Journal: Journal of the Institute of Reformed Baptist Studies
Volume: JIRBS 07:1 (NA 2020)
Article: The Doctrine Of Divine Simplicity In Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics
Author: John C. Biegel

JIRBS 7 (2020) p. 33

The Doctrine Of Divine Simplicity In Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics

John C. Biegel*

^* John C. Biegel, M.Div., The School of Divinity at Cairn University, is one of the pastors at Riverstone Church in Yardley, PA and a ThM student at the School of Divinity at Cairn University in Langhorne, PA, where he is writing his thesis on the reception and continuity of Marrow theology in the work of Scottish theologian John Colquhoun. The author wishes to express his gratitude to Dr. James E. Dolezal for his feedback on this article and his encouragement to pursue its publication.

In his examination of the state of divine simplicity in theological discourse, James Dolezal seeks to validate Richard Muller’s claim that the classical theistic understanding of the doctrine has been among “the normative assumptions of theology”1 throughout the history of the church. Dolezal offers “a brief sketch of what some of the church’s leading theologians have said about the [doctrine of divine simplicity] in the last two millennia.”2 Through this survey of patristic, medieval, Reformation, and post-Reformation voices, Dolezal convincingly demonstrates that divine simplicity in its classical theistic form is the majority report across the ages and ecclesiastical branches of Christian theology―both Roman Catholic and Reformed Protestant.3 There is one branch of Christianity, however, on which Dolezal does not comment, and that is Lutheranism.4

Confessional Lutheranism developed alongside Reformed theology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, having broken from Rome over a myriad of theological issues principally related to Scripture, authority, justification, and the nature of the gospel. As vigorously as they distanced themselves from Roman Catholicism

JIRBS 7 (2020) p. 34

and as vehemently as they denounced Rome’s theological errors, Lutheran theologians, like their Reformed counterparts, generally did not see the doctrine of God as a primary battleground. This is because under the head of theology proper there was great continuity between the pre-Reformation theology of the Church and what was held by Lutheran theologians.

This study contends that confessional Lutheran dogmaticians followed the same basic trajectory as their Reformed cousins, and that confessional Lutheranism, like confessional Presbyterian and Reformed theology, has historically held to a classical theistic understanding of divine simplicity. If this is so, it adds further weight to the ...