Systematic Theology 1 | Lecture 1

Good morning. Welcome to RTS. Some of you, for your first class, perhaps you've been taking some summer classes, maybe your first one in person. Good to have you here. We will do the obligatory syllabus run-through a little bit later this morning. We'll also have a chance to just quickly introduce ourselves. But rather than do that, because, uh, you'll have a lot of first classes this week, and probably that's the first thing you do for the first half hour or so, thought you're here and you're here to learn about theology. So we're going to start by learning about theology. Uh, let me pray.

Father in Heaven, thank you for these brothers and sisters. Thank you for the opportunity we have to study your word, to study those who have gone before, and to learn about this heritage of faithfulness. Give us good minds, good hearts. Help us to listen, to pay attention, even when the mornings seem long. We pray that you would give us, from the great privilege we have to be here together over these weeks, the opportunity to know you better, to be better equipped to serve others in the church, and on campus, and in our homes, and ultimately, we would be more enraptured with you, more led to worship. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

This is Systematic Theology One: Prologomena of Theology, Anthropology, and Dr. Kevin DeYoung. And I am a, uh, whatever assistant professor here. And my real day job, normally, except for Wednesdays, is as the pastor at Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, just about five miles away from here. And it's good to be with you in this class. This handout that I gave you is the macro outline, so you can see along the way where we are. As you know, with great infamy, I do not allow computers for note-taking in class. That's just to thin out the ranks of people taking the class, but I have my reasons for it. Don't need to convince you of those reasons because you just have to do it. So glad that you're abiding by those.

Really, the main reason I do that is because one, I think even the godliest student can be very easily distracted with a screen. Uh, two, because I'm not trying to train you to be court stenographers. If I wanted you to, the idea of this class was to regurgitate my notes, I would have, I have 170 pages of this, and I would just, here you are. And, uh, that's fine, and there's advantages to doing that, just to get the clarity. But what I want you to do is I want you to listen, and I want you to digest, and I want you to think, "Do I need to write that down? Do I need to know that?" That's part of learning and discerning. If you listen, and I like to be able to see some faces and not just 40 screens. So those are the rules, and I know I'm one of the few, maybe the only one who does that, but thank you for abiding by that.

So even though I don't hand out lengthy notes, this will at least give you a sense of direction. You can see here on the first page, the main division or loci. Actually, Latin, the C would be pronounced as a hard C, but loci is a superhero or something. So loci, or topics: Prologomena, Theology, Anthropology, Christology, Soteriology, Ecclesiology, Eschatology. Those are seven classic, big-picture topics in Systematic Theology. We are looking at the first three in this course, which is a daunting task to get through all three of those. As you will see from the outline below, this course sets out to answer seven fundamental questions: One, what is theology all about? Two, how does God reveal himself? Three, what is God like? Four, who is God? Five, what does God do? Six, what are we like? And seven, what is our problem? And then you can turn the page, and you'll see where we're going with Prologomena, Theology Proper One, Theology Proper Two, and then the last page, Anthropology. So this will at least help you as you take your notes to know what are the big topics, where are we? I've gotten lost, I'm not sure where we are. This will tell you where we are, where we're going.

So I want to start with what is theology, why we study it. The word theology, you probably know, comes from two Greek words: Theos, meaning God, and logos, meaning word, speech, or statement. So theology is, put simply, the study of God. That's a somewhat prosaic definition. Perhaps more poetically, William Perkins defines theology as, quote, "the science of living blessedly forever." That's nice. William Ames said theology is "the doctrine of living to God." Peter van Mastricht, theology is "the doctrine of living unto God through Christ." I would put it this way: The aim of theology is to know, enjoy, and walk in the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. The aim of theology is to know. So no apologies that we are here to learn something. This is a class to learn about God. It's also a class in a graduate institution. Most of you are pursuing a degree. We have some auditors, welcome. So yes, you have to know something. You have to articulate that knowledge in tests and in papers. Unapologetically, we are aiming to know something. But not only that, to enjoy. To know more of God, to delight in him, to treasure him, to enjoy him.

One of the things, hopefully, you learn, those of you in particular who will go on to preach, there is a, you can feel the weight when you're preaching that every sermon needs to have some application. Whether it's very explicit, "Here's three things you can do this week: you can pray more, you can read your Bible, you can share your faith." And yes, it's true, my sermons, I hope, have lots of application woven throughout. But is it the case that some sermons, the application is simply to know God, to learn more about God, to see more of God? It's like if you're, if I were introducing you to my wife, my lovely wife Trisha, and, uh, perhaps I introduce you to her so that you can know the sort of coffee that she likes to drink so you can help her with the kids. That would be very nice of you if you'd be willing to do that. But wouldn't it also be worthwhile to just show her to you, tell you about her so you could know something of the delight that I have in her, and you could see what a wonderful person she is? Well, how much more so when we're talking about God. So theology, here to know, to enjoy, and then to walk in the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. So we also are moved toward obedience.

The knock on seminary education sometimes is just making eggheads or esoteric. "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" Well, that's obviously not what we're aiming for. We want to know something, we want to enjoy God, and then we want to walk in obedience. We want to help others toward that end.

We want to look at three preliminary distinctions as we try to understand what is this thing called theology. So if you look at the second page of your outline, you see: Christianity as religion? Theology as science? Speculative or practical? All of these questions are quite common in the, at least the, the older systematic theologies. These are the sort of things under this heading, Prologomena. So that's just a fancy word for first things. Words, what are the words we need to say about God before we get to God's words about him himself? That's what Prologomena has to do with. What are sort of the ground rules when we talk about theology? What is this thing? And that moves us into the doctrine of scripture.

Some systematicians, quite understandably, will start with the doctrine of God. The argument is, well, first you encounter God, and then you encounter that God and he speaks to you. So they start with theology proper, the doctrine of God, and then they go to the doctrine of scripture or revelation. That's obviously not wrong either. But the more traditional way is to start with these preliminary ground rules, and then look at God's revelation to us, and understand the doctrine of scripture, and then turn to God himself.

So let me say something about these three preliminary distinctions and definitions. First, Christianity as religion. The etymology of the word religion. To read through the older dogmatics, and they will all tell you that it's somewhat unclear. Over the years, many have agreed with Cicero, who derived religio from religare, a Latin word meaning to gather together or to re-read. And on this account, it comes from religary. Let me write that up on the board. If it comes from this word, then you can see the idea is religion is the, the diligent study of the things pertaining to God, to, to re-read. Others have preferred the explanation given by the church father Lactantius, which Augustine then adopted, that religio comes from a foreign word in Latin, religare, meaning to fasten or to bind. And with this etymology, religion is about the binding or the reattachments of man to God. This has to do with binding or attaching, and this with re-reading or studying.

In contemporary parlance, religion is often construed in entirely derogatory terms. Most of us have read or heard from pastors, Christians, even we respect, maybe this has come through. And in our opportunities to teach others, "You have religion, and then you have Jesus," or "Religion is one thing that's bad, and then you have Christianity, which is not a religion." Religion is, in contemporary uses, often the opposite of a relationship with God. So you can have a relationship with God and grace and faith and all of those good things, or you can have religion. That's when the Imperial Death March comes in. Who wants religion? Well, I understand that. And if that's what religion means, earn favor with God, work your way to God, stultified, dead rituals, well, then of course we don't want religion. But historically, religion was not used this way. And there's a problem with using religion only as a disparaging term.

So I'm urging you not to launch into a series with your college students on "Jesus versus Religion: Jesus hated religion." Well, what's the danger? Let me give you three quick reasons. One, this is a relatively new way for Christians to speak that religion equals bad. Think about John Calvin. Wrote *Institutes of the Christian*. What? The Christian relationship with Jesus? You know that's not the title. It's *Religion*. Not a bad word. Jonathan Edwards wrote on *Religious Affections*. Pastors and theologians, especially in the age of the Awakenings, often wrote about religion, or true religion, or real religion. So absolutely, our forefathers in the faith, they were not unaware of hypocrisy and ritualism, false religious systems. But they did not equate religion as something bad with works righteousness. They used the word all the time. So that's one reason not to use religion just disparagingly.

Second, the word religion occurs five times in the ESV, the English Standard Version, and is by itself a neutral word. Translates either the word *diaskeuē* (reference for the gods) or *threskeia* (religious worship). So religion can refer to Judaism (Acts 26:5) or the Jewish Christian faith (Acts 25:19). Religion can be bad when it is self-made (Colossians 2:23) or when it fails to tame the tongue (James 1:26). But religion also can be good when it cares for widows and orphans and practices moral purity. You think of James 1:27: "This is religion that is pleasing to God: it cares for widows and orphans and abstains from sexual immorality." So five times the ESV uses the word in English, religion, and it does not do so in any negative way, neutral or even positive. So there's, there's no biblical ground for making the practice of religion a uniformly negative phenomenon.

And then a third reason not to throw religion as a word under the bus: In castigating the word religion, we often end up unloading more baggage than we realize. It's all heard the phrase, "Spiritual, not religious." But what do people mean when they want to claim to be spiritual, not religious? Spiritual, they mean something like, "I believe in mystery, I believe that there's a world beyond our senses, I might believe that there's a God, or I should be a good person." And then what do they mean by religion? Well, religion is equated with commands, doctrines, structures, rituals. That's religion. Christianity has commands, doctrines, structures, rituals. So when people say they want to be spiritual, not religious, it often means, "I would like to have some sort of God on my own terms." Christianity is not a religion. If religion means I earn God's favor, it is, however, a religion in almost any normal sense of the word. Jesus was a Jew. Do you think Judaism was a religion? Do you think Jesus had sacred scriptures? Do you think he had certain doctrines that he was taught to believe? The Shema? Do you think he was instructed in the Ten Commandments? Certain things he had to do? Do you think that in synagogue worship, uh, and especially in Temple worship, there were all sorts of rituals? So if you want to say that to have rituals and commands and doctrines and structures and order and officers, that's bad, well, then Jesus was a bad dude because that was all the religion that Jesus practiced. Jesus went to services at the synagogue. He operated within the Jewish system of ritual purity. He founded a church. He established church discipline. He instituted a ritual meal. He called, he called people to observe that meal forever. He told his disciples to baptize people. They told them that they should obey everything he commanded. In short, we give people the wrong impression if we just set aside "good thing, Christianity" and "bad thing, religion."

