Scholasticism revisited: methodological reflections on the study of seventeenth-century reformed thought

Abstract

Historical theologians have commonly held that a rather negative connection exists between the two major intellectual movements in the Protestant world of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – the Reformation and Protestant scholasticism. These scholars have condemned the writings of the Protestant scholastics as an unfortunate survival of medieval traditions that could be safely disregarded, and argued that the true spirit of Protestantism was expressed in the literature of the Reformers. Protestant scholastics were condemned without a hearing and labelled as empty “quibblers,” followers of a dead past who failed to understand the living problems of their new times. Characterized as the return of medieval dialectic and Aristotelian logic to the Protestant classroom, it was, therefore, considered a distortion or perversion of Reformation theology. Many recent works on the history of Protestant theology still repeat the common notion that scholasticism was a relapse into earlier “concept–splitting school philosophy,” giving some of the charges made against scholasticism by the Reformers a much more extreme meaning than they originally had.