Gereformeerde scholastiek: hoofdlijnen van een nieuwe benadering

Samenvatting

This article posits that the antischolasticism found in Reformation theology is a post-Reformation invention and that recent research calls into question views on certain Protestant and, especially, Reformed scholasticism. Instead of a reduction to a binary choice – Reformation or scholasticism – I argue we need a sound historical method not influenced by all kinds of prejudices held against scholasticism. This method does not devote attention primarily to individual authors; rather to questions on the more general and theological discourse of their times: What issues were they addressing, and to what extent were they accepting or questioning the prevailing assumptions or traditions of theological debate? The claim made in this essay is that we should let the Reformed scholastics define for themselves what scholasticism stands for. Achieving this aim, I will discuss some major methodological– and hence practical – implications of this new approach for the study of Protestant scholasticism.