Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 68:1 (Spring 2006)
Article: The Theologian’s Tool Kit: Johannes Maccovius (1588–1644) And The Development Of Reformed Theological Distinctions
Author: Willem J. Van Asselt

---

WTJ 68:1 (Spring 2006) p. 23

The Theologian’s Tool Kit:
Johannes Maccovius (1588–1644)
And The Development Of Reformed
Theological Distinctions

Willem J. Van Asselt

Willem J. van Asselt is Associate Professor of Church History at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands. An earlier version of this article was presented at Westminster Theological Seminary, 21 October 2004.

What the angelic doctor, the subtle mystic, the profound poet and the chief master or all the other scholastics have ever said: the one and only Makowsky now at last hath bequeathed it to posterity.1

I. The Present State of Maccovius Research

In ecclesial historiography the Polish aristocrat and theologian Jan Makowsky (1588–1644)—who latinized his name as Johannes Maccovius—does not rank among the most popular theologians of the seventeenth century.2 Many textbooks on the history of theology include references to him as a super-scholastic whose defense of scholastic method and logical distinctions in theology was qualified as an excessive form of “rationalism” resulting in an extreme emphasis upon the doctrine of predestination, which was seen as a perversion of the “biblical theology” of the reformers. Authors such as W. B. S. Boeles, Paul Althaus, Otto Ritschl, Otto Weber, G. C. Berkouwer, and Keith L. Sprunger, to name just a few, time and again used Maccovius as a kind of “whipping boy” in order to express their own aversion to scholastic method and logic in post-reformation Reformed theology. According to these authors, the introduction of scholastic method by authors like Maccovius implied a substantial modification of the theological framework, which the Reformation theologians had set forth in their works.3

WTJ 68:1 (Spring 2006) p. 24

Though such incidental remarks and several entries in dictionaries of historical theology have appeared in print, very few substantial works on the life and work of Maccovius have been published.4 The first and most important source of biographical information on Maccovius is the funeral oration given by his colleague at Franeker University, the federal theologian Johannes Cocceius (1603–69), delivered on July 2, 1644, about a week after Maccovius’s death.5 In this oratio Cocceius presented a rather congenial overview of Maccovius’s life and works, calling him an expert in philosophy, a good historian, and well-versed in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, although he pronounced his Latin with a strange a...

visitor : : uid: ()