marked the beginning of a shift away from scholastic Reformed theology in Geneva into the early Enlightenment quest for a Christianity built more on natural theology and in search for a theological system consisting almost entirely of “fundamental articles” of the faith. (Reformed Scholasticism: Recovering the Tools of Reformed Theology, 49)
It would be easy to imagine a contemporary person who is not well-versed in Reformed scholasticism declaiming in triumph: “See, the problem is natural theology! I told you it is the source of all our problems!” Biblicism is the attempt to do theology while rejecting natural theology.
The problem with this view, however, is that natural theology was part and parcel of Reformed theology from the very first generation of reformers all the way through to the composition of the great Protestant confessions (Lutheran and Anglican, as well as Reformed). It was not a novelty introduced at the time of the Enlightenment and it did not lead to or cause the Enlightenment.
The Preambles of the Faith and the Articles of the Faith
The distinction between the “preambles of the faith” and the “articles of the faith” goes back to Thomas Aquinas and was an important part of medieval scholasticism. The genius of Thomas, as recognized by Reformed scholasticism, was to integrate faith and reason by using philosophy as the handmaiden of theology. The preambles refer to what one can, in principle, know by reason such as the law of non-contradiction, the principle of causality, the fact that God exists, and the fact that God must be one, perfect, simple, omnipotent, good, eternal, and immutable. All this is known from general revelation and constitutes natural theology from the fathers to the reformers.
The articles of the faith, on the other hand, refer to doctrines which can only be known by special revelation such as creation ex nihilo, God’s self-revelation to Israel, the incarnation of Jesus Christ, the gospel, and our eschatological hope. (See Richard Muller, Dictionary of Latin and Green Theological Terms, 40, 273). In the system of Thomas Aquinas, the role of the preambles was to ground and support the truths of special revelation so that Christianity could be seen to be in harmony with reason and science and thus as the one true religion.
Philosophy is the discipline that uses reason to go as far as it is possible to go in discovering truth about God and the world, but its role is not to contradict or correct the special revelation of Scripture. The proper use of philosophy in theology is to display its rational and beautiful structure. Christian theology is meant to display a harmony of faith and reason as the human mind contemplates the world using reason and integrates that knowledge into what we learn from Holy Scripture. One only need to read the first few pages of the Summa Theologica in order to hear Thomas Aquinas say:
It was necessary for man’s salvation that there should be a knowledge revealed by God besides the philosophical sciences built up by human reason. . . because man is directed to God, as to an end that surpasses the grasp of his reason.” (Summa Theologica, Q. 1, A. 1, sed contra)
Sacred doctrine includes a treatment of both the preambles and the articles in a systematic presentation of Christian truth. It cannot be reduced to the preambles alone, but the preambles help us grasp the meaning of divine revelation.
The Reformers and the Place of Reason in Theology
The Protestant Reformers did not set out to proclaim a contradiction between reason and faith or between philosophy and revelation. In their work of reforming late medieval doctrine and bringing it back to classical orthodoxy, they took for granted that both the preambles and articles are necessary. But they were clear about two things: 1) that special revelation corrects and supplements natural theology (sola Scriptura) and 2) that there can be no final conflict between faith and reason since one and the same God is both the Creator of the world and our human minds (including reason), and also the One who speaks through the prophets and apostles of Holy Scripture.
They set out to purge the church of false teachings regarding the pope, inflated notions of tradition, Mary, the sacraments, the priesthood, and the application of salvation to the believer. They wanted to restore true catholicity by emphasizing justification by faith alone through grace alone. But they did not wish to make Christianity either an irrational mysticism that opposes reason or a rational system that does not need special revelation. The former direction was taken by many of the Anabaptists, while the latter direction was taken by the Enlightenment philosophes. Both of these directions were decisively rejected by the magisterial reformers.
Enlightenment Rationalism as the Rejection of Scholasticism
The core of the Enlightenment was the denial of the harmony of faith and reason. The philosophes of the Enlightenment promoted a rationalistic movement that sought to reduce all knowledge to what can be rationally comprehended or empirically confirmed. The first quest for the historical Jesus, for example, sought to reduce our knowledge of Jesus to what can be known naturalistically. Rationalism of this sort breaks free of special revelation and seeks to exalt reason at the expense of faith. Ironically, this extreme position ultimately leads to the undermining of both science and religion, as can be seen in the increasingly confused postmodernism of the past half century or so. Natural science, natural theology, and natural law are all dissolved in the acids of rationalism. We now live in a “post-truth era.” The result is a loss of cultural confidence in the reality of truth and morality and a slow degeneration into a vicious clash of wills.
Reformed scholasticism is a system of doctrine that keeps reason in its proper place as the handmaiden to revelation and in so doing provides a basis for viewing reason as capable of attaining truth. Since God created the world by his Logos and imprinted upon it laws that reflect his nature, and since God created man in his image with reason and language and thus able to discern the laws of nature placed there by God, we know that we can make progress in comprehending the truth about the world, about God, and about ourselves. Take away the belief in God as Creator and the result is that there is no basis for believing that reason can even attain truth. At best what is left is some sort of pragmatism or utilitarianism.
Recovering Scholasticism after the Enlightenment
The tragedy of much modern Evangelical and Reformed theology is that it reacts to the Enlightenment as if the Enlightenment’s posing of the choices was correct and the only thing wrong was the actual choice it made. The Enlightenment offers a choice between facts (reason and science), on the one hand, and values (irrational religion and ethics), on the other. This is a false dilemma, and we must refuse to make such a choice. Both Barthians and VanTilians often have failed to avoid this “all-or-nothing” trap regarding the place of reason in theology. This often occurs because of a misunderstanding of Thomas Aquinas and Reformed Scholastics as rationalists. We must understand that modern rationalism is the sworn enemy of scholasticism, which it sees as too dependent on what Enlightenment thinkers call “church dogma,” but which is in reality biblical revelation (eg. creation ex nihilo, the deity of Christ, the Trinity, miracles).
Of course, one can point to the existence of irrational and mythological religions in the world. There are many such. But the point of the Great Tradition of Christian orthodoxy is that Christianity is a fully rational religion. But we must remember that rational does not equal rationalistic. For a system of thought to be rationalistic means that reason is taken to an extreme in such a way that it is allowed to push out faith and special revelation. The Enlightenment is not rational, then, but rationalistic. So, there is a third choice beyond rational science and irrational religion and that is religion that is rational but not rationalistic, that is, historic Christianity.
The Enlightenment project sought to reject historic Christianity and to replace it with a new religion fabricated out of atheism, rationalism, and naturalism. Its partisans attempted to colonize Christian institutions such as universities, seminaries, and churches and replace orthodox Christianity with their new religion while continuing to use the older terms but giving them radically new meanings. Too often, Christian theologians were intimidated into going along with rationalism out of fear of being seen as rejecting reason. This fear must be exposed as nothing more than a sophisticated con job. The postmodern denouement of the Enlightenment testifies to its essentially irrational, anti-reason character. What we need to grasp is that rationalism is anti-rational. To put reason in the place of faith by rejecting the articles of faith and replacing them with the preambles of the faith alone ultimately destroys both the articles and the preambles.
This is why it is crucially important to recover the unity and harmony of faith and reason in the strain of medieval scholasticism that grows out of the pro-Nicene Fathers, Augustine, Anselm, and Thomas Aquinas and to reject the rationalistic ideas of William of Occam and Gabriel Biel, which paved the way for Hume and Kant. This is why the recovery of Protestant scholasticism is the most urgent task facing theologians today.
This post was originally published in Dr. Carter’s Newsletter.