Second category here: Theology as science. Now, here we're thinking about, in, in older, not unrelated, but an older use of the word science. This too, in the older systematics, often had a separate section. And how do we understand religion as science? Here's a statement from Charles Hodge, which is often cited and claimed to be particularly cringe-worthy. Hodge said, quote, "The, as my kids say, cringy, okay, I'm very with it. The Bible is to the theologian what nature is to the man of science. It is his storehouse of facts, and his method of ascertaining what the Bible teaches is the same as that which the natural philosopher adopts to ascertain what nature teaches." The reason people knock Hodge for that statement is if you just take that sentence, it can sound rather dull or dry, as if theology is just opening the Bible much as you would dissect the frog you probably did at some point in class growing up, or you just observe. You think of, you know, entomologists or people who are into bugs, and they may have under a glass plate all these moths and crickets with a pin through it, and just staring at these, observing, as if that's what we did with God in the Bible, just the storehouse of facts here. Well, certainly we don't want to think of the Bible as just an assortment of dry, unattached facts. There's stories, there's law, there's poetry, there's love letters, there's lots of genres here in the Bible. So I get that if you only take Hodge with that sentence, you might be misled. However, it's not right to think that Hodge was some sort of naive rationalist who approached his Bible as if he were just on a treasure hunt for timeless sayings or aphorisms. No, there's a reason to think of theology as a science.

This question did not start with Hodge. Medieval theologians, employing traditional categories from Aristotle, talked about five types of intellectual dispositions. I'll just give them to you. Uh, you, you can write it down, but you, you don't need to know this. When I write something on the board, now there's a lot, there's things you will be asked on a midterm or a final that I won't write on the board. But things writing on the board are usually a good indication of something that could be asked on a midterm or an exam. When I talk through the syllabus, I'll say more about what to expect for that. But Aristotle talked about five types of intellectual disposition: One, *intelligencia* (understanding); Two, *scientia* (science); Three, *sapientia* (wisdom); Four, *prudentia* (discretion); and then *ars* (technique). Protestant Scholastics, following in this medieval Aristotelian distinction, agreed that theology was not strictly speaking *intelligencia*. You say, "Why isn't theology understanding?" Well, in Aristotle's categories, that meant dealing with principles but not with conclusions. Aristotle's form of understanding was, you deal with first things and principles, but you don't go to the conclusions. Well, clearly that's not theology because we deal with principles, first things, and with conclusions. They also argued it was not *prudentia*. Now you say, "Well, doesn't theology have to do with discretion?" Well, in Aristotle's sense, *prudentia* was concerned with, not concerned with things to be believed. It was a separate category, had to do with discretion, but it didn't have to do with *credo*, what you believe. Okay, so that's not it. They said it, theology is not *ars*, technique, because that's only directed toward practical results and it does not have to deal with virtuous action. So you think about in our day, *ars* technique would be, is how do you get something done? How do you build a better smartphone? How do you build a faster car? You don't have to think about the virtue of it, just how do you get the technique to manipulate the material world to accomplish something. Well, that's not theology.

So you're left with two things: *scientia* (wisdom), uh, uh, science, and *sapientia* (wisdom). Some Reformed theologians like Turretin, John Owen, rejected the label science because they thought science involved only self-evident principles and didn't include revealed principles. Other Reformed theologians like William Perkins had no problem calling theology a science. Everyone agreed, in other words, theology is certainly *sapientia*, that is, theology is, is wisdom. And then there was some disagreement about whether or not it was also science. Uh, and just to repeat what I said there, the debate really is, does science as a discipline have to do with only rational, observable phenomena, or does it also include revealed facts? Well, if it doesn't include revealed, and theology is not a science. But if it includes both, we can consider it a science.

By the time we get to the end of the 19th century, so coming back to Hodge, who wrote in the 19th century, and especially when you get on the other side of Darwin, Reformed theologians were much more uniform in their acceptance that yes, theology indeed is a science. Bobink is typical. He says, "Dogmatics can rightly claim to be a science because it deals with true and trustworthy knowledge of God." If, uh, you've been in RTS for a while, these names I'm throwing out are familiar. If you're just starting and you think, "I don't know who some of these people are," that's okay. We'll get to some of them in the class. And if you don't, can't place their names right now, that's okay. William Shedd, another Presbyterian theologian from the 19th century, said, "Theology, then, as a science of God, aims to obtain a knowledge of him free from contradictions and is as profound as is possible, considering the nature of the subject and the limitations of the human mind." So theology is a science insofar as it deals with true knowledge, entails inductive analysis, and it seeks to gather biblical facts into a unified whole.

One of the reasons this is, we're thinking about that, may seem sort of esoteric, just Aristotle's five categories, well, that's sort of interesting. But we all know today how science, often capital S science, is put forward as the indisputable answer to everything. And this is in itself a very recent phenomenon. For most of Western history, people would have agreed that theology was the queen of the sciences. That was the language that they used. They understood that there are other means of knowing truth. Theology isn't the only way to know true things about the world, but every true thing we know about the world ought to be made subservient to what we know from God's word, from his revelation in theology. So I encourage you, because this, this happened, well, I suppose it's downstream from Kant and then accelerates after Darwin, and now it's just part of the air that we breathe. Science, for most people, means deals with things that are true. Religion, faith, spirituality, that may be very important, but that deals with things that are true to you, true for you. The very end of the class, we'll wrap up and and talk about how this happened, where religion became personalized, psychologized, and pragmatized. Religion became something that's just internal, and that's good if you, if it's meaningful to you, go ahead, follow your religious path. If Jesus is important, have more of Jesus. But when we talk about what we actually can know, we have science. And yes, there's some wisdom in arguing that's a part of apologetics sometimes to say, "Well, let me deal with your own set of assumptions and show you the problems in them." And yet, it's a mistake if we, as Christians, seed all of that ground and think that what we know by faith, by reason, by revelation, no longer counts in the realm of facts, no longer counts in the realm of truth. Theology is a science in that it deals with truth and the gathering together of facts into a unified whole, and it ought to have a, a place in public discourse and have, we know as Christians, even a more assured place in understanding how we think about the world.

Then finally, as we're just dealing with some definitions, is theology speculative or practical? This is an old question again, that has been around for hundreds and hundreds of years. You can read it in Aquinas, you can read it in Turretin, you can read it almost all the older and dogmatics is theology chiefly speculative or practical. Again, there are fairly technical ways of understanding those terms because if I were just to ask you, "Is theology speculative or practical?" Almost none of you are going to want to be on team speculative, because that sounds like a very bad thing. That's, that's like the worst stereotype of seminary students, a world of people to, to save from hell, and all we want to talk about is *infralapsarianism* or *supralapsarianism*, and we will get to that in this class. All we want to talk about are these very seemingly esoteric, speculative discussions about theology for smart people who have too much time on their hands. That's speculative. Has been practical is good. But that's not exactly the way the terms were used.

Thomas Aquinas argued that sacred doctrine is a speculative science because, he said, "practical science is concerned with human operations, while Christian theology is chiefly concerned with God. The goal of theology," he maintained, "is, quote, 'the perfect knowledge of God, in which consists eternal bliss.'" Of course, Aquinas is famous for that beatific vision, that blessed vision of God. So Aquinas emphasizes their knowledge of God for its own sake. That's what he means by speculative. And in Aquinas's mind, if you say theology is practical, well, that's a, that's a bad thing. You're saying theology is only worthwhile because it helps you, because it's useful to you. You're saying theology is just about human operation. No, theology, he said, is chiefly about the. He doesn't mean speculation as just sort of curious imagination. He means about being entranced with God. Oh, that's Aquinas.

Turretin, and I'll do a lecture, if not this week, the next week, to just introduce you to this Turretin, this man that you will grow to love with all of your heart as you read his big fat book. Turretin said, "Ah, okay, I get with a, what Aquinas is saying, but, uh, he argues that it's mixed, partly speculative, partly practical." Probably Aquinas wouldn't disagree with that too much. "The mysteries of the faith," to Turretin, "are impulsive to operation." That's a cool phrase, "impulsive to operation." So Aquinas said, uh, practical is just about human operation, speculative is about the entrancement, the beatific vision of the divine. Sure, Turretin says, yes, it is. But aren't those impulses to operation? That is, when you are entranced with God, when you are speculating and thinking about the greatness of God, it doesn't just leave you there. Oh, that's great. It, it works itself out in some sort of operation. That is, it incites us to love and to worship.

So here's Turretin: "A practical system is that which does not consist in the knowledge of a thing alone, but in its very nature and by itself goes forth into practice and as operation for its object. In other words, right doctrine must sink into our hearts and must find expression in our lives." So practical, he says. But yes, also speculative or theoretical. This is not a pejorative term. Again, here's Turretin: "A theoretical or speculative system is that which is occupied in contemplation." Here Turretin is affirming that there is something to learn from the, the Aquinas emphasis on the beatific vision. Knowing the truth, reveling in the truth, are worthwhile in themselves. Turretin feared that heretical groups in his day wanted to make theology exclusively practical. And this is actually a danger to be aware of in our own day. Whenever you have voices starting to say, "Well, this theology, all of this theological wrangling, or really isn't what really matters is that we're helping hungry people, isn't what really isn't the mission, what really matters? Look, there's there's nations to be disciples, there's lost people to be saved, there's poor people who need food." Once you hear people landing in that way, your theological Spidey senses should be tingling because what they want to affirm is of course not bad, but they're doing so by casting aside something that's important and indeed critical. And Turretin was worried in his own day, these sort of, these sort of controversies that come with new categories, new terms, new events, but they're the same sorts of categories or same sorts of controversy. So he had in his own day the Socinians, for example. They were the ones who said, "Ah, the doctrine of the Trinity, it's a lot of metaphysical speculation, a lot of your predestination sort of talk. This is all very confusing. What really matters is a, a theology and a Christianity that has hands and feet." Haven't you heard even in our day, this is a slogan that's been around for 100 years: "Doctrine divides, mission unites." If we could set aside the doctrine and just all agree on just rolling up our sleeves and doing mission together, that impulse has been around for a long time, and it almost always leads to heterodoxy.

