iustitia aliena

Detail bits regarding the influence of Turretin’s Institutes of Elenctic Theology :

The contemporary relevance of Protestant orthodox theology arises from the fact that it remains the basis of normative Protestant theology in the present. With little formal and virtually no substantial dogmatic alteration, orthodox or scholastic Reformed theology appears in the works of Charles Hodge. Archibald Alexander Hodge and Louis Berkhof…Charles Hodge’s Systematic Theology draws heavily on Francis Turretin’s Institutio theologiae elencticae and represents, particularly in its prolegomena, an attempt to recast the systematic insights of orthodoxy in a nineteenth-century mold.

Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Othodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1725 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 1987 and 2003), Volume I, 29.

The Marrow of Theology was most influential in New England, where it was generally regarded as the best summary of Calvinistic theology ever written. It was required reading at Harvard and Yale well into the eighteenth century, when it was supplanted by Francois Turrettini’s Institues of Elenctic Theology. (Footnote: S.E. Morrison, Harvard College in the Seventeeth Century  (Cambridge, Mass: Havard University Press, 1936), p. 267.

Joel R. Beeke and Jan van Vliet, “Marrow of Theology by William Ames (1576-1633),” in  A Devoted Life: An Invitation To the Puritan Classics. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004)

Read on!

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Post by Dan B. here.

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Part of Turretin’s concluding remarks:

I do not expect or ask for any praise in the future from my little work, but I will consider my labor to be well satisfying if you soberly and favorably regard that this work of mine, such as it is, renders service to the church of God.  If any fruit is returned from hence, it will come through divine blessing for illumination of the truth and edification of the saints.  But if this main portion of my labor be neither unhelpful for you nor clearly useless–which I alone have reluctantly brought into the light–were I to perceive this to be the case, I would proceed to another part more eagerly and act with aid of a good God if he would see fit to bestow to me strength and life and that I might more swiftly deliver the faith once given.

Meanwhile, since I am a man (and I do not suppose that I am free from any human limitations), if anything would be said by me here that would correspond little with Scripture united with the rule of our faith, not only do I want it to be unsaid, but even to be stricken out.

You then, dear reader, when you kindly express appreciation and are lenient toward my errors: “If you know something better than these precepts, pass it on, my good fellow. If not, join me in following these” (Horace, Epistles 1.6.67-68) [Loeb, 290-91]).

May the God of truth and of peace cause us to walk always in truth and charity; may we grow every day in him who is the head, until we all arrive at the unity of faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, perfected in power and to the measure of the maturity of Christ Amen.  

Francis Turretin, translated by George Musgrave Giger, edited by James T. Dennison, Jr.  Institutes of Elentic Theology (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1992), xlii.

  

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The post-Reformation development can be divided, for the sake of convenience, into three periods: early, high, and late orthodoxy. Early orthodoxy, in two fairly distinct phases (ca. 1565-1618-1640) extends roughly from the time of the deaths of a large number of major second generation codifiers of the Reformation and the promulgation of the great national confessions of the Reformed churches (1559-1566) to a transition in generations and approach that occured followng the Synod of Dort and the outbreak of the Thirty Years War (1618-1619), to the closing phases of the war and the deaths of the major figures who formulated the confessional solutions of the beginning of the seventeenth century. It was the era of the confessional solidification of Protestantism. Specifically, as of 1565, many of the important second-generation codifiers of the Reformed faith (John Calvin, Wolfgang Musculus, Peter Martyr Vermigli, and Andreas Hyperius) has passed away–the single eminent exception of Heinrich Bullinger who lived until 1575. Reformed theology passed, in the first phase of early orthodoxy, into the hands of Zacharias Ursinus, Casper Olevianus, Jerome Zanchi, Lambert Daneau, Theodore Beza, Francis Junius, William Perkins, and Amandus Polanus. The theologians who sat at Dort and perpetuated its carefully outlined confessionalism in the early seventeenth century–among them, Antonius Walaeus, Johann Polyander, Sibrandus Lubbertus, Franciscus Gomarus, Johannes Maccovius, John Davenant–together with writers like William Ames and J.H. Alsted belong to the second phase of the early orthodox period. Here also are found the seeds of developments and debates that would occupy the thinkers of the high orthodox era: covenant theology begins to elaborate in the works of Cameron, Ball, and Cloppenburg; worries concerning the universal promise of the gospel not addressed to the satisfaction of all at Dort reached initial formulation in the writings of Davenant and Amyraut; and the first salvos of the debate over the origin of the vowel-points were heard in the writings of Buxtorf and Cappel.

