Theopedia

Scholasticism

Definition

Scholasticism is a method of teaching and writing theology, not a body of doctrine in its own right: “a method which is characterized, both on the level of research and on the level of teaching, by the use of an ever recurring system of concepts, distinctions, definitions, propositional analyses, argumentational techniques and disputation methods.”1 It grew up in the medieval schools and universities, then was taken up again by Reformed theologians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who used it to give the Reformation’s doctrine academic precision without adopting the content of medieval theology along with its method.2

Historical Development

Medieval scholasticism

Scholastic theology developed inside the schools and universities of the Middle Ages, built on lecture, meditation, and questioning, and grew alongside the rise of academies and literacy that eventually fed into the Renaissance.3 Some of the earlier scholastics worked by the maxim “Credo ut intelligam”: having accepted the truths of special revelation by faith, they considered it necessary to raise that faith to understanding through rational demonstration.4 Thomas Aquinas went further, denying that the mysteries of special revelation, such as the Trinity and the incarnation, admit of any logical demonstration at all. He held that natural revelation supplied a scientific natural theology, reasoned to by natural reason, while the “mysteries” content of special revelation had to be accepted by faith alone; between the two, he argued, there could be no real conflict.4

Renaissance humanism fed into the same period as a separate but related current. Humanists “looked back to classical culture because they saw in it the best possibilities for humanity to be formed and to flourish,”5 and their return to the sources (ad fontes) meant not only recovering lost texts but reading familiar ones with new methods and from a new perspective.6 That same impulse, applied to Scripture and the church fathers in their original languages, shaped the Reformers who followed.

The Reformers’ response

The Reformers did not simply continue the medieval scholastic project. Luther held a formal disputation against scholastic theology, and Calvin himself attacked the scholastics in his Institutes.7 Berkhof describes their objection as one of substance, not just style: “The Reformers rejected the dualism of the Scholastics and aimed at a synthesis of God’s twofold revelation.”4 Where the medieval schools had treated natural and supernatural revelation as two separate tracks yielding two kinds of theology, the Reformers held that sin has so obscured the natural revelation of God that a sound natural theology cannot be built on it without the corrective of Scripture.

Protestant and Reformed scholasticism

Despite that critique, the generations of Reformed theologians who followed the first Reformers took up scholastic method again, this time put to the service of consolidating and defending Reformed doctrine. Their work “employed an emphasis on rigorous definition, logical coherence (syllogism), and various metaphysical categories (e.g., form, cause) in theological discourse for the sake of clarity and precision,” using Aristotelian categories as tools of analysis rather than as a source of theological content.8 Properly understood, this scholastic methodology “was simply the method of teaching theology and other topics, including natural and physical science, in schools.”9 Reformed theology after the Reformation drew on syllogism, Aristotelian categories, both inductive and deductive reasoning, and the quaestio form throughout, patterns visible across Francis Turretin’s Institutes of Elenctic Theology.10

The shift in genre between Calvin and this later generation is visible in the two theologians’ own major works:

“Comparing the structure of this work with Calvin’s Institutes, a number of things become immediately apparent. These differences, however, do not primarily concern content but genre; from a historical and didactic perspective, they presuppose a different context. While Calvin wrote his Institutes for church members as an ‘aid for reading the Bible,’ Turretin’s work must be placed in an academic context.”11

Richard Muller traces the method itself to a specific set of tools: “the logical tools of the early Reformation, notably the Agricolan place-logic as modified by Melanchthon, and the later method known as Ramism, were used by Reformed thinkers to give form and structure to their theology,” producing “a theology academic in its method, structured around the traditional method of disputation and definition, but altered from the medieval versions of scholastic method by its training in late Renaissance logic and rhetoric.”12 On Muller’s reading, the change was one of form more than substance: “the methodological vehicle of scholasticism carried Calvinist thought forward into the seventeenth century different in form but virtually the same in basic content as the thought of Calvin and his contemporaries.”13 Richard Lints makes the same point from a different angle: “The Reformed scholastics did not abandon the faith of the first generation of the Reformers. If anything, they maintained the faith with vitality under circumstances that demanded institutionalization and a willingness to draw substantively from parts of the church tradition that had been cast aside only a century earlier.”14

This use of scholastic method was not uncritical. Petrus van Mastricht, writing within the Reformed scholastic tradition himself, still warned against its overuse: “As an example of excess, the Scholastics, according to their philosophical theology, loved the philosophical method of Aristotle, whether it was his analytic or synthetic method, to the point of distraction.”15

The historiographical debate

How to weigh the continuity between Calvin and the Reformed scholastics who followed him “was a focus of considerable contention in past decades.”16 Older scholarship held that the Reformed scholastics “returned to the medieval patterns of thought by committing to the scholastic method and using Aristotelian categories in their theological formulations,” treating human reason as a source of truth on the same level as Scripture; on this reading, Reformed Scholasticism was “a caricature of the biblical and Christ-centered theology of the Reformers.”16

