual tradition and Renaissance humanism (some trads would probably consider this […]
Catholic theologians, philosophers and historians of the twentieth century, having fought fiercely to eradicate prejudices against medieval philosophy, adopt the anti-Scholastic rhetoric of the old Protestant histories and project it upon the thinkers of the Baroque age. As a result, they reject the ‘schools’ of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries–much as Lutheran Aristotelians and later […]
In doing some looking for the causes of all the bad things associated with modernity, and an alternative narrative to that offered by Brad S. Gregory, for instance, I came across some references in Richard A. Muller’s Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics of some relevance. On the philosophical and scholastic side of things, there was a breakdown of […]
One helpful way of viewing the Reformation’s relationship to the phenomenon of scholasticism is to consider it to be, in modern terms, a kind of “reboot.” Various accounts of decline were in circulation among the reformers, but there was common agreement that something had gone wrong by the end of the fifteenth century. There needed […]
The unjustly forgotten Scottish poet and philosopher James Beattie has a delightful invective against David Hume, his once-celebrated Essay on Truth. In it, Dr. Beattie provides a philosophical rebuttal, a powerful rhetorical display, an interesting commentary on the Enlightenment, and among other things a personal review of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.