So Turretin said, "Yes, yes, yes, the contemplation of God has an impulse toward operation." But let us not think that the theoretical, speculative entrancement with the divine is somehow alien to true Christianity. That will lead us to minimize the doctrine of the Trinity or the Incarnation, or it paves the way for a universal kind of religion of just good deeds. No, Turretin insisted, knowing what is right and doing what is right must never be separated. The Christian faith unites theory and practice. Theology is theoretical insofar as it points to God as the chief in, in all our knowing and delighting, but also insists that the beholding should result in us becoming more like Christ.

Pause here. See if there are questions on these three: religion, science, and the speculative or practical. Next, and there'll be lots of other opportunities to follow up and and ask questions, and we will, uh, there's no way around it, three hours. It's a long time for me to talk, and it's a longer time for you to listen to me talk. So we will, we will take a break. Uh, you can plan on a break an hour in, most times. And then we have a hard stop at 10:30 for Coffee Chapel, which is a half-hour break, and usually there's food and stuff down there. And then we'll come back from 11 to 12. So we will try to make this each week into about three hour, 55-minute sessions. So I am aware of the limits of your brain and your bladders.

The history of dogmatics, following on your outline, one definition of theology. Now, very briefly, just the history of dogmatics is not a history class, but to know something about where does this study of systematic theology come from? As far as we can tell, the first Systematic Theology, though it wouldn't have gone by that term, as *Oops, Harry Arkon*, concerning *peri archon*, concerning principles, first things, around 218 A.D. That might be a good thing to ask on a midterm. *Peri Archon*, concerning principles. Many other theologians in the early church, in the medieval church, also wrote what are something akin to a systematic theology: Augustine, John of Damascus, and some Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas, of course. Moving to Protestants, the first Protestant systematic theologian, theology comes from the Lutheran Philip Melanchthon. Actually, I think there's not an H here. Philip Melanchthon, who was the most, uh, he was, remember these early days of the Reformation, people weren't thinking about, "We got Reformed people over here, they have their own churches, and then we have Lutheran people over here." So Philip Melanchthon, and it's really Luther's theological brain and systematizer and Lutheran, but yet there weren't these distinctions. He was also, we would say, Reformed in many ways. He wrote the book *Loci Communes*. Saw that word earlier. Loci means places. Common, common places. What are the common topics, the common places that we need to address in theology? Zwingli, Calvin would follow. Calvin's *Institutes* were first published in a small volume in 1536 when Calvin was 26 or 27. So people get on it, "What are you doing?" Uh, and what began as six chapters in 1536 swelled to 80 chapters in four books by the final edition in 1559.

By most accounts, if you were to play, uh, fun parlor game to your friends, you'd be very popular. "Tell me, who are the five most important theologians in the history of the church?" Jesus. There you go. Oh, God the Father, God the Son. Let's, let's go Paul. Let's go outside the Bible. Most people will say Augustine, Aquinas, and this is some, I guess we're Protestant, Calvin, Luther. And then many people would probably add Karl Barth from the 20th century. Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Luther, uh, all sorts of people you could put from the early church there, the Cappadocians. You didn't say Anselm, didn't say Athanasius, but Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Luther, and more recently, Barth. Those five would, uh, no one could really kick you off the team if you said those are the five most influential. I didn't say those are the, the five for your life and ministry, but those are undoubtedly, if not the five, then some of the most influential.

This is Reformed Theological Seminary. So let's just think specifically about Reformed theology. No branch of the Protestant church has produced more high-quality systematic theologies than those from the Reformed and Presbyterian tradition. I don't think that's just patting ourselves on the back. Every church tradition has certain strengths and has certain weaknesses. And undoubtedly, the strength of the Reformed Presbyterian tradition is that we really want to get our doctrine and our theology right. Sometimes people will say, sort of tongue-in-cheek, "You want the, you know, you want the Charismatics to write some of your praise songs, and you want the Baptists to go save people, and you want the Presbyterians to give you your theology, and maybe you want the Episcopalians to fund the whole thing." So there's a lot of different ways to look at it. And maybe you want the Anglicans to, you know, get the candles and design the liturgy. So the Reformed faith has no doubt been leading the way in systematics. The most influential Reformed dogmatics would include Calvin's *Institutes of the Christian Religion* (1559), Turretin, what you're reading, *Institutes of Elenctic Theology*. Elenctic, if you wonder, "I, you're making us read this book, I don't even know what the title means." Elenctic means polemical or disputation. We hear polemical as you're a polemical part, you're argumentative, but he means it in a more technical sense. Uh, there's there was catechetical theology, that is theology you're trying to help new believers, young people, understand, question and answer the faith. There is maybe doxological, of course, we want it to be doxological. There's lots of different ways to go at it. Elenctic means Turretin was trying to bring together all of the disputed questions of theology. I like Turretin. Uh, he's, he's hard to read, and there's a lot of things that are going to go over your head, and that's okay. Just keep going. But one of the things I hope you appreciate is it's orderly and it's very clear, very easy to follow. Has some, "Here's the dispute. Uh, was creation, did God create the world in the spring or in the fall?" That's actually one of the sections that you're going to read. Turretin's got an answer. I don't think we can actually, but he's got an answer to that. Some people say this, some people say that, here's the right answer, here's what we affirm. That's elenctic. He's dealing with disputes and arguments. Herman Bavinck's *Reformed Dogmatics*, which came out in the second expanded edition (1906-1911). Bavinck, I'm sure, is, I know, is assigned in other classes. Other important systems from the Reformed tradition: William Ames, Johannes and Marck, Wilhelm à Brakel, Benedict Pictet, Charles Hodge, Louis Berkhof. More recently, within our lifetimes, John Frame, Michael Horton, Doug Kelly, who used to teach here, R.C. Sproul, James Montgomery Boice, collected writings of John Murray. There are many other recent systematics: Gerald Bray, who was a Reformed Anglican; Thomas Oden, a Methodist; Millard Erickson, General Evangelical; Charles Ryrie, Dispensationalist; Wayne Grudem. How many of you have ever read Wayne Grudem's *Systematic Theology*? Parts of it? Yeah. Not many systematic theologies go on to sell a million copies, but Grudem's did and continues to sell. Grudem is evangelical, Calvinist eschatology, Baptist in ecclesiology, charismatic on the gifts. And Grudem's gift in theology is to be very clear, very orderly, very understandable. We'll have occasion throughout this class to point out some differences with Grudem, but many people cut their teeth, introduced to Systematic Theology, from Wayne Grudem. So that's a little bit about the history of dogmatics.

Once I ask the question now, as we zero in on this thing called Systematic Theology, I have three questions for us. These are written on your macro outline: What is Systematic Theology? Why should we study Systematic Theology? How should we study Systematic Theology? Let's just deal with this first question, and then we'll take a break.

What is Systematic Theology? It says, "ST One." What is that? Let me try to answer the question by moving from simple to complex. Starting simple. In doing Systematic Theology, we are trying to answer the question, "What does the whole Bible say about this?" And this could be hundreds of topics. What does the whole Bible say about angels? What does the whole Bible say about sin? About heaven? About the death of Christ? About law, faith, grace, the Holy Spirit? About speaking in tongues? About baptism? About the Lord's Supper? What does the whole Bible say about those topics? Or maybe, "What does the whole Bible say about some perennial questions?" About the relationship between law and gospel? How do we understand the difference between the covenants? Was Jesus God or man, or somehow both? How do we reconcile Divine Sovereignty and human responsibility? Systematic Theology takes those topics and those perennial questions and says, "Okay, let's try to understand what the whole Bible says about this."

Let's just get a little more complex. Systematic Theology is also a specific discipline with certain methods and structures under the broader category of theology. So there are different disciplines of theology. And the word discipline there is important. Just like you have a discipline and an exercise routine, discipline means there are certain categories, certain rules, certain first things, certain patterns, certain ways and methods of doing things. So we could talk about Historical Theology. Then is to trace out various theologians, confessions, groups. You can organize it topically, often organized chronologically. And Historical Theology, you might say, "Well, let's look at the doctrine of the Incarnation and let's see what Origen had to say about it, and Athanasius said about it, and Augustine said about it, and what a Nestorius said about it, and what Aquinas, and move throughout history and see how that particular doctrine developed." And we'll do some of that, but this is not mainly a Historical Theology class.

Talk about Philosophical Theology. That is, what can we know from reason and by observation, usually without direct reference to scripture? And this has a place. We're going to talk later about the place of philosophy and reason in theology. You can't do Systematic Theology without learning a number of important philosophical distinctions and categories to help us think. But Philosophical Theology, by itself, is sort of bracketing scripture and thinking with reason and observation. That's not what this class is.

Biblical Theology. They say, "Well, isn't that what all of our theology is? We want it to be based on the Bible." Well, that's true, but that's not what we mean by Biblical Theology. Most of you have probably encountered this, that Biblical Theology as a specific discipline is different than saying theology that comes from the Bible. Biblical Theology as a discipline traces the storyline of scripture, the redemptive-historical arc. So that in Biblical Theology, you look at a specific topic. Uh, so you might say Sabbath. You say, "How does Sabbath operate throughout the Bible?" And you got God taking a, a rest on the seventh day. You have this Sabbath principle, and then how does that get appropriate? Well, you have it in the Ten Commandments. And then how does Sabbath function in the life of Israel? They're often punished for not keeping the Sabbath. And what does this teach us about rest? And, and then you can go throughout the Old Testament. You go to Jesus, how did he handle the Sabbath? Why was he perceived as breaking the Sabbath? Hebrews says, "There remains a Sabbath." So you're tracing that and seeing its organic developments. So you might do the land, or temple, or tabernacle, or garden. There's obviously overlap here. That you might have a topic like Systematic Theology, and you might use the method of Biblical Theology to approach it. But Biblical Theology, it has its own set of norms, a little bit different than Systematic Theology.

So what then? Well, it is, as we've seen, organized around topics. That word loci, or loci, places, common places. Now, even within Systematic Theology, there are different organizing principles. You can read some systematic books, and they'll organize everything around Christ, or everything around Kingdom, or Covenant is the all-encompassing idea, or Trinity, or God's holiness, God's love, God's Lordship. I've seen systematics of various kinds that use those heuristic devices, those organizing principles. I would argue that yes, all of those are major themes in the Bible, but if you try to say this is the theme that organizes everything, you can end up being lopsided, truncated, forcing everything into a preconceived center.