Since the 1980s and 1990s, a body of scholarship led by Richard Muller has reassessed that older stereotype, arguing that Reformed Scholasticism “primarily refers to as a particular method of teaching, without direct implications for content.”17 Carl Trueman frames it the same way: “the question of scholasticism is in fact a question first and foremost of context and genre, not of theological content.”18 Muller’s own key essay in this reassessment, “Calvin and the ‘Calvinists’: Assessing Continuities and Discontinuities Between the Reformation and Orthodoxy,” together with his four-volume Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics and Willem van Asselt’s edited Introduction to Reformed Scholasticism, has become the standard reference point for treating Reformed orthodoxy’s scholastic method as continuous with, rather than a corruption of, the theology of Calvin and the other first-generation Reformers.19

Related Doctrines

  • Covenant theology, one of the doctrines most fully developed using Reformed scholastic method in the post-Reformation era
  • Thomas Aquinas, the medieval scholastic theologian most associated with the method
  • Francis Turretin, whose Institutes of Elenctic Theology is a primary example of Reformed scholastic method
  • John Calvin, whose relationship to the later Reformed scholastics is the subject of the historiographical debate above
  • Natural theology, the medieval scholastic category the Reformers reworked rather than abandoned outright

References

  1. L. M. de Rijk, Middeleeuwse wijsbegeerte: Traditie en vernieuwing, 11, quoted in Willem J. van Asselt, ed., Introduction to Reformed Scholasticism (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2011), 7, quoted in Carol Man Fen Chen, “Post-Reformation Development of Covenant Theology,” in “A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants: Unconditionality and Conditionality in Relation to Justification and Sanctification” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 110. ↩

  2. Richard A. Muller, Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1985), 8. ↩

  3. Alex Charles Tibbott, “Turretin and Theological Method,” in “De Impassibilitate Et Satisfactione: An Examination of the Methodological Implications of Trinitarian Classical Theism for the Doctrine of the Atonement” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2024), 64. ↩

  4. Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1969), 23-24. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  5. Willem J. van Asselt, “‘Open Hand and Fist’: Humanism and Scholasticism,” in van Asselt, Introduction to Reformed Scholasticism, 73, quoted in Tibbott, “Turretin and Theological Method,” 65. ↩

  6. Willem J. van Asselt, “‘Open Hand and Fist’: Humanism and Scholasticism,” in van Asselt, Introduction to Reformed Scholasticism, 75, quoted in Tibbott, “Turretin and Theological Method,” 66. ↩

  7. Pieter J. Rouwendal, “The Method of the Schools: Medieval Scholasticism,” in van Asselt, Introduction to Reformed Scholasticism, 67, quoted in Tibbott, “Turretin and Theological Method,” 66. ↩

  8. Tibbott, “Turretin and Theological Method,” 65. ↩

  9. Tibbott, “Turretin and Theological Method,” 65. ↩

  10. Tibbott, “Turretin and Theological Method,” 66. ↩

  11. Willem J. van Asselt, “Scholasticism in the Time of High Orthodoxy,” in van Asselt, Introduction to Reformed Scholasticism, 158, quoted in Tibbott, “Turretin and Theological Method,” 64. ↩

  12. Richard A. Muller, “Approaches to Post-Reformation Protestantism,” in After Calvin: Studies in the Development of a Theological Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 10, quoted in Chen, “Post-Reformation Development of Covenant Theology,” 112. ↩

  13. Richard A. Muller, “John Calvin and Later Calvinism: The Identity of the Reformed Tradition,” in The Cambridge Companion to Reformation Theology, ed. David Bagchi and David C. Steinmetz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 140-41, quoted in Chen, “Post-Reformation Development of Covenant Theology,” 112. ↩

  14. Richard Lints, The Fabric of Theology: A Prolegomenon to Evangelical Theology (Grand Rapids: W. B. Eerdmans, 1993), 171, quoted in Chen, “Post-Reformation Development of Covenant Theology,” 111. ↩

  15. Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, 1:70, quoted in Tibbott, “Turretin and Theological Method,” 66. ↩

  16. Chen, “Post-Reformation Development of Covenant Theology,” 109. ↩ ↩2

  17. Chen, “Post-Reformation Development of Covenant Theology,” 110. ↩

  18. Carl R. Trueman, “Calvin and Calvinism,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Calvin, ed. Donald K. McKim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 234, quoted in Chen, “Post-Reformation Development of Covenant Theology,” 110. ↩

  19. Richard A. Muller, “Calvin and the ‘Calvinists’: Assessing Continuities and Discontinuities Between the Reformation and Orthodoxy,” in After Calvin: Studies in the Development of a Theological Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 63-102, cited in Chen, “Post-Reformation Development of Covenant Theology,” 109. ↩