Muller's thesis

A description of the task that Muller has set himself is explicit on page 37: "The underlying theses of the present study concern the continuities and discontinuities in Reformed theology during the eras of the Reformation and Orthodoxy, running Chronologicaly from approximately 1520 to approximately 1725." Then he says, on page 38: "An operating assumption of the work has consistently been that the theology of the Reformers is not utterly identical to the theology of their orthodoxy successors, and that continuity between the theologies of the two eras is not to be equated with identity, nor discontinuity with development and variation." He lists a few more of his targets on the bottom of page 38 and the top of page 39: the belief that Protestant scholasticism is rationalistic, and the view that Protestant Scholasticism is based on a few central dogmas (such as election, as will become clear later on). He argues that such claims "are fundamentally anachronistic" (pg 39). "They have looked down the well of history and seen their own faces reflected: those who have found central docmas in the older theology have typically not been historians but theologians and, as such, advocates of central doctrinal pivots in their own dogmatic systems" (39). He argues that "The very method of their (that is, the Protestant Scholastics) theology, the gathering of topics or loci drawn out of their exegetical work, stands in the way of such models for theological system" (39). And then, on page 40, he argues specifically for an exegetical continuity between the Reformers and the orthodox: "The history of exegesis marks one of the clearest indicators to the nature and character of the continuity in thought between the Reformation and orthodoxy."

Tags: Muller, thesis, dogmatics

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