Review: Reformed Scholasticism: Recovering the Tools of Reformed Theology By Ryan M. McGraw (Part Two)

by on July 18, 2024 | Comment

Pedagogical and Practical Research Considerations

McGraw’s advice about how to learn Latin has some useful and interesting aspects, but he seems to endorse a sort of inductive approach and uses the words “very little effort” (37). He seems to discourage memorization. As a long-time Latin student and a Latin teacher, this is contrary to my experience and instruction of my students. We learn our native language inductively, by experience, but it takes perhaps 10–15 years to gain a reasonable proficiency—and even then there is hard work and memorization involved. To learn a language deductively, in 3–5 years, there is a great lot of hard work and memorization to be done. The first thing a Latin student should do is get a good grammar and memorize the back of the book, that is, the vocabulary and forms. That is the essence of first semester Latin. Learning a language without memorization is like trying to learn to build or fix a car with no knowledge of the names of the engine parts.

One other piece of the author’s advice to students that should be disputed: his recommendation of Microsoft Word. I have not used it for many years, but I gave it up happily. For Apple users there are better options. At the moment I am using Ulysses (which, in some ways is a throwback to WordPerfect 5.1), but I have used Pages (about which McGraw is correct), Nisus Writer Pro, Mellel (which I used to write my commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism), and Scrivener. Several of these are superior to Word, which might be an excellent tool for business but which, in my experience, was miserable to use for academic work. In that vein, Zotero might be a fine bibliographic application, but I do not trust “free” software. I use Bookends on my Apple devices.

I agree entirely that undigested block quotes are unhelpful, but it would have helped students to encourage them to adopt the rule that if they are going to use block quotes they must explain them and analyze them. In the absence of such explanation and analysis, McGraw’s criticisms are justified (80–81).

As one of those writers who has apologized to his family for (relatively) neglecting them during the research for and writing of my DPhil thesis (and in several subsequent books), I was impressed by McGraw’s pointedness about this practice and what it represents: “It is always sad to see an acknowledgments page in a PhD thesis that asks forgiveness of neglected families during the process of research and writing. This is a price that any author should be unwilling to pay” (204). All we sinners who have had to do what McGraw thinks we should never have done look forward to his next volume in which he explains how we can do work worthy of publication (to which he himself exhorts the reader) without transgressing this law.

Further Historical Considerations

His characterization of Jean-Alphonse Turrettini (1671–1737) might benefit from the work of Jennifer McNutt, who characterizes him as a broad—and we might add, post-confessional— evangelical.1 This is an improvement over the older story about Turrettini. It is important to recognize that orthodoxy did not give way to liberalism as much as it gave way to broad, non-confessional evangelicalism and Pietism, which in turn gave way to liberalism and the mediating theology.

The author’s relatively brief dismissal of the significance of Renaissance Humanism for understanding Reformed orthodoxy is a mistake (104–06). My subject, Caspar Olevianus, was much influenced by Humanism. Erika Rummel’s brilliant work was extremely useful for understanding how Humanism morphed in the late sixteenth century.2 I just had the pleasure of reading an outstanding MA thesis by Yi Wang, who demonstrates the significance of Humanism for understanding a major figure in Reformed orthodoxy who has been long understood (misunderstood?) as a “scholastic.” Similar questions might be raised of the author’s more detailed account of the history of philosophy (106–13). I regret not spending more time learning about the history of metaphysics. This is an area in which I am presently trying to do some remedial reading.

I am not quite sure what to think about his distinction between “monastic” and “scholastic” theology (134–24). It is interesting. It does account for Bernard (and others like him) who were not in the schools. We have a similar phenomenon in Reformed orthodoxy which accounts for those writers who were not academics, or at least not regularly.

The author mentions Calvin’s hostility toward “scholastics” (e.g., p. 50), but beginners should be aware of Muller’s explanation of Calvin’s rhetoric, that it was more often aimed at his contemporaries in the Sorbonne than it was at the great orthodox medieval theologians.3

Perhaps this is just a matter of clarification, but when the author writes of the “so-called five solas” and characterizes them as a “later historical construct,” I wonder whether he wants us to think that the lumping of them together is a later construct or that the solas themselves are a later construct? (157) If the latter, that is demonstrably untrue. Each of the of the five solas, so-called or not, were used both in the Reformation and post-Reformation periods.