The traditional approach to Systematic Theology, and the other approach is inevitably, don't stray from it too much. The traditional Systematic Theology starts with God, and then looks at everything related to God and flowing from God. Sometimes this is called a synthetic approach. Again, we hear the word synthetic, and you think fake. If you have synthetic fibers, they're man-made fibers. But synthetic here means you must understand A in order to understand B, in order to understand C. That's what is meant by synthetic. *Syn* is a Greek prefix meaning with. They think of synthetic, these pieces come together. You need this one with this one, with this one. There's a logical order to them.

So as you see from my macro outline, Systematic Theology typically operates with six or seven main headings. We're doing Prologomena, first things. Sometimes that goes first, sometimes that's a subset of Theology Proper. But there's a logical synthesis to it. You start with who is God, what's he like, and then you can't help but think about who are we in relation to God, because the crowning achievement of God's work is his creation, and we're the crowning achievement of that creation. So you go from theology naturally to anthropology. And as you think about God making us, you think about, well, why are we the way we are? How did we fall? How did sin come into the world? Then when you want to think about the solution to sin, you move to Christology, the God-man who came, and how did he save us? We have the person of Christ, the work of Christ. That leads into Soteriology, the doctrine of salvation. And then, as saved people, God gathers us together in a church. That's Ecclesiology. And then we look to the telosity and the eschatology. Sometimes there is this category, as we've seen, prefatory remarks, polygamina, where methodological questions are dealt with. And that's what I'm doing here. The definition of theology, the history of dogmatics, the role of reason, the nature of revelation. In older systematic theologies, could be quite lengthy. Herman Bavinck, you may know, has four volumes, big fat volumes. Volume one is entirely Prologomena. Likewise, Louis Berkhof's *Systematic Theology*. Louis Berkhof is basically taking Bavinck's four volumes and putting it more user-friendly into one volume. And for a long time, uh, it was, that was harder to see because people couldn't, you know, like us, probably didn't read the, the Dutch. But now that Bavinck's translated from Dutch into English, you can say, "Wow, Berkhof, I don't know if this passes some of the plagiarism rules here, you're just, this is a lot above it." But Berkhof was doing that intentionally. He was taking Bavinck and then moving it into a more user-friendly one-volume form. So one-fourth of Berkhof is also about Prologomena.

Systematic theology, this is the last thing I'll say here before the break, can also be considered one branch among many divisions of theology. All right, one sheet to pass out here. Uh, Barry, you want to come up and grab some of these and start at the back in the middle? What I'm handing you is someone's nice delineation of Turretin's divisions of theology, and they've laid it out nicely in this graph. So you can see what Turretin is up to. This is a diagram of the divisions of theology as discussed by Turretin in Topic One, Question Two, Sections Five through Eight. Just wait till you get this. This is the sort of chart, graph that at first, it looked very overwhelming, confusing. What's going on here? But it's, it's really not that hard to understand. And once you see what Turretin's up to, I think you'll actually find it very helpful in trying to discern what is this thing we call Systematic Theology.

So I think, uh, you all have this in front of you. So look at the top: Theology. Says, "Well, you can have false theology or true theology." And this whole delineation is not original to Turretin. It comes in large part from Franciscus Junius and then is adopted by the whole Protestant Scholastic tradition. So go over to the left: False Theology. You have False Theology of the Gentiles, and he lists some Greek philosophers, Pharaoh, and Plato. And then you have False Theology of Infidels and Heretics, those who openly reject Christ. There, he might think of, turns his mind, Jews or Muslims. And those who retain Christ's name but at variance with his word, Pelagians, who sent Socinians. They call themselves Christians, but they're heresy. So yeah, this whole thing, false theology. Well, that's not the train we want to get on.

Go to the right: We want True Theology. But these categories, and I'll come back to this after the break, because these are really important in the history of Protestant Reformed dogmatics. You have Archetypal and Ectypal Theology. So Archetype is the knowledge that God has of God. Ectype is the knowledge that is God gives to us. So we do not know God exhaustively, comprehensively. God, in one sense, is incomprehensible. We cannot fully comprehend him, but we can know him. So when people say, "You're putting God in a box with your fancy theology," well, no, because we're never claiming to have archetypal knowledge of God that he has. But we do think God speaks, and that's ectypal theology.

So look, Archetypal: God's Essential Knowledge of Himself. Of that which God has decreed to reveal to us. So archetypal is what God knows about God. We don't know everything that God knows about God. Ectypal, then, well, ectypal, he divides into three categories. Let's start over from the right-hand side. Theology of the Hypostatic Union. That means that which God has revealed in the person of his Son, the, the instantiation, the Incarnation of the Divine taking on human flesh. Surely that's something of a revelation. Then we have the Theology of Vision, or the Beatific Vision. And he says there's two, there's two types of that. You got that of Heaven, and you have that of the Saints. So here he's thinking of, in heaven, you'll have this, you still, in heaven, we still will not know God as God knows God. We don't become God in heaven. There will still be God, will still be infinite, and there will be things and mysteries and wonders we will not fully comprehend. But there's a beatific vision in heaven of angels, of saints.

Now we go over to Revealed Theology, the Theology of Pilgrims. It's called those people who are walking along the way. That's us. We're pilgrims on Earth, making our journey to heaven. There are two types of this theology, and again, we'll come back to these. There's Natural Theology. You can think of that as what God has revealed to the world innately and acquired. Those are the categories that were often used. We have innate.

knowledge we have eternity written on our hearts. we have a sense of divine. we have a conscience and an acquired knowledge. there's things we can observe. Romans 1. we can see his eternal power in the creation of the world. that's natural theology. Turretin clearly had a place for natural theology. So did the whole reformed tradition. But that's not mainly what we're dealing with. We're here in this category of Supernatural theology.

