Faith Seeking Understanding

Marjorie Grene, Heidegger

Bowes and Bowes, 1957, 128 pgs.

Summary: A brief and devastating critique of the philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and existentialism in general. Heidegger somehow managed to be an unrepentant Nazi and the philosopher of post-modernity. His early training was as a Catholic and his dissertation was on the medieval scholastic Duns Scotus.

Dr. Grene thoroughly and competently shows in what sense he asks and answers some important perennial questions about human existence or existential experience, and how he fails completely to do anything significant in ontology. His greatest contribution seems to be located in taking Kierkegaard’s Christian existentialism and attempting to make it an atheist system.

Heidegger defines the human experience as: “facticity; being-always-already-in –a-world; existentiality: being always in advance of itself in essential relation to its own possibilities; forfeitures: distraction by the insistent claims of everyday moods and everyday interests and everyday companions, are the essential aspects of human being. But the three aspects are not separable. They form, as we have seen, one unified structure. It is to this single, indissoluble nature that Heidegger gives the name Sorge, cura, concern or care” (26).

C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature

Cambridge Publishing, 1964, 231 pgs.

Summary: Lewis gave a series of lectures at Oxford on the cosmological model or the understanding of reality as it was generally understood in the Medieval and Renaissance period. The textual source of the model was the Bible and classical sources synthesized into a single mostly non-contradictory system. Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and the others all participated in building the model through the writings of men like Pseudo-Dionysius (c. 500) and Boethius (c. 480-524). Lewis defends the later two as Christian writers.

It must be stressed that the model is not anthropocentric or even Terra centric if correctly understood. Instead the model was “anthropoperipheral.” “Earth is in fact the ‘offsourings of creation’, the cosmic dust-bin” (63). The weighty and the gross, the dross, descends to the center: in the intelligible universe, “the Earth is the rim, the outside edge where being falls on the border of nonentity (116). The earth was widely understood as round and insignificant “as a mathematical point—puncti habere rationem” (83) through the work of Boethius.

Richard A. Muller, Prolegomena to Theology

in Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: the Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1725, vol. 1, 2nd ed.

Baker Books, 2006, 463 pgs.

Summary: An analysis of the Protestant Scholastic prolegomena in Reformed dogmatics. Muller traces the interaction between the medieval sources (Lombard, Thomas, Duns Scotus, Henry of Ghent, etc.), the first generation of Reformers (i.e. Luther, Bullinger, Zwingli, Calvin) and the scholastics Protestants (Ames, Turretin, Owen, Heidegger, etc.).

His basic argument is that scholasticism is a method of developing and teaching a theological system appropriate for the schools. The Reformers, many of whom were scholasticly trained, were forced by polemical and practical necessity to develop theological systems and schools designed for creating and maintaining the Protestant movement. The next generation of the reformed then developed theological systems that were designed to maintain reformed churches through academic training and analysis. The second generation became the Protestant scholastics or the Reformed orthodox. Conceptually both the Reformers and the reformed scholastics were drawing on the theological tradition of the Middle Ages with its rich theological and biblical reflection.

Pelagius’s Commentary on St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, tran. Theodore De Bruyn

Oxford University Press, 236 pgs.

Summary: Pelagius’ verse by verse commentary on Romans.

Fundamentally, Pelagius reads the text as if there is no original sin or inherited sin from Adam. The Fall caused no internal change to humanity. Each person is born innocent and sins only as they gain the habit of sin from following the example others. When Paul speaks of a sin nature or the flesh as in Romans 8, Pelagius reads the habit of sin. Neither creation nor humanity has been fundamentally corrupted or changed by the Fall. The “creation groaning” in Romans 8 refers to the angels mourning the humans’ misuse of their will to do ill.

Each decision by a human being must be free in the sense of no prior proclivity to sin. Even the habit of sin can be broken by the free will alone. Pelagius is of two minds as to if all have sinned. He makes statements that allow if not require that some have not sinned or have overcome sin on their own, but he also speaks of the universal need for salvation. Sin creates a debt that must be paid, and Christ has paid that debt. Baptism washes away the debt that occurred through sins prior to baptism, but then the forgiven and baptized sinner must begin to merit his salvation and follow Christ’s example perfectly. Justification or salvation is a process that begins at baptism, but must be maintained by good works.

Peter Martyr Vermigli, The Peter Martyr Library: Philosophical Works - On the Relation of Philosophy to Theology

1996, 342 pgs.

Summary: Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499-1562) was a former Augustinian monk and contemporary of John Calvin who joined the Reformed after careful study of the Bible. He taught at Oxford, Strasburg, and Zurich. He like Luther had received the scholastic training of the day.

This work is a compilation of his comments on locus classicus from his commentaries on the Bible and his lectures on “philosophical” topics—free will, natural religion, philosophy and the theology, revelation, and etc.

