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edited by Carl R. Trueman and R. S. Clark
Paternoster Press, 1999
344 pp.; $35

edited by John B. Roney and Martin I. Klauber
Greenwood Press, 1998
228 pp.; $59.95

by Philip Graham Ryken
Paternoster Press, 1998
357 pp.; $40, paper

If Protestants in general must sometimes plead guilty to forgetting the centuries of Christian history between the Apostle Paul and the start of the Reformation, evangelical Protestants must make the same plea for the period between Luther and Calvin and the outbreak of revival under Wesley, White field, and Edwards. Sheer ignorance is the most important reason for neglecting the nearly two hundred years of history between 1550 and 1730. But to ignorance is often added a negative stereotype. Wasn't this the period of that notorious "Protestant scholasticism," when churches and leaders turned their back on the vital faith, urgent exegesis, and courageous faithfulness of the first Protestants in order to fill up on arid philosophy, sterile disputes over theological arcana, and ego-driven quarrels about recondite church practices? The worst feature commonly thought to characterize the age of Protestant scholasticism was its propensity to substitute fascination about the secret will of God for Scripture's clear teaching about the work of Christ.

As with most stereotypes, the commonly held views on Protestant scholasticism are not completely fallacious. Yet as these three books, and a modest tide of other similarly well-researched, volumes have recently shown, there is a whole lot more to the subject. Of these books, the symposium edited by Carl Trueman and Scott Clark is most ambitious in correcting misconceptions and arguing new theses. Among its most successful contributions are arguments by David Bagchi (for Luther) and David Steinmetz (for Calvin) pointing out how aspects of medieval scholastic theology survived in the first generation of the Reformation. Other important chapters include Richard Muller's convincing argument that Calvin's successor in Geneva, the oft-