Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 64:2 (Fall 2002)
Article: The Fundamental Meaning Of Theology: Archetypal And Ectypal Theology In Seventeenth-Century Reformed Thought
Author: Willem J. Van Asselt

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The Fundamental Meaning Of Theology:
Archetypal And Ectypal Theology In Seventeenth-Century Reformed Thought1

Willem J. Van Asselt*

[*Willem J. Van Asselt is a senior member of the Church History department in the State Theological Faculty at the University of Utrecht.]

I. Introduction

In his Vorgeschichte des Rationalismus and in his Geschichte des Rationalismus, the nineteenth-century pietist theologian F. A.G. Tholuck (1799–1877), professor of theology at the university of Halle (Germany), defended the thesis that post- Reformation Protestant scholastic theology was one of the important causes that effected the rise of Enlightenment rationalism.2 His idea that post-Reformation Protestant theology was an essentially rationalistic project leading up to the Enlightenment was taken up by historians and theologians of the twentieth century, who connected it with some other ideas regarding the development of Reformed theology during this period. First, it was argued by Karl Barth that post-Reformation Reformed theology tended to create an abstract doctrine of God’s sovereign power (Deus nudus) as supreme being and ruler of the universe, as opposed to a God whose love for us is revealed in Jesus Christ.3 Following Barth, Ernst Bizer claimed that this abstract doctrine of God created a radical separation of natural knowledge of God from the saving knowledge of God and, thus, the possibility of knowing God apart from the knowledge of his grace and mercy.4 This separation resulted in an independent theology of the first article: God as Creator.5 According to Paul Althaus the duplex cognitio or twofold knowledge of God as Creator and Redeemer was reflected in the development of a

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positive locus of natural theology independent of Scripture and soteriology.6 Like Barth, both Althaus and Bizer declared that the gradual development of natural theology and the positive use of reason in post-Reformation Reformed theology represented a turn towards Enlightenment rationalism. Finally, Otto Weber summarized this Barthian approach to seventeenth-century Reformed theology by asserting that many of the Reformed scholastics came to view special revelation as no more than a completion of our natural knowledge of God. The Reformed scholastics assumed that Christian knowledge fits very well into the model of rati...