Exemplar Quotes:

“So it seems that philosophy should be defined as a capacity given by God to human minds, developed through effort and exercise, by which all existing things perceived as surely and logically as possible, to enable us to attain happiness” (7).

Richard Muller, Christ and the Decree: Christology and Predestination in Reformed Theology from Calvin to Perkins

Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008, 235 pgs.

Summary: Muller argues that the Reformed scholastics were not rationalists and did not organize their doctrine around a central doctrine, such as predestination. Further, he shows the continuity and discontinuity between Calvin and the third and fourth generation Reformers.

The essential history of Reformed thought begins with the response of Luther to the sacramental system of the Roman Catholic Church via his interpretation of Paul. Paul placed Christ at the very center of salvation and history. Luther and the Reformers concluded that the “medieval system was christocentric only in a formal sense” (73). Christ merited the grace, but God as the first mover and the Church bestowed the grace through the sacraments ex opera operato. Christ as the current mediator and the meeting place of God and man was severely compromised by the Church’s view of itself as the mediator and dispenser of grace. The recipient of sacramental grace must not hinder the work of God and the Church, but faith in Christ was secondary. Christ’s merit was further eroded by the addition the saints’ merit to the process of salvation and sanctification.

Richard A. Muller, God, Creation, and Providence in the Thought of Jacob Arminius: Sources and Directions of Scholastic Protestantism in the Era of Early Orthodoxy

Baker Book House Company, 1991, 309 pgs.

Summary: A scholarly assessment of the development of Arminius’ theology. Muller’s basic argument is that Arminius is part of the third wave of Protestant theologians who attempted to systematize the earlier exegesis of Scripture by the first wave of the Reformers. In so doing, Arminius attempts to appropriate medieval scholastic and Jesuit tools in vocabulary and theological distinctions to help explain some of the inherent theological tension in theology. His greatest difference with his Reformed counterparts was not biblicism or scholasticism but how he understands God’s being and psychology and God’s relationship to creation.

Arminius adopts and modifies Thomas of Aquinas’ (1225-1274) understanding of the sovereignty of God in his relation to creation using his own modification of the doctrine of middle knowledge, which was developed and embraced by the Jesuits. Arminius’ hybrid theology teaches that God limits himself by his relationship to the order of creation so that God’s actions are contingent on the foreseen decisions of human beings. Thus God and creation are in a mutually reciprocal relationship and to a degree God’s actions are determined by human actions (cf. 135, 165). Arminius also defines the grace of salvation and the grace of creation in such a way as to require that the grace of salvation be universal in nature though limited by human freedom. Because Arminius’ theology allows for God and man to have a reciprocal relationship, Arminianism is more open to the materialistic rationalism of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophy (cf. 284-285).

Karl Barth, The Theology of Schleiermacher

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1982, 287 pgs.

Summary: A careful consideration and critique of Schleiermacher’s canon and theological system by Karl Barth (1886-1968), delivered as lectures in 1924.

The lectures are divided into two chapters: the first discussing the theology of Schleiermacher as a preacher, working particularly with his early sermons, Easter and Christmas sermons, and household sermons. The second chapter considers the content of Schleiermacher’s Encyclopedia, Hermeneutics, The Christian Faith, and The Speeches on Religion (cf. my review).

Schleiermacher’s basic goal and failure are described in this way by Barth: “The task that he set himself . . . was to demonstrate that heresy and heterodoxy are not the same thing and to indicate how much friendly agreement is possible within the space inhabited in common by the orthodox and the heterodox” (204). (Heresy is essentially defined by Schleiermacher as rejecting the feeling of absolute dependence on the infinite as germinated by Christ.)

John Calvin and Sebastian Castellio, The Secret Providence of God, ed. Paul Helm, trans. Keith Goad

Crossway, 2010, 125 pgs.

Summary: John Calvin’s former friend Sebastian Castellio (1515-1563) wrote, privately published, and circulated among Protestants a letter attacking Calvin’s articulation of the decrees of God. (Calvin divides God’s will into the revealed will of God and the secret will of God or the published and secret decrees [cf. Deut. 29:29]). The letter is rhetorically sophisticated and claims to summarize Calvin’s teachings into 14 articles drawn from his writings. Castellio, or the calumniator, then makes a show of defending Calvin and his careful theological distinctions before collapsing into accusing Calvin of erecting Satan as the God of the Bible (53), because God is the ultimate cause of evil.

Castellio sets the attitude and the framework of the later developments of Arminianism egalitarian love and libertarian free will. There is also the use of a “normal” hermeneutic used to shield Castellio’s first premises: “When Christ taught divine thing he followed common sense. If common sense is taken away, then all the parables of Christ will be nullified, for we interpret these parables by means of common sense” (43).

Faith Seeking Understanding

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