High Orthodoxy (ca. 1640-1685-1725) spans the greater part of the seventeenth and the first quarter of the eighteenth century. Like early orthodox, it needs to be divided into two phases. It represents a still broader theological synthesis than early orthodoxy: it rests upon a confessional summation of faith, has a somewhat sharper and more codified polemic against its doctrinal adversaries, and possesses a broader and more explicit grasp of tradition, particularly of the contribution of the Middle Ages. Characteristic of the initial phase of this era are internal and intraconfessional controversies, such as the broader Amyraldian controversy and the debate over Cocceian federal theology as well as the vast expansion of debate with the Socinians over the doctrine of the Trinity. In this phase of the high orthodox period are found such authors as Johannes Cocceius, Samuel Maresius, Andreas Essenius, Gisbertus Voetius, Friedrich Spanheim the Elder, Marcus Friedrich Wendelin, Franz Burman, Francis Turretin, Edward Leigh, Matthew Poole, John Owen, and Stephen Charnock.

Following 1685, the tenor of the orthodoxy changed, although the confessional boundaries continued to remain relatively in place. Given the difficulty of preiodization and the presence, in the late seventeenth century, of various forces and pressures that would bring on the Enlightenment, some writers have further divded the chronology of orthodoxy by identifying a “transitional phase” and even a “transition theology” from ca. 1685 to ca. 1725. Certainly, after 1685, the theology represented by the more traditional writers ceased to be as dominant an intellectual pattern in the church and in the theological faculties of the great Protestant universities as it had been in the mid-seventeenth century, although the theology and the ethos of orthodoxy was carried forward by a significant number of theologians. The changes that took place included an increased pressure on the precritical textual, exegetical, and hermeneutical model of orthodoxy, an alteration of the philosophical model used by theologians from the older Christian Aristotelian approach to either a variant of the newer rationalism or a virtually a-philosophical version of dogmatics. This is also the era of the beginning of internal divisions in the Reformed confessions over the issues raised by the piety of the Second Reformation or Nadere Reformatie and by the dispossesed status of Reformed Protestants in England and France. By 1725, a fairly uniform and unified confessional subscription had faded both in England and in Switzerland. In this latter transitional phase of high orthodoxy, reaching into the eighteenth century, the significant theologians included such writers as Benedict Picter, Wilhelmus a Brakel, Louis Tronchin, Leonhardus Rijssenius, Petrus van Mastricht, Herman Witsius, Solomon van Til, Johannes Markius, John Edwards, Thomas Ridgley, Thomas Boston, Campegius Vitringa, Johannes van der Kemp, and J.A. Turretin.

Theology after 1725, in what can be called “late orthodoxy,” is less secure in its philosophical foundations, indeed, searching for different philosophical models, less certain of its grasp of the biblical standard, and often (though hardly always) less willing to draw out its polemic against other “orthodox” forms of Christianity, less bound by the confessional norms of the Reformation, and given to internecine polemics. One can even speak here of a “deconfessionalism” in the late orthodox era that reverses the process of “confessionalization” that took place in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Nonetheless, even in this altered climate, a more or less traditional theology continued to be produced by such late orthodox writers as Daniel Wyttenbach, Johann Friedrich Stapfer, Herman Venema, John Gill, Alexander Comrie, John Brown of Haddington, and Bernhardus de Moor.

Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Othodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1725 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 1987 and 2003), Volume I, 30-32.

 

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From the NIV Application Commentary on Ezekiel by Iain Duguid

The gospel is not merely the starting point from which we move on to ethics; it is the heartbeat of our lives as Christians. That is why Paul could say in 1 Corinthians 2:2: “I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” Presumably, Paul is not saying that he only preached evangelistic sermons while ignoring the task of discipleship. Rather, he means that every sermon he preached had a focus on the cross of Christ, whose implications he then drew out for every area of life. To put it simply, he never preached Ephesians 4-6 (the ethical imperatives) without Ephesians 1-3 (the gospel indicative). Our sanctification flows out of our justification. (33-34, Bold added)
(HT: Michael Tran)
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It is sometimes been said that the modern church, usually because of its ignorance of the patristic period, has tended to duplicate in its theology most of the errors and problems of the first five centuries of Christian thought. When approached in a balanced and objectve manner, history provides insight into the limitation of our powers, if only by preserving the reasons for the failures of the past and, in the case of the theological tradition, showing the boundaries within which the community has chosen to formulate its views.

James E. Bradley and Richard A. Muller, Church History: An Introduction to Research, Reference Works, and Methods (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co.), 62.

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Josh quotes from The Economy of the Covenants. The Post is titled, Witsius on the Mosaic Covenant: Works of Grace? and it may be read here.