Now notice for Turretin, natural theology and supernatural theology are both theologies of revelation. Natural theology is what God reveals innately in the conscience and in our own image being image bearers and in the world. But that's muddy. That won't save you. That's indistinct. What we need is a supernatural theology. Now there's two categories here, you see. On the right, habitual theology, theology of inclinations, sort of thinking about induction versus deduction. Let's just set that aside. That's confusing to Turretin. Let's just hunker down here on Systematic Theology. Ah, so you thought Systematic Theology was, and they tell you everything. Well, Turretin says, we're doing one box here, one little box. Now, it's a pretty important box. Uh, more important than what some this guy Vero said about some stuff. But Thornton says, let's make clear what we're doing in theology, what we're understanding about God and truth and knowledge. We're in this category called true theology, archetypal revealed theology of pilgrims, non-natural theology, supernatural theology, systematics. All right, your brains are full. Why don't you take a five-minute break? We'll be back. Uh, it's a little after 9:40. So let's talk about the syllabus. You can read. You've read it, I assume. But let's just make sure we know what we're doing. You can see the course requirements. There is a midterm exam. The exam will cover the lecture material up to this point in the course. Questions will focus on facts and terms. A few short answer questions. It will be in class on October 5th. Jenny said she can't be here. Hopefully, you can make all the classes. I know life comes up and maybe there's one you got to miss. If you can't be here for the midterm or the final, in particular, please do let me or you see their contact information. My TA is Alberto. My assistant at the church, who's sitting there in the back, wave. You're in Barry Peterson. Both of those guys are amazing at what they do. So probably better than contacting me initially, you could contact one of them and, uh, we'll figure it out if you can't be here for the midterm. But hopefully, you will be in class. A number of you have had me before. So those of you who haven't, you can talk to the people who have been in my classes before. But the midterm exam are some facts and I'm not trying to stump you. I'm not trying to find the most obscure things. But maybe I say, what, what is the Latin term for topic or place in Systematic Theology? And you say, right, locus. Um, short answer questions. All of the material on the midterm and the final will have been covered in the class lectures. Now, reading up to that point is only going to help reinforce things, but it, it will be in the class lectures. So I'm not looking to pull something from Turretin that we've never talked about here and expect you to know it. If you're wondering the order, because I didn't give a specific outline of how to read the books, if you just make some progress on Turretin, little by little, that's going to help you because that's the hardest book. And reading Turretin is difficult because he throws out names. I don't know who that is, and terms sometimes or debates. But just keep pressing forward. One of my theories on the books that I assign is, I want you to read books that later in ministry, you will be glad you have read. And so Turretin is, is not easy, but I think you will find the logic helpful, the distinctions helpful, and in a lifetime of ministry, you'll feel like, ah, I can go back and look up some of these questions and understand. And my lectures here are very much influenced by Turretin, so we'll reinforce it. So do your best, plow through, be as disciplined as you can, because if you save that to the very end and you gotta ram through 300 pages of Turretin, it won't be pleasant. The other books, the, the Carl Truman book should be not a terribly difficult read and very relevant for issues. I was looking for an anthropology book. I've assigned other books that are more typical systematic theology books on anthropology, but, but Carl's doing such good work. He has the bigger one, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, and then, uh, *Brave New World* is the one I assigned, which is a distillation of that. That should just help you understanding some of the anthropological devolution and debates in our day. The other books, David Haynes, not a long book, *History and Defense of Natural Theology*. And then the James Dolezal book is also not long, a little more challenging, but we'll introduce you to some of these debates regarding what's called classical Christian theism. Just warning you, it's a little punchy, meaning he does like to punch, and he'll punch at some people that you know, wait, I thought I liked John Frame or Don Carson. Did what? So just take it with a grain of salt when he seems to kind of go after. Overall, I think it's a very helpful book to try to understand where some strands of evangelical theology, doctrine of God, over the past 50 years took some wrong steps and how a lot of people are trying to bring back to what I would say is the mainstream theological tradition from the church fathers through Aquinas and Turretin and the Protestant Scholastics. So that's what you're going to get in those books. The final exam will be very similar to the midterm. It will cover the second half of the class. Now, that doesn't mean that once you get to October 5th, flush everything out from the first half, but to make it manageable, the final will be that second half. Most of your final exams are during an exam period. I like to just do it on the last day of class. And because this class starts on the first day of the semester, believe it or not, we actually end on November 30th. And so, yes, that means you got to prepare for a final exam two weeks before your other finals. But hopefully that helps that you get one out of the way. Memorization, you see there. This is a requirement that is handed down from on high, not the Lord, but Legrand. And it's a good requirement. Westminster Shorter Catechism, one through 19. You will be asked all or some of these questions and expected to give the answer. So again, memorization, little by little, be working on that in your head. That is going to come on November 2nd. That will come sooner than the end of class. So start planning ahead. I haven't decided how I will examine you on it. I'll tell you, it's very unlikely I'm going to give you all 19 of them. But since you don't know which ones I am going to give you, you should, it's your real good guesser, you should memorize all 19 of them. And then the reading, I talked about going back to theology, which is what the purpose of our class. We are looking at these questions. Why should we study systematic theology? So having looked at what is systematic theology, now why study systematic theology? And then how to study systematic theology. We have just five minutes. So let's just get started on this question. Why should we study systematic theology? There are a number of objections. You may hear some may say, well, this is not even possible. How can we put God in a box and freeze-dried, shrink-wrapped? You hear those pejorative metaphors sometimes. But remember, we're not dealing with archetypal. We're not saying we get God as God gets God, but ectypal. He has said something to us. So some say it's not even possible. This class will argue several times why it is. Another objection might be that Christianity is a life, not a doctrine. Look, isn't it about a relationship with Jesus? And then you people come along, and usually, uh, you people, it's, it's a Western linear, you know, whose fault it is? The Greeks. The Greeks made us think like this. The Hebrews, they were all poets, vagabonds. And the Greeks came along. Or it's Enlightenment. Well, look, you've already heard there are systematic theologies millennia before the Enlightenment. But sometimes you get that at a popular level. You may even get from people in your, oh, that's theology stuff. It's just about a relationship with Jesus. Well, if I don't know anything about my wife, if I know no propositional truths about my wife, I can't tell you. If I say my wife's amazing, I want you to know my wife because she is the best. And you say, oh, great. How tall is she? What color are her eyes? What color is her hair? How did you meet? Dude, it's about the relationship. Well, I don't have a relationship with her. I can't even pick her out in the supermarket if I don't know some propositions about her. So people who say, man, it's not about doctrine, it's about Jesus. Okay, who's Jesus? What is it that we are about Jesus? Well, if you're going to answer that question, you need doctrine. You're saying something about the person of Jesus, the work of Jesus, why having a relationship with Jesus matters. So Christianity is a life, not a doctrine, is sometimes the response. Others say, well, it's too neat. It's too Enlightenment. It's modern. Well, that's historically inaccurate. And let's not be so full of ourselves to think that we are the first people to come up with organization or only the Enlightenment or only Western. Sometimes you hear that, well, this, this way of linear, logical, structured is Western. Now, I don't know. I'm not an expert in China, but it looks to me like they do organization. Well, it looks to me like they're not afraid of structures. And so let's not be so full of ourselves to think that it's only people like us who have ever wanted things organized or systematized. Or then some people say, well, isn't this really opposite to true biblical theology? Not biblical theology as the redemptive historical arts, but man, you guys are introducing all these categories, the hypostatic union, super lapsarianism, synecdoche, the extra calvinisticum, the principia ascendi. We'll look at next week. All of these Latin and highfalutin Greek phrases. Shouldn't we just be sticking with the Bible? We're going to answer that in several different ways. Yes, our systematic theology must always be based on the best exegesis, always mindful of the redemptive storyline of scripture. But we need those historic categories to help us safeguard the truth. And we'll come back to that after the break when we look at several reasons for studying Systematic Theology. I have seven. Those were a few objections. They'll go into seven reasons we study Systematic Theology when we come back. So you got a half hour for our coffee chapel, probably stuff down there. So get some fresh air. We'll be back promptly at 11. Welcome back. So you are ready to go for one more hour. I know the third hour can be a chore. Hopefully the half hour break helps. We are talking about why should we study systematic theology. We dealt with some objections and now some reasons why we study Systematic Theology. Number one, the Bible's interest in truth demands it. The Bible's interest in truth demands it. You don't need to be able to regurgitate all of these scripture references, but just to give you an idea of the importance of truth. John 8:30, "True truth will set you free." John 14:17, "The Holy Spirit is called the Spirit of Truth." John 16:13, "The work of the Holy Spirit was to guide the apostles into all truth." John 17:3, "Eternal life is to know the only true God." Jesus prays. John 17:7, "To be sanctified in the truth." Romans 2:8, Paul warns those who do not obey the truth, there will be wrath and fury. Romans 12:2, "We are to be transformed by the renewal of our minds." An elder, Titus 1:9, "Must hold firmly to the trustworthy message as it has been taught." Second John goes so far as to say that some people should be kept out of your house for believing the wrong things. "Anyone who runs ahead and does not continue in the teaching of Christ does not have God. Whoever continues into teaching has both the Father and the Son. If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not take him into your house or welcome him." That's not a verse about, you know, anti-hospitality evangelism. It's a verse about welcoming teachers into your community because you don't have hotels. When people come into the community and they want to teach, they have to stay with someone. They have to be welcomed in. So John is saying, if they're not teaching the truth, don't welcome them under your house, don't give them any sort of platform or foothold into the church. You're not interested in, well, this would be a very wonderful expression of diverse ideas about the person of Jesus. Well, that's not the place for it in the church. Second Thessalonians 2:10, "The wicked perish because they refuse to love the truth." Second Timothy 2:15, "The workman of God must rightly handle the word of truth." Louis Berkhof says, "They who minimize the significance of the truth and therefore ignore and neglect it will finally come to the discovery that they have very little Christianity left." Here's how the Bible describes orthodoxy: teaching, the faith, the truth, the deposit, the pattern of sound words, the tradition, the apostolic teaching, what we have heard, what we have heard from the beginning. There is something that is fixed, and there are grave dangers if we stray from the truth. This is not the invention of fundamentalists somewhere. This is in the Bible. We hold fast to the word preached. First Corinthians 15. If we get the gospel wrong, we may be damned. Galatians 1:8. We must be on the lookout for quote, "destructive heresies." Second Peter 2:1. Beware the yeast of the Pharisees. Be on guard. I warned you night and day, Paul says in Acts 20. So all of that to reinforce that the Bible itself tells us how important it is that we study, understand, and defend the truth. That's why we do Systematic Theology. Second, more quickly. Not only does our view of truth demand it, but our view of scripture demands it. All scripture is breathed out by God. So that means everything in the Bible matters. And it also presupposes a fundamental unity, as we'll see when we get to the doctrine of scripture, that God is the author. So one of the objections against Systematic Theology, well, you're getting all of these things. I mean, isn't it inappropriate to take something 3,000 years or 2,000 years earlier? Or you're comparing something from an Old Testament law to wisdom literature to a story in the Gospels? Well, yes, it's true. Good exegesis will be mindful of how to interpret those within their context and their genre. But if all scripture is breathed out by God, it means that underneath and above Moses and Paul and John and Peter, there is one Divine author. And if God is the Divine author, it presupposes a fundamental unity. So we are right to compare verses and find ways to harmonize the whole because God is the author of all of his word. Why study Systematic Theology? Realism about the human intellect demands it. Even if someone says, well, I don't want to get into the doctrinal weeds and I don't want to do all this Systematic Theology, you are going to come to some conclusions. Who was Jesus? What is the human predicament? Is there a hell? How