On Studying John Calvin

The theological and exegetical “conversation” in which Calvin was involved is far more specified than the issue of “context.”  It is, at times, exceedingly clear – from Calvin’s prefaces and from references in the text of his letters, as well as his printed works – that his theology was constructed in dialogue with certain thinkers and certain books.  Calvin sought advice and counsel from Farel, Viret, and Bucer.  He engaged in extended discussions with Bullinger and Melanchthon.  He framed his exegetical method with specific reference to the alternative approaches of Bucer, Melanchthon, Bullinger, and others.  As I hope to show, there is also a mass of evidence that Calvin engaged in an ongoing methodological dialogue with Melanchthon’s theology, quite distinct from their major disagreement on the issue of human free choice and election.  This conversation included, moreover, not only living authors: Calvin’s exegetical and rhetorical work engaged the medieval tradition and classical rhetorical texts like Cicero and Quintillian, whose writings he had ready to hand.  The point of identifying this relationship to other authors as a “conversation” is to emphasize that Calvin did not merely cite, use, and agree or disagree with these thinkers but, rather, developed his thought in an ongoing exercise of learning from and, in some cases, with them.

From: The Unaccommodated Calvin: Studies in the Foundation of a Theological Tradition by Richard A. Muller; Oxford Studies in Historical Theology series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 13-14.

Richard A. Muller (born in 1948) is the premier Reformed historical theologian working in the United States today.  His magnum opus is: Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1725; 4 volumes (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003).

 

On God the Holy Spirit

When Scripture states that the Spirit “searches the deep things of God” and that no human being knows the “things of God,” but only the Spirit, it clearly identifies the Spirit as having understanding.  Nor do these passages refer to a human being endowed with the Spirit, for the Spirit is consistently distinguished from the human beings to whom His gifts are given.  The personal distinction of the Spirit and the distinction of the Spirit from human beings is also implied in the statement that God has revealed things to us by His Spirit (1 Corinthians 2:10).  Even so, the Spirit is a giver of gifts who works “as He wills” (1 Corinthians 12:11).  For Owen, this attribution of understanding or wisdom to the Spirit underlines the Spirit’s personal identity inasmuch as this attribute “is the first inseparable property of an intelligent subsistence.”

Witsius notes that, in the passages that refer to the Spirit and power, there is a clear distinction made by Scripture between the Spirit and the power that He has.  Thus, Luke 24:49 indicates that the “power from on high” is given to the Apostles, meaning the power with which they were filled – which is not the Spirit Himself, but a gift of which the Spirit is the author.  This is not only the implication of the text in Luke; it is the necessary conclusion drawn when this particular text in Luke is compared to other places, such as Acts 1:8, where the Apostles are told, “ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you.”  Similarly, in Acts 10:38, God is said to have anointed Jesus “with the Holy Ghost and with power.”

From: Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1725: Volume Four: The Triunity of God by Richard A. Muller (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), pp. 348-349.

 

Writing the Westminster Secondary Standards

In April, 1645, after much delay on the part of the Assembly, the House of Commons formally instructed the Assembly to proceed with its work on the confession.  On April 21, a committee – presumably not the committee organized to draft the new Confession of Faith – reported on the Thirty-Nine Articles, recommending a review of the document.  In response, the Assembly ordered this committee to determine which, if any, of the Articles should be considered “useful…till a Confession of Faith can be drawn up by this Assembly.”  The committee on the Articles was to meet that day, and the committee on the new confession was called to meet on the following Wednesday – but it was only on May 12 that a somewhat reconstituted committee was finally named.  A first draft of the chapter on Scripture was written by the committee and presented for discussion and debate on July 7.  Debate continued through July 18.  At that time, three subcommittees were formed to deal with specific doctrinal topics.  After a year of work, on September 25, 1646, the first nineteen chapters of the confession were delivered to the House of Commons for consideration, with the remaining fifteen chapters following on November 26.  Parliament required that each section of the confession be illustrated with proof-texts – a labor that took the committee until April, 1647.  After another year of close consideration of the text, the confession was adopted for England by Parliament in June, 1648.  The Scottish Parliament ratified the confession in 1649.

We, also, have clear and precise documentation concerning the drafting of several of the major sections of the confession.  A smaller sub-committee was named on May 12, 1645, in order to expedite the drafting of individual chapters of the confession: it was composed of Thomas Temple, Joshua Hoyle, Thomas Gataker, Robert Harris, Cornelius Burgess, Edward Reynolds, and Charles Herle.  In response to the Assembly’s request of July 4 that “the sub-committee for the Confession of Faith…make report to the Assembly on Monday morning of what is in their hands concerning…the Scriptures,” the first chapter of the confession, “Of Holy Scripture,” was presented to the Assembly by Dr. Thomas Temple on Monday, July 7, 1645.  Debate on the text of the chapter ran from July 7 through July 18 of 1645.

From: Scripture and Worship: Biblical Interpretation and the Directory for Public Worship by Richard A. Muller and Rowland S. Ward; The Westminster Assembly and the Reformed Faith – a series; Carl R. Trueman, series editor (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2007), pp. 33-34.  The quotation is taken from Chapter 3, “‘Inspired by God – Pure in All Ages’: The Doctrine of Scripture in the Westminster Confession,” which was written by Dr. Muller.

Richard A. Muller is P. J. Zondervan Professor of Historical Theology at Calvin Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  Among his many other books is his monumental four-volume Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics.

Rowland S. Ward is pastor of Knox Presbyterian Church in Melbourne, Australia.  His other books include The Bush Still Burns and God And Adam: Reformed Theology and the Creation Covenant.

 

Scholasticism

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.