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While God’s mercies to the Israelites despite their disloyalty to the Sinaitic covenant are always justified on the basis of the Abrahamic promise, there are no passages that read, “Yet God remained faithful to David/the house of David for the sake of his covenant with Moses and the people at Horeb.” The covenant does not work in reverse. God never remains faithful to unfaithful national Israel on the basis of the Sinaitic covenant itself–for on that basis, as he repeatedly says, he would have scattered them long ago. And yet it is on the basis of the Sinaitic covenant that God exiles Judah and eventually, through Jesus’s prophetic ministry abolishes the theocracy and pronounces judgment upon it. This reiterates the fact that the ministry of Moses could not being about that blessedness that was the positive side of the sanctions–not because it was flawed, but because those who answered with one voice, “We will do all these things,” in fact did not.
- Michael S. Horton, God of Promise (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books) 99.

 

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The gospel method of sanctification, as well as of justification, lies so far out of the ken of natural reason, that if all the rationalists in the world, philosophers and divines, had consulted together to lay down a plan for repairing the lost image of God in man, they had never hit upon that which the divine wisdom has pitched upon, viz: that sinners should be sanctified in Christ Jesus, 1 Cor. i. 2, by faith in him, Acts xxvi. 18; nay, being laid before them, they would have rejected it with disdain, as foolishness, 1 Cor. 1. 23. (9)

And hence it is always to be observed, that as the doctrine of the gospel is corrupted, to introduce a more rational sort of religion, the flood of looseness and licentiousness swells proportionably; insomuch that morality, brought in for doctrine, in room and stead of the gospel of the grace of God, never fails to be, in effect, a signal for an inundation of immorality in practice. A plain instance hereof is to be seen in the grance apostasy from the truth and holiness of the gospel, as exemplified in Popery. And on the other hand, real and thorough reformation in churches is always the effect of the gospel light, breaking forth again, from under the cloud which had gone over it; and hereof the Church of Scotland, among others, has, oftener than once, had comfortable experience. (10)

In all views which fallen man has towards the means of his own recovery, the natural bent is to the way of the covenant of works. This is evident in the case of the vast multitudes through the world, embracing Judaism, Paganism, Mahomentanism, and Popery. All these agree in this one principle, that it is by doing men much live, though they hugely differ as to the things to be done for life. (9, 10)

Reader, lay aside prejudices,-look and see with thine own eyes,-call things by their own names, and do not reckon Anti-Baxterianism or Anti-Neonomianism to be Antinomianism and thou shalt find no Antinomianism taught here; but though wilt be perhaps surprised to find, that that tale is told of Luther and other famous Protestant divines, under the borrowed name of the despised Mr. Fisher, author of The Marrow of Modern Divinity .  (11)

I conclude this preface, in the words of two eminent professors of theology, deserving our serious regard:-

‘I dread mightily that a rational sort of religion is coming in among us: I mean by it, a religion that consists in a bare attendance on outward duties and ordinances, without the power of godliness: and thence people shall fall into a way of serving God, which is a mere deism, having no relation to Jesus Christ a nd the Spirit of God.’ (1)

‘I warn each one of your, and especially such as are to be directors of the conscience, that you exercise yourselves in study, reading, meditation, and prayer, so as you may be able to instruct and comfort both your own and other’s consciences in the time of temptation, and to bring them back from the law to grace, from the active (or working) righteousness, to the passive (or received righteousness); in a word, from Moses to Christ.” (2)

(1) Memoirs of Mr. Halyburton’s life, page 199. (2) Luth. Comment. in Epist. ad Gal. page 27.

 -The Marrow of Modern Divinity By Edward Fisher,  A.M. with notes by Thomas Boston. Westminster Publishing House, New York/Seoul.

wow.

Petrus Dathenus…His Pearl of Christian Comfort takes as its main thesis that its interlocutor did not know how to properly distinguish law and gospel because of the preaching that she was evidently having to endure. Puritan preaching was, especially in its late phase, given to extremes (charges of neonomianism and antinomianism dominating the literature). Illustrative is the Marrow Controversy in Scotland, in which a rediscovered 1645 theology text, which had been celebrated by its contemporaries, was vilified as “antinomian” by an eighteenth-century Church of Scotland that indicted unblemished Puritan fathers such as John Preston as antinomian for regarding salvation entirely as a “deed of gift and grant.” Eventuating in the Secession of 1733, the controversy shows that the dominant sentiments in the Church of Scotland in that period were so far removed from those of the Reformation that the standard Reformed orthodoxy enshrined in the Westminster Standards could be condemned as antinomian heresy.- Michael Horton in his chapter Law, Gospel, and Covenant: Reassessing Some Emerging Antitheses in the book Theologia et Apologia: Essays in Reformation Theology And Its Defense Presented to Rod Rosenbladt, edited by Adam S. Francisco, Korey D. Maas, and Steven P. Mueller. (262)

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Good stuff. Part two is at the Heidelblog here.