The author refers to Jean Taufin (1529–1602) rather than Taffin, which is the only way I have ever seen his name given (189). He attributes to him a fairly extreme view regarding church membership but provides no bibliographic leads.

Are Belgic Confession articles 28 and 29 “ambiguous” (191)? This comment was surprising to me, and I think it would be surprising to the Reformed ministers who have been subscribing to the Belgic (sometimes at the cost of their lives) since the 1560s.

Luther and the Reformed

The chief reservation I have about this work is his account of the relations of Luther to the Reformed generally and to Reformed orthodoxy in specific. Some of his comments about Luther are untenable. For example, as I read his comments about Luther’s attitude toward Aristotle (108), I wrote “Bagchi!” in the margin only to find, on page 125, the author citing David Bagchi’s under appreciated essay, “Sic et Non: Luther and Scholasticism.”4Yes, Luther could be rhetorically dismissive of Aristotle; but as Bagchi showed, in fact, Luther was well read in Aristotle and dependent upon him throughout his career.

In another place he cites Bob Kolb and says, “While all Reformed writers respected Luther, Melanchthon influenced many early Reformed writers” (45). This understatement and contrast is misleading. Luther was a primary source for both the early Reformed and their orthodox successors. Martin Bucer became a Protestant at the Heidelberg Disputation (1518). His career is inexplicable apart from Luther’s influence. Calvin called Luther his father.5 Calvin was not merely respectful of Luther. He was devoted to him. The Heidelberg Reformers Zacharias Ursinus (1534–83) and Caspar Olevianus (1536–87) alluded to and paraphrased Luther so often in their work that it will take some AI application to document all the allusions, but anyone who is well read in Luther will see his fingerprints all over their work. This is true for writers such as Rollock, Perkins, and Alsted.6 Indeed, it is not hyperbole to say that one way to analyze Reformed theology in the sixteenth and seventeenth century is to distinguish between those who were openly indebted to Luther and those who merely respected him.

Our author says that, for Luther, the elements of the Supper are “simultaneously” bread and wine. This is because, for Luther, the elements never become the body and blood of Christ. Luther used the same prepositions as Lutheran orthodoxy: in, with, and under.

He refers to his own work on John Owen’s treatment of what he characterizes as “covenant threats” in Owen’s understanding of “the gospel” (73).7 He claims that Owen “clearly rejected Lutheran dichotomies to the effect that the law commands and threatens while the gospel promises and blesses” (73). When we follow the breadcrumbs to the journal article, which is the basis for his comments, we do not find a substantive engagement with primary sources beyond Owen. The author may be correct about Owen on this point, though I have my doubts. Consider this passage:

The law is connatural to him; his domestic, his old acquaintance. It came into the world with him, and hath grown up with him from his infancy. It was implanted in his heart by nature,—is his own reason; he can never shake it off or part with it. It is his familiar, his friend, that cleaves to him as the flesh to the bone; so that they who have not the law written cannot but show forth the work of the law, Rom. 2:14, 15, and that because the law itself is inbred to them. And all the faculties of the soul are at peace with it, in subjection to it. It is the bond and ligament of their union, harmony, and correspondency among themselves, in all their moral actings. It gives life, order, motion to them all. Now, the gospel, that comes to control this sentence of the law, and to relieve the sinner from it, is foreign to his nature, a strange thing to him, a thing he hath no acquaintance or familiarity with; it hath not been bred up with him; nor is there any thing in him to side with it, to make a party for it, or to plead in its behalf.8

Does Owen’s language here constitute the sort of Lutheran dichotomy that he finds alien to Reformed theology? Anyone who is reasonably well read in Luther or Calvin will see that this is the very sort of language one finds in Luther. This is the language of someone who has been struck by the law in its first use,9 who knows the greatness of his sin and misery, and who sees the clear difference between the demands of the law and the promises of the gospel.