can we be saved? How should we treat each other? If you answer those questions, you are getting into systematic theology. We cannot help but synthesize and organize. What I remember reading, I don't know if anybody reads Brian McLaren anymore. But years ago, Brian McLaren was one of the emergent guys, and he was often negative about Systematic Theology and doctrine and in a box, freeze-dried, shrink-wrapped, all of those metaphors, and saying we're imposing upon scripture these foreign categories. But then he wrote a whole book on the kingdom of God, and it was amazing how all of a sudden it was really important to look at the whole Bible and see what it said about the kingdom of God. He's essentially doing systematic theology. So sometimes when you set systematic theology aside, it's just a way of saying I don't, I'm not interested in these things. But when you come to something you are interested in, you want to find a systematic answer. We live in an age of supreme intellectual laziness. That famous line from Spurgeon, "Use hard arguments and soft words." The internet specializes in just the opposite, many hard words, many soft arguments. We are, for the most part, nicer in our day about theological disputes. You may say, have you been on Twitter? Yes, I know that's a nasty place. We may call each other names, but at least so far, we don't banish people or kill them. Sarcasm is better than that. And it's easy to see in an earlier age how extreme they took theological disputes and how the, the church and the state and were so intermingled that to get the wrong doctrine that you were banished. And we can shake our finger and say, well, we shouldn't do that, and we shouldn't. But isn't our danger just the opposite? We are not likely to kill people over theological differences. Good. But we are likely to be spiritually and intellectually lazy. Remember hearing John Piper say, "It's okay to talk about mystery, but don't make mystery your first answer to every theological question." Yes, it's true. When you get into the rarefied air of the Trinity, which we will in this class, or divine sovereignty and human responsibility, there are some questions that go unanswered. There are some things that make your brain hurt. You cannot fully comprehend. But if your answer to every theological conundrum is simply mystery, that's not humility. That's usually intellectual, theological laziness. A lot of people in a lot of history has spent a lot of time thinking through these questions. And if you get to the bottom of Augustine and Aquinas and Calvin and the confessions and Bavinck, and you still say, wow, there's some mystery here, good for you. But if we're not willing to think hard about it and just land on mystery, that's laziness. We are quick to say, "We just have different perspectives." Well, of course, that's true. Or we want to calm down the situation by saying, "Well, we all love Jesus." Yes, okay. And we, even if you're with people who all do love Jesus, that's a good thing to all love. But let's not use that as an excuse not to really press in and try to solve some of these problems or at least come to a clear understanding. Yes, some theological conundrums are very difficult. Sometimes you're holding different truths in tension. But our cultural climate and shoes careful thinking, because careful thinking may lead to deeper disagreement. You know that good word, s-e-s-c-h-e-w, it means to avoid or set aside. Remember somebody in college walking around, some of you, you're this type of guy, okay? And it's good, it's good. But he had the shirt that said, "eschew obfuscation." Obfuscation is confusion. And eschew, it's a very confusing way to say it. It's like, pinnacle of nerd. Human eschew obfuscation. So our culture eschews careful thinking. Imagine if the Arian controversy happened today. Shudder to think. People saying, "That's not made such a big deal about this. We all love Jesus." And we'll get to that when we get to the Trinity, and you'll learn about it in your church history course. But the Arian controversy was a fight fought over a diphthong, on whether Christ was homoousios or homoiousios, of the same essence with the Father, or of a similar essence with the Father. It was an iota in Greek. What's the difference between orthodoxy and heresy? And there was a middle party that said, ah, let's just, let's just answer this question with Bible verses. Can't we all just agree on Bible verses? Why are we introducing these Greek metaphysical categories, these technical terms? But of course, those technical terms were there to safeguard the biblical truth. Because to say that the Son is of a similar essence with the Father is not the same as saying he is of the same essence with the Father. And if Athanasius and the Orthodox party had just said, you know, it's all kind of close, you love Jesus, you love Jesus, you love Jesus, everybody loved Jesus. You're probably not in the church if you don't, on some level, love Jesus. So we got to have something deeper than that. It isn't enough that both sides can quote scripture. You hear that? Well, they got Bible verses. They got Bible verses. Some people say homosexuality is a sin. Some people say it's not a sin, and they're both, they both love the Bible. Every controversy, slight exaggeration, virtually every controversy in the history of the church, you have had people with Bible verses on both sides. So we have to do the hard work of coming to the conclusion of what the Bible means. Second Peter 3:16, "Some have twisted Paul's writings as they do the other scriptures." So even then, in the New Testament era, people were quoting Bible verses at each other, and Peter says, well, but they're twisting it and they're not giving the true meaning. So intellectual honesty demands realism about the human intellect demands Systematic Theology. Number four, the history of the church demands it. Again, some people say, why can't we just let the Bible speak for itself? "No creed but the Bible." Which is a very nice creed. But think about Nehemiah 8:8. "They read from the book from the law of God clearly, and they gave the sense so the people understood the reading." They gave the people the sense. Even then, when you have direct prophetic inspiration, there were teachers among God's people, what many of you will be, who said, "We're reading it, and now I'm going to explain it to you." First Corinthians 15, Paul said, "What you have received from me, now pass on to others." The early church quickly formed statements of faith, the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, and they did so in order to safeguard the apostolic deposit of truth. I saw this clip, who should I say who it was from? Okay, it was from Andy Stanley, and it was, uh, I just saw it recently. I don't know if it was something recently he said or was just being brought up. But he was talking about the Apostles' Creed and the early creeds in the church, and he's saying, "There's a lot that's good in here, but he said, do you notice what you never find in the creeds? These ancient creeds, they never say anything about love." And you know why? He said, "They never say anything about love because they were written for the emperor, and the emperor knew that he didn't want to live a certain kind of Christian way. And so the people wrote these creeds, and they kept out all of the ethical imperatives and the love because they just wanted to make the emperor happy." Really difficult to get so many things wrong in one statement. Historically wrong, theologically wrong. Not at all. The formation of the creeds, they were often at odds with the emperor. We have creeds in order to safeguard. The church has never stopped writing creeds and confessions to explain, defend, and safeguard the truth. And we need those categories in order to say what we mean. Five, the unity of the church demands theology. Ephesians 4, "There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope that belongs to your call, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all." Jude 3, "Contend for the faith once delivered for the saints." Confessions and catechisms throw a few elbows, but they're meant ultimately to unify, not to divide, so that people can say, "Yes, this is what we believe." One of the things I always say in our new members class, why we're going to tell you about the, the Westminster Confession, we don't want the main, you think about a church having banners or, you know, if you were to put a flag, I don't want the main flag or banner waving in my church. It's not, "Come to us, we're Presbyterian." You know, I want the banner to be Jesus, the gospel, the Bible. Yes. But at the same time, we ought to tell people what we believe. And one of the things they say is, because of the unity of the church, I want you to know what all of the elders and pastors and deacons in this church affirm. That's a lot. The Westminster standards have a lot in there, and we all, you can make little exceptions, we know, but we all affirm this. And so you can expect a common truth to be taught from the pulpit, from the Sunday school classroom, any church sponsored. That's really important for the unity of the church. The duty of the church demands it. Number six. What do I mean by that? I owe it to you. We owe it to other churches. The church owes it to the world to give a clear expression of our faith. Second Corinthians 4:2, Paul calls his preaching an open statement of the truth. Berkhof says, "The church of Jesus Christ should never seek refuge in camouflage, should not try to hide her identity." That's yours. Sounds like your car. You can stop that. But the, you hear about contextualization, that's important. Just remember, contextualization is to make not the truth acceptable, but clear. Contextualization is to find the right terms, the right bridges, so that people understand what you're saying. It's not to make it automatically acceptable to them. So Paul says his preaching is an open declaration. There were mystery cults in the ancient world. You were only initiated into it. We still have those. They're secret societies, secret initiations. There's things that you only can know when you get on that. That's not the, the church. Think about it. It's pretty amazing. The church says to the whole world, you want to know? If you want to know what Presbyterians think, it's right there. We've tried to write it all down. We, and then we had a committee. The committee told us with that. And then they had the committee to record that committee. And we had another committee to check that that committee was doing the work that a committee should do. We are really careful about this. And part of that is to be absolutely clear. Our goal is not to figure out the bare minimum necessary to get us out of hell. In fact, if your heart attitude is, or the heart attitude of your people, tell me the least I need to know about God, tell me the least I need to believe, tell me the least I need to understand about God's revelation in order to be a Christian, we ought to sincerely wonder if that person is a Christian. We are for the maximum amount of truth for the maximum number of people. And then a final point, the worship of God demands it. You have such a great privilege, whether I'm a good lecturer or a good professor or not, or you like the assignments or not, there's no doubt that you have a tremendous privilege to think about and learn this robust, deep theology. Now, if all you know is that God sent his Son to die for sinners, we're saved by the blood, well, that's precious. That's precious. We, we don't knock that. But how much sweeter if you have not just a general notion that you are saved, but you can then glory in your unconditional election of the Father and the act of obedience of the Son and the sealing of the Holy Spirit. If you can exalt in the covenant of grace woven throughout the pages of scripture from Abraham to Jesus. If you glory in effectual substitutionary atonement of the perfect Son of God, fully divine, fully human. If you understand the difference between propitiation and expiation and reconciliation. If you glory in the imputation of Christ's righteousness and the forensic justification of sinners, that's all Systematic Theology. It's to make us better worshipers. The analogy that I often use is, if you're on a hike, you're going up into the hills, and you see, you get to the top, a beautiful hill, and you see this vista for a long ways. And then you realize you're really just at the foothills of the Appalachians. One of the first Sundays I was at Christ's Covenant, moved from Michigan, I don't remember who said this, probably good, I don't remember, but I think I must have shook somebody's head at hand and said something about the Appalachian Mountains. I got a tongue lashing. It's the Appalachians, the Appal- it's Appalachian State University, it's Appalachians. And, uh, I see the wife was doing the thing that wives do, and it's hugging on his arm. Okay, honey, let's try a different first impression with the pastor. But it has stuck with me. So if you're in the foothills, and then you go into the Appalachians, and then you go further west, and you take a plane, and you get to the Rockies, and you get to the Front Range there in Colorado Springs, where my in-laws live, and you go up to Pikes Peak, 14,000 feet, and then you look out to the west, and it just keeps going and going. Studying theology at its best is like that. You get up to this point that you've worked really hard, and you realize you're just at the highest elevation in, in Iowa. My first church was in Iowa, in Northwest Iowa. There's this little sign that says, "Highest elevation in Iowa." And like, there's actually some rolling hills in Iowa, and it can be very pretty. But you realize that's not very high. Then you come to, isn't the highest points in the east of the Mississippi is in, uh, is in North Carolina, some 6,000 feet. Then you realize 6,000 feet. My in-laws lived in outside of Colorado. Well, Colorado Springs is at 6,000 feet. That's the hot, that's the highest point here. And you're like, nowhere. All the mountains are up here. And then you go into the Front Range and you think you're there, just like we've ever, you know, read Lewis and Clark expedition, they must have just gotten there and thought, these mountains never end. And there's another peak, and there's another one, and another one. And then you can know that all the fourteeners are nothing if you were to go over to the Himalayas, 26,000 feet. Studying theology is like that. Don't you want to see more of God? Yes. You can see truth, beautiful things from the plains. And yes, you can see them from the highest point in Iowa, and from the highest point in North Carolina. But if you can keep going up higher and higher and see new vistas, that's what we're doing in theology. And that's what we want to present to our people. How then? So that's all why. Much more quickly, how should we study Systematic Theology? In four ways. One, biblically. We submit ourselves to scripture. Berkhof says, historically, there have been three views about