Journal: Journal of the Institute of Reformed Baptist Studies
Volume: JIRBS 01:1 (NA 2013)
Article: Of The Nature Of God: The Inter-Relation Of Essence And Trinity In Edward Leigh’s "A Systeme Or Body Of Divinity" (1662)
Author: Stefan T. Lindblad

JIRBS 1 (2014) p. 95

Of The Nature Of God:
The Inter-Relation Of Essence And Trinity In Edward Leigh’s
A Systeme Or Body Of Divinity (1662)

Stefan T. Lindblad*

*Stefan T. Lindblad is a pastor of Trinity Reformed Baptist Church, Kirkland, WA, and a Ph.D. Candidate in Historical and Systematic Theology at Calvin Theological Seminary, Grand Rapids, MI.

Beyond the seventeenth century the name Edward Leigh (1602–1671) is virtually unknown, and his theology relatively untouched in the extant secondary literature.1 A prolific author and theologian, he was nevertheless well-regarded in his own day for his intellectual industry, theological orthodoxy, and austere piety.2

JIRBS 1 (2014) p. 96

Leigh’s last theological work, A Systeme or Body of Divinity (1662), is a positive and polemical theological system typical of the high Reformed orthodox era (ca. 1640–ca. 1725) that draws upon a wide range of patristic, medieval, and sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sources, and as such is quite unoriginal. Specifically, employing the standard scholastic order, as well as common Reformed distinctions and lines of argumentation, the locus de Deo of Leigh’s Body of Divinity is characteristic of seventeenth-century Reformed orthodox thought on the doctrine of God. When his doctrine of God’s nature (quid sit Deus)–inclusive of the doctrine of the divine essence and the doctrine of the Trinity–is studied against the broader backdrop of seventeenth-century Reformed theology, it is evident that, like his predecessors and contemporaries, Leigh did not construct an abstract or speculative doctrine of God that emphasized the divine essence at the expense of the Trinity, but instead attempted to formulate a theologically cogent doctrine of God grounded in Scripture, the principium cognoscendi theologiae.

The paucity of scholarly investigation of the Reformed orthodox doctrine of God has been complicated by the fact that where scholarship of the last century did venture into the subject it almost universally cast these writers and their doctrinal formulations in a negative light. As part of a larger body of scholarship claiming methodological, philosophical, and theological discontinuity between the Reformation (especially Calvin) and subsequent Reformed theology, this older scholarship opined that an interest in metaphysics was so pronounced among the Reformed orthodox that they necessarily constructed an abstract and speculative

JIRBS 1 (2014) p. 97

doctrine of God.3 Ot...