The term scholasticism has a narrower reference than the term orthodoxy: it well describes the technical and academic side of this process of the institutionalization and professionalization of Protestant doctrine in the universities of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If the doctrinal intention of this theology was confessional orthodoxy, its academic motivation was certainly intellectual adequacy. Indeed, rather than draw on such grandiose and speculative notions as the nineteenth-century central-dogma theory or the large scale working out of “tensions” between doctrines (argued by numerous twentieth-century writers), much of the reason for the development of Reformed scholastic orthodoxy must be found in the intellectual culture of the successful Protestant academies and universities. The theology of the great systems written in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, like the theology of the thirteenth-century teachers, is preeminently a school theology. It is a theology designed to develop a system on a highly technical level and in an extremely precise manner by means of the careful identification of topics, division of these topics into their basic parts, definition of the parts, and doctrinal or logical argumentation concerning the divisions and definitions. This, moreover, is the sense of the term used by the writers of the sixteenth century to describe their own academic, technical, and disputative theology as distinct from other genre and approaches, namely, the catechetical, biblical-exegetical, and simply didactic or ecclesial. Thus, large numbers of the works of the late sixteenth and seventeenth-century Reformed orthodox – including works by the authors of scholastic theological systems – are not scholastic.
From: Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1725: Volume One: Prolegomena to Theology Second Edition by Richard A. Muller (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003 [1987]), pp. 34-35.
