Supralapsarianism and the Role of Metaphysics in Sixteenth-Century Reformed Theology -- By: Lynne Courter Boughton

Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 48:1 (Spring 1986)
Article: Supralapsarianism and the Role of Metaphysics in Sixteenth-Century Reformed Theology
Author: Lynne Courter Boughton


Supralapsarianism and the Role of Metaphysics in Sixteenth-Century Reformed Theology

Lynne Courter Boughton

EVEN the most objective modern scholars seem to share with Luther and Calvin a humanistic impatience with metaphysical elucidation of theology and to admire the original Reformers’ commitment to developing a vigorous experiential faith grounded in the scriptural promise of God’s unconditional gift of salvation. There is, therefore, a tendency for many scholars to see in the controversies concerning predestination that divided sixteenth and seventeenth century admirers of Calvin a fraternal but trenchant conflict between those who preserved the experiential faith and soteriological emphasis of the early Reformation and those who encumbered the theology of salvation with metaphysical exploration of the divine essence and rigid doctrinal formulae.

It has been well-established that English Puritan theology exemplified the experiential approach to faith. Seeing in Calvin’s understanding of the relationship between God and man a verification of their own experience of grace, election, and scriptural promises, Puritan theologians perpetuated Calvin’s vision of a transcendent but promise-bound God and focused, like the Heidelberg Catechism and Belgic Confession, on the unconditional nature of election. By limiting theological inquiry to the exegetical and soteriological explication of God’s salvific covenants and in employing Peter Ramus’s method of eliminating metaphysics and confining first philosophy to the study of the physical world, leading Puritan scholars advanced an inductive theology that seemed to nurture experiential

piety while avoiding the intellectual and spiritual rigidity associated with metaphysics and doctrine.1

The apparent role of Ramist philosophy and its similarly nonmetaphysical precursors in preserving experiential faith has cast Reformed admirers of Aristotelian metaphysics into an adversary position as corruptors of Reformed theology. Several modern commentators have found fault with certain sixteenth-century theologians at Geneva and Strassburg who saw in Calvin’s concept of predestination not a mystery to inspire awe and piety but a revealed doctrine to be explored

and defined through the use of the metaphysical categories that the great Genevan had scorned. These continental theologians who included Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499–1562), Girolamo Zanchl (1516–1590), and Theodore Beza (1515–1605) incorporated new interpretations of Aristotelian metaphysics established by Renaissance scholars into what seeme...

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