Historical And Theological Studies Natural Law And The Noetic Effects Of Sin: The Faculty Of Reason In Francis Turretin’s Theological Anthropology -- By: Stephen J. Grabill

Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 67:2 (Fall 2005)
Article: Historical And Theological Studies Natural Law And The Noetic Effects Of Sin: The Faculty Of Reason In Francis Turretin’s Theological Anthropology
Author: Stephen J. Grabill


Historical And Theological Studies Natural Law
And The Noetic Effects Of Sin:
The Faculty Of Reason In Francis Turretin’s
Theological Anthropology

Stephen J. Grabill

Stephen Grabill is Executive Editor of Journal of Markets and Morality and Research Scholar in Theology at the Acton Institute’s Center for Academic Research in Grand Rapids, Mich. This article was originally presented at the conference “Written on the Heart: The Tradition of Natural Law,” Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Mich., 13–15 May 2004.

I. Present State of the Question

Scholarship on Reformed orthodoxy, largely rehearsing the generalizations and conclusions of such nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German historians and theologians as Alexander Schweizer, Heinrich Heppe, Paul Althaus, and Hans Emil Weber, has often criticized the Protestant theological systems of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for being “rationalistic.”1 Rationalism, as a term of diminution applied to those systems, generally signifies that reason functions either as the foundation upon which theological doctrines are built or as the first principle by which they are authenticated. In this view, the supposedly inherent rationalism of the scholastic method brought about a distortion of the Reformers’ doctrine.

In his frequently cited study of the seventeenth-century Reformed theologian Moyses Amyraut, Brian Armstrong claimed that Protestant scholasticism employed “reason in religious matters, so that reason assumes at least equal

standing with faith in theology, thus jettisoning some of the authority of revelation.”2 Walter Kickel described Theodore Beza as having masterminded the “substitution of a rational system of final causation for Christocentrism.”3 Otto Grundler advanced the argument that the concept of causality was not only the “key” but also the “unifying principle” of Jerome Zanchi’s theology: “In the theology of Zanchi, at the very point of transition from Reformation to Orthodoxy, the spirit of medieval Scholasticism has thus begun to replace that of the Reformers at a point where it counted most. To the extent to which—under the influence of the Thomistic-Aristotelian tradition—the christocentric orientation of Calvin’s thinking shifted toward a metaphysics of causality in the thought of his successors, Reformed theology ceased to be a theology of revelation.”4 Such an approach is also identifiable in Alan Clifford’s contention...

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