where dogmatics come from: come from scripture, from the teaching of the church, or from Christian consciousness. Very broadly, you could say teaching of the church, some since the Catholic view, though of course they honor scripture too, but they have the teaching, the magisterium. Christian consciousness would be liberalism. They too believe in scripture, but it's through reason, human experience, Christian consciousness. And soul of scripture, which doesn't mean the Bible. And we don't listen to anything else, but it means the Bible alone is our final authority. Is the Protestant, Evangelical, Reformation view. We always are submitting ourselves to scripture. Biblically. Number two, rationally. We'll see this in another lecture how reason functions in Systematic Theology. But let me just remind you here. Acts 19:9, "For two years Paul reasoned daily in the lecture hall of Tyrannus." Reason's not a bad word. Acts 24:25, "He reasoned with Felix and Drusilla." Acts 26:25, "He told Festus, I am not out of my mind, most excellent Festus. I am speaking true and rational words." So reason is not the foundation of faith, but it is an instrument of faith. Reason's the foundation means it's the foundation. It's where you start. Everything is built upon reason. Everything must be tested against reason. No, we have beliefs that are beyond reason. But Turretin's very clear, beyond reason is not the same thing as saying irrational. Something can be above human comprehension without being irrational. Turretin says, "The proper rule of things to be believed and disbelieved is not the apprehension of their possibility or impossibility, but the word of God." So the word of God is final. The Yeti goes on to say that reason has an instrumental office. So he often will say, "The mysteries of faith may surpass reason, but they do not contradict reason. They surpass it." I can't finally explain that. Uh, I, I don't have the categories to finally get that settled in my mind. But that's different than saying it's another contradiction. So rationally. Three, humbly. To approach theology humbly means we care about history. We pay attention to what has gone before. One of the problems with the saying "no creed but the Bible" is invariably everyone is, you can't flush your mind. You can't go back to the first century. You are either standing on the shoulders of giants to see farther, or you're unaware of your own presuppositions that come from others. So we are in a certain historical moment, and if we have humility, we will pay attention. We'll say, you know what, there's probably some things we get right that they didn't get right. But if you can read Augustine or Aquinas or Calvin or Bavinck and not think that, yeah, some people were smarter than us, then we don't have the proper humility. Humility means we read historically. We read prayerfully. So we ask God for help. And we read, do theology gracefully. So we're doing it to be more loving, not puffed up. And then finally, biblically, rationally, humbly, doxologically. That is, as we saw at the beginning, theology is practical to show forth in fruit in action, but it's also speculative, theoretical. That is, we want to contemplate God. Form theology has always emphasized, good theology has always emphasized, we are learning these things that we might be moved to worship, to sing praise to God. Which is why I said at the beginning, the aim of theology is to know, enjoy, and walk in the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. All right, take a breath and look at your macro outline for a moment. We are just a half hour left. So let's change gears and you see on the outline, introduction to theology. We've done Roman numeral one, two, three, four, five. We don't have time to do six. So let's skip that and go to this excursus, little insertion here. Do a little history, which will help you because you're reading Turretin, perhaps it'll be helpful to introduce you to Turretin and to this time in which he lived and some of these terms. So brief excursus as we close today on Francis Turretin and High Reformed Orthodoxy. All right, Francis Turretin, 1623 to 1687. Calvin dies in 1564. So we are the prime of Turretin. We are a hundred years later. We're now in the next generation or the third generation after the Reformation. Turretin was the son of Benedict Turretin, professor of theology at the Geneva Academy and a pastor in an Italian congregation in Geneva. You'll sometimes see it as Turretini because it's an Italian name, or just given in the Latin form, Turretin. Francis studied at Geneva, eventually held the chair of theology in Geneva. So he's in Calvin's Geneva, a century after Calvin. He was a bulwark for the truth. He opposed doctrinal innovation and all attempts to mitigate the angularity of reformed Orthodoxy. Say more about this term in just a moment. Thank you. Reformed Orthodoxy. His *Institutes of Elenctic Theology* have had a privileged place in reformed theology from the end of the 17th century well into the 19th century. It was the textbook of choice at Old Princeton. When you hear Old Princeton, it means Princeton Seminary before its reorganization and it moved in a liberal direction, and Machen and others left and started Westminster. So Old Princeton is from its founding in 1812 until 1929. Old Princeton, Archibald Alexander, Charles Hodge, B.B. Warfield, Machen. That's what we mean by Old Princeton. It was the textbook. It was the systematic textbook until Charles Hodge wrote his own Systematic Theology. They'd often have to go and get loose leaf pages of Latin text. Imagine reading this whole thing in Latin. And then Hodge wrote his own Systematic Theology. Dabney used Turretin at Union in Richmond. Shed used Turretin at Union Theological Seminary in New York. It is written in a bulky Latin with sentences often running on for nearly half a page. So he did not hear the lecture on perhaps how to write less poorly, but he can be excused, I guess, for being a genius. Let me say about this term, Reformed Orthodoxy. You hear orthodox, lowercase O, means most generically, right teaching that is orthodox. It's right, or heterodox, wrong. You also have Eastern Orthodoxy, which is a branch of the church, Protestant, Catholic, Eastern Orthodoxy, like Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox. What we mean by Reformed Orthodoxy, it's really a historical term. It refers to the time following the Protestant Reformation in which doctrinal formulations developed and were codified in the Lutheran and Reformed tradition. So you often will hear of Lutheran, the period of Lutheran Orthodoxy, and Reformed Orthodoxy speaks of the theology and the theologians connected to the Reformed confessions in the period from the 16th century into the 18th century. And I'll give you some more history in just a moment. Here's another term, scholasticism. It used to be in reformed circles in the second half of the 20th century, this was generally seen as a negative word. Scholasticism was a put-down. It conjured up notions of overly speculative debates, Aristotelian philosophy. And it's true that Calvin, well, sometimes used scholastic in a negative sense. He's thinking in particular about the theologians of the Sorbonne in France that he disagrees with, those Catholic theologians. More recently, however, and this is thanks in large part to scholar pictured Muller, made his career at Calvin, now mostly retired. He has a big four-volume work called *Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics*. Even sure if it's in print, even though it was not published that long ago. If you ever have an opportunity to get these four volumes, sell your hair, give plasma, do what you have to do to get PRRD, because they are worth their weight in gold. Very not easy reading, but Richard Mueller really revolutionized this field, which was people often thought of reformed theology and it kind of went, ah, Calvin, Jonathan Edwards. And this whole period of post-reformation reformed dogmatics was often lost. And Mueller helps a whole generation see, well, reformed theology wasn't just Calvin, it was a lot of different people. And this term scholasticism, which was used very negatively, Mueller showed scholasticism was not so much a particular theological conclusion as it was a particular method. So he said it wasn't about content of late medieval theology as much as it was a method of teaching and investigation. Scholasticism employs a recurring system of distinctions, definitions, disputational questions. So Turretin often says, "We distinguish." Somebody told me they saw somebody had, they're not getting, you know, good nerd shirt made, that "we distinguish." Put on a t-shirt because Turretin is always saying, "Let me make some distinctions for you." Not this, but this. We can say it this way, or this way, or this way. That's what scholasticism does. And Turretin, it will help you to read him to understand he's using Scholastic methodology. He's constantly parsing, defining, making clear. I'm not talking about this, this, and this. I'm talking about this. Maximal precision, minimal ambiguity. Reformed scholasticism then refers to the theology practiced in this period of Orthodoxy where the method is Scholastic, the content is bound up in the reformed confessions. There are two centuries of reformed Orthodoxy, typically divided into three periods, and this will help you understand Turretin and give you some necessary history of reformed theology. Different scholars divide this in different ways, but this is fairly standard. You can think about early, high, and late Orthodoxy. Those of you have had me before know these markers. Never, ever. Early Reformed Orthodoxy, early Orthodoxy, roughly say 1565 to 1640. Calvin dies 1564, 1565 to 1640. You can call this the era of confessional solidification. Things are becoming together, solidify. By 1865, many of the second-generation reformed theologians have passed. Calvin, another theologian, Musculus, Peter Martyr Vermigli. So this is marking a new phase in reform thought. The time period is marked by a codification as well as an elaboration, developments. There's a lot of developments in covenant theology. Important theologians include Zacharias Ursinus, the chief author of the Heidelberg Catechism, Caspar Olevianus, Hieronymus Zanchius, Theodore Beza, William Perkins, Amandus Polanus, William Ames. Uh, one scholar says Franciscus Junius would be the representative example of this period. That's a lot of names. You don't need to know all of them, but if you have some hooks, those are some of the names here. High Orthodoxy. Some people divide this into two periods, other just one. None of these dates are handed down from on high. But I think 1640 to 1725. If this is confessional solidification, we can say that this is confessional summation. Theology in this time period is enmeshed in a number of controversies surrounding Arminianism. If you've never heard of that, we'll come to it later. Arminianism, Socinianism. It's often marked by increased precision, detailed polemics. Important theologians in the first half of the period include Johannes Cocceius, Gisbertus Voetius, Louis Le Blanc, John Owen, Stephen Charnock, and Francis Turretin. Also think of Wilhelmus a Brakel, Petrus van Mastricht, Herman Witsius, Benedict Pictet, Thomas Boston, and others. Francis Turretin would be considered when people talk about high reformed Orthodoxy, they usually mean what you get in Turretin, or the top of the mountain of maximal precision. Turretin is taking on all comers. Come at me, I dare you. I will distinguish and I will show you what the true reformed faith believes. So in this period, you have the early, some of the early reformed creeds and confessions. So Heidelberg Catechism, 1563. Belgian Confession, 1561. You have the Canons of Dort here in the 1640s. You had the Westminster Standards. And if you've read those, the so-called Three Forms of Unity, Heidelberg, Belgian, Canons of Dort, those tend to be the, the confessions for reformed Christians on the continent, France, Netherlands, Germany. The Westminster Standards tend to be the reformed confessions for those coming from the British Isles, Ireland, Scotland, England, Wales. By the time you get to 1640, there's a reason the Westminster Confession is so much longer than those earlier statements. It's because you've had another two generations of controversies, another 60, 70, 80 years of doctrinal development. So there's more things now they want to say. There's more things they want to safeguard. So the Westminster Confession is a much more developed. Some people say, well, the Heidelberg is much more pastoral and warm and ironic. And other people say the Westminster Confession is much more detailed and thorough and comprehensive. And both are true. They're just aiming at different purposes. Turretin is the high point of this reformed Orthodoxy. Then there is a late period after 1725. [Music] Doesn't have an ending date, but because it sort of trickles off as the Enlightenment takes hold throughout the 18th century. And this, you might think of as a time of confessional stagnation. Yes, these terms are told with a certain historical vantage point. Somebody else might say, well, late reformed Orthodoxy is a time of confessional creativity or liberation. But if you tend to think that Turretin is a good guy, then this late period is one of stagnation because the reformed movement and its confessional heritage is beginning to get frayed at the edges. In this era of confessional stagnation, Richard Mueller describes this reformed theology after 1725 as having less secure philosophical foundations. It's less willing to draw firm boundaries. It's wanting to be less bound by confessional norms. It's a transitional era. The old formulas are coming under disrepute. There's less interest in the Scholastic method. There's more interest in finding some kind of pan-Protestant unity around fundamental articles of the faith. And in this period can be found a great variety, everything from say, Ralph and Ebenezer Erskine, Seceders in Scotland, who are pretty hardcore, to Latitudinarians like Joseph Butler, staunch Calvinists like John Gill, Enlightenment liberals like Jacob Vernet in Geneva. And some might put, depending on your time period, some people say Benedict Pictet is a quintessential figure here. I would disagree with that because I think Pictet is more in line with Francis Turretin. Others might say that Jacob Vernet, who takes on a prominent role in Geneva, is the pinnacle. Whoever you put there, the idea is these confessions, which were fought so hard to write, to summarize, to defend, are now coming under increasing disrepute. Hey, and I'll say just a little bit about the history of that in closing. Before we get there, just a few things to maybe help you understand the *Institutes*. A few terms and people you might wonder, okay, who does Turretin think, who is he arguing against? Catholics is obvious, sometimes called Papists in there, or Romanists, thinking of the Catholic Church. Besides that, Arians. So the Arians, derived from the