McGraw’s rhetoric about “Lutheran” dichotomies notwithstanding, it is easy to find Reformed orthodox writers using the very same language as Luther regarding the distinction between law and gospel. The disappointing thing here is that these connections have been documented in print for some years.10 After all, when Olevianus said that he was “retaining” the distinction (discrimen) between law and gospel, whose distinction was he retaining? When he wrote that the entire book of Romans was about the distinction (we could just as well say dichotomy) between law and gospel, was he departing from the Reformed tradition? If so, both he and his Lutheran critics seemed entirely unaware of it. We could ask the same questions about Ursinus’ use of the distinction in his Corpus Docrinae and his Summa Theologiae, where he expressed the distinction he learned from Luther and Melanchthon in terms of the covenants of works and grace.

This is as good a place as any to complain about some minor editorial issues. First, the index is rather paltry. This is more likely the fault of the publisher than the author, but I found my marginal notes more useful than the index for finding or recalling references. There are other editorial issues. The editorial team failed to catch a stray footnote reference which should be after punctuation (p. 29, fn. 25), and Olevianus’ name is misspelled once (174). Again, this tells us more about the publisher and perhaps the state of publishing generally. In this regard, the author should have been asked to supply us a reference to the wonderful title, Telling the Truth About History (82).

This is a valuable work and these observations and criticisms should not deter readers from benefitting from it. McGraw is pointing us all in the right direction, even if he is not always following his own map.

Notes

  1. Jennifer Powell McNutt, Calvin Meets Voltaire: The Clergy of Geneva in the Age of Enlightenment, 1685-1798. (Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Pub. Company, 2013).
  2. Erika Rummel, The Humanist-Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and Reformation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
  3. See Richard A. Muller, The Unaccommodated Calvin (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 50.
  4. In Trueman and Clark, Protestant Scholasticism, 3–15.
  5. R. Scott Clark, “‘Subtle Sacramentarian’ or Son? John Calvin’s Relationship to Martin Luther,” Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 21.4 (2018): 35–60.
  6. Alsted was obviously indebted to (and not merely respectful of) Luther when he wrote, “Articulus iustificationis dicitur articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae” (“the article of justification is said to be the article of the standing or falling of the church”) J. H. Alsted, Theologia scholastica didactica (Hanover, 1618), 711.
  7. See also Ryan M. McGraw, “The Threats of the Gospel: John Owen on What the Law/Gospel Distinction Is Not,” Calvin Theological Journal 51 (2016): 79–11.
  8. John Owen, A Practical Exposition of Psalm 130 in The Works of John Owen, ed. William H. Goold (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, n.d.), 6.389–90. I am indebted to Inwoo Lee for this reference.
  9. Those who still think that Luther denied the third use of the law ought to spend time reading Luther’s 1522 preface to Romans in Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Vol. 35: Word and Sacrament I, ed. Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, Hilton C. Oswald, and Helmut T. Lehmann, vol. 35 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1999), 365–79, where he extolled good works as the necessary fruit of true faith, or his exposition of the decalogue in the Large Catechism (1529), or his treatises against the Antinomians and beyond. It is anachronistic to read the theology of modern, mainline (ELCA and its European counterparts) Lutheranism back into Luther.
  10. For example, see R. Scott Clark, “Letter and Spirit: Law and Gospel in Reformed Preaching,” in Covenant, Justification, and Pastoral Ministry, 331–63; Clark, “Law and Gospel in Early Reformed Orthodoxy: Hermeneutical Conservatism in Olevianus’ Commentary on Romans,” in Jordan J. Ballor, David S. Sytsma and Jason Zuidema eds, Church and School in Early Modern Protestantism: Studies in Honor of Richard A. Muller on the Maturation of a Theological Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 307–20.

©R. Scott Clark. All Rights Reserved.

Ryan M. McGraw, Reformed Scholasticism: Recovering the Tools of Reformed Theology (London and New York: T&T Clark/Bloomsbury, 2019)

You can find the whole series here. 

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  • R. Scott Clark
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    R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.

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