4th Century heretic areas are those who denied the full deity of Christ. So for Turretin, Arians can be a blanket term for anyone who has a heterodox view on the person of Christ. It's not that there were churches that put out "first Arian church of Geneva," but he uses that phrase for Arians, people who have a heretical view of the person of Christ.

Then you have Arminians, or sometimes called, sorry, this is so hard to read, the Remonstrants. A Remonstrance [Music] is a dispute, a disagreement. Uh, the, the Remonstrants sounds like somebody's name, their heretical band. After that, the, uh, the Remonstrants are in the Netherlands. They're objecting to the Calvinism that has been handed down to them, followers of Jacob Arminius. So Arminians and the Remonstrants, same group. Arminians and Remonstrants from the Synod of Dort, 1618-1619, is to address the Five Points of the Arminianism of Arminians of the Remonstrants, and they have a counter-Remonstrance.

So if you've heard of The Five Points of Calvinism, uh, Five Points, and many people disagree, not on the five points, but is that really a good summary of Calvinism? Probably not. But the reason there are five points to begin with is because the Arminians, they are the ones who first came up with their Five Points, their five Remonstrances. Synod of Dort is called to settle this controversy in the Netherlands and abroad and come up with the five heads of doctrine, which come to us often as the Five Points of Calvinism.

So you have those people. But this is where it's important. He's, when he uses Arminians, Remonstrance, he's not thinking of your nice Evangelical Baptist friend who believes that he chose God before God chose him. He's thinking of those who broke with the mainstream Reformed tradition and are off base, as he considers it, on election, on the decrees, on sovereignty, on the freedom of the will. So don't impute into your mind John Wesley, uh, your Free Will Baptist Church. Yes, those are Arminians in their theology, but he has a more distinct class of people who make other sorts of errors as well.

And then this group, you'll find often the Socinians, the Socinians. This is a religious movement named after Faustus Socinus, 1539-1604. They were Unitarians. That is, they believed the doctrine of the Trinity was not found in Scripture. They did not think you could have multiple persons in one essence. They denied the pre-existence of Christ, the union of the two natures, the deity of the Holy Spirit. They also held to full immersion believers' baptism and they denied the right of the state to use the sword. So they represented the liberal, heterodox wing of the, the Radical Reformation.

When you learn your Reformation history, sometimes hear about the Magisterial Reformation. Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, called magisterial because they tended to work in hand with the magistrates, so that a whole city or whole quasi-nation state would become one sort of religion. So Calvin, Geneva, worked hand in hand with the magistrates, that all of Geneva was to be reformed. So I told the magister. Where the, the Radical Reformation were those who were much more averse to any of that sort of political alliance. So you're thinking of Anabaptists, uh, you know, today Mennonites, Hutterites, from that Radical Reformation tradition. You have the Socinians, who are a liberalizing, heterodox part of that. So they believe in full immersion baptism of believers only, and their heretics on the two natures of Christ, the deity of the Holy Spirit, and the Trinity. So you read about the Socinians often.

And then there's a particular controversy. Sometimes find this person mentioned, Boyce, Amira, and they wrote, but uh, Francis Amira. Now, who's from Detroit, you know, we can we can pronounce it like Americans. We don't say I'm from Detroit, but uh, we'll try to, we'll try to do our best here. Amira. And we'll come back to this. It's quite a, a sophisticated debate, but it's one that dominated Turretin's perspective and most of the Reformed Orthodox.

So let me just finish here with some of this history. Amira, sometimes called Amyraldians. For most of the 17th century, this is when Turretin's writing reformed theology was embroiled in controversies surrounding the Academy at Saumur in France and the leading men there, Moise Amyraut, Louis Cappel, Joshua De La Place. They lobbied for a more ecumenical reform faith. They saw, they wanted one less corrupted by Theodore Beza. Beza is Calvin's successor in Geneva. Uh, remember I had up on the board there, Richard Muller. Richard Muller and many others like him have successfully, in my mind, overturned this old historiography, Calvin versus the Calvinists. There was a dominant stream of historical interpretation that that looked at and intended to come from a lot of Guardians and neo-orthodox who said, Calvin good guy, Beza bad guy. Beza is Calvin's successor. So Calvin was good and warm and heartfelt and pastoral, and then you get Beza and the post-reformation guys, and everything got real tight, real rigid, real strict. So Calvin good, Calvinists bad. And you will still find that in a lot of the historical literature, especially people who are maybe second-hand reading the literature, they'll describe all of this Reformed Orthodoxy period as just turning Calvin into a frozen statue.

Well, Muller's work, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, and another scholar, Willem van Asselt, and others like him, have shown really conclusively that, yeah, doctrine is always developing, but this next generation, the post-reformation Reformed dogmatics, are building on that first generation, and there is no Calvin versus the Calvinists. Beza did not ruin Calvin's theology. But some of this has been a debate for a long time, which brings us back to these men at Saumur. Amira and others thought Beza had corrupted the Reformed faith. As early as 1637, Amira was brought before the French Reformed Church to account for his views on the universal extent of the atonement and something called hypothetical redemption or hypothetical atonement. Again, it's very complicated, and so we don't have time to explain that here, but it has to do with the debate on for whom did Jesus die? Did he die for everyone in its intention and scope, or did he die intentionally only for the elect? Probably heard of that debate. It's often the L and TULIP, limited atonement. It's even a little more complicated than that, but sometimes so-called four-point Calvinists are called Amyraldians. Amira wasn't thinking, I want to be a four-point Calvinist, but he had a very nuanced view of the extent of the atonement, which differed with Dort's outcome. And so that's come down to us as Amyraldianism.

It became clear over the next decades that Amira was not going to be removed from his post at Saumur or from his pastorate. And in fact, the, the spread of Amyraldianism was growing. So many of the leading lights in Switzerland started to plan for a response. Francis Turretin initiated the idea with another man, Johann Heinrich Heidegger. Not the Heidegger philosopher, will come later. And a Swiss consensus that would address the errors of Saumur. They wanted to address three errors in particular. This man, Louis Cappel, undermining the inspiration of the Hebrew text, as they saw it. There's a big debate about the vowel points. So when they first wrote the Hebrew text, they didn't have vowel points. The Masoretes put in vowel points, and there was a debate: are the vowel points inspired? And Turretin and his group said they were, and then the Saumur school said they weren't. And Turretin and his guys thought that's undermining the inspiration of the Hebrew text. Start to get into what's right or wrong there, but that was the issue.

Then this man, Joshua De La Place, rejected the immediate imputation of Adam's sin. And then Amira insisted that God intended Christ's death to be for all upon the condition that they believed. That's the debate about the extent of the atonement. So you've got these three issues: with the vowel points, the imputation of Adam's sin, and the extent of the atonement. Turretin pulls these guys together, and they draft a consensus. It's composed by Heidegger in Zurich, with Turretin of Geneva, and another man of Basel, Lucas Gernler, assisting. These three. It's called the Formula, the Formula Consensus Helvetica. Good thing to know for midterm.

It was approved by the Swiss Evangelical Diet in 1675, endorsed by the Geneva Company of Pastors in 1678, the Council in 1679. It really marked the high point of Reformed Orthodoxy. This is getting, as if you don't like it, you'd say narrow. If you do like it, you'd say careful as you can be. This Consensus Helvetica, and it was championed by Turretin with his weight and influence behind it. It was approved by the Council in 1679.

Almost done here. It's just one of the, one of the ironies of theological history that this Formula Consensus Helvetica, which was really trying to deal with Amyraldianism, that this consensus was quickly set aside. And the move to remove the consensus was led by Turretin's son, Jean Alphonse Turretin, whose main opponent defending the consensus was a man by the name of Benedict Pictet. It almost always, it's, it's a family. Benedict Pictet, Jean Alphonse Turretin. Jean Alphonse is Francis Turretin's son, and he's Francis Turretin's. Benedict is Francis Turretin's nephew. Benedict. John Alphonse was born in Francis's older age, so he was actually closer in life to his nephew Benedict Pictet than he was to his son John Alphonse. And when Turretin, Francis, died, it's Benedict Pictet who takes over in the chair of theology in Geneva.

Now, Benedict Pictet and John Alphonse didn't want to make it sound like there's some blood feud, Hatfield and McCoys. They, they agreed and worked together on things, but the nephew of Francis and the son of Francis, after his death, are on opposite sides of this issue with the Formula Consensus Helvetica. Pictet succeeded Turretin as professor. Pictet was the one who came to Francis's bedside in his dying days. Pictet was the one who gave Francis Turretin's funeral oration because John Alphonse was only 16 at the time.

Toward the close of the oration, Pictet prayed that the death of his beloved uncle, this Francis Turretin, that the death of his beloved uncle, 1687, would not, quote, portend anything for our church, and that God would keep Geneva safe and tranquil, an invincible theater of your power and virtue. But it was not to be. And it was a matter of decades after Turretin's death that the Formula Consensus Helvetica was removed. On seven, on September 6, 1706, the Council adopted a new ordination service. They first removed the Formula Consensus. Then they only required ministers to subscribe to the Old and New Testaments and not teach against the confessions and catechisms. Unlike the younger Turretin, Jean Alphonse, Pictet believed that the Formula was not a hindrance to unity with the, with the Dutch or with the Lutherans. He insisted upon a high Orthodox standard. He was concerned, and with good cause, that eventually they would lose Dort and the confession of faith in Arminianism would be established. He said, quote, "I fear the spirits of this century are extremely given to novelties." Another good back of the T-shirt, "This century is extremely given to novelties."

And in 1725, so why 1725 for this date? And here we're done. Pictet dies in 1724, and it's 1725 that the slimmed-down formula of 1706 is set aside in favor of a still looser policy, which required ministers only to subscribe to the Bible and to say that Calvin's Catechism was a faithful summary of scripture. There was no requirement to subscribe to, not even a requirement not to teach against the Formula Consensus, the Second Helvetic Confession, or the Canons of Dort. And so an outside observer, Robert Woodrow, writing from Scotland in 1730, passed along the news, quote, "Turretin's son has quite overturned everything in Geneva. Subscription to the confessions are no more required in that city." Shows you how much one man can do and how much can happen so very quickly when that one man was gone. A little bit about Turretin's time and the debates in this period of Reformed Orthodoxy. Next week we will jump back in fundamental articles and then move to the doctrine of scripture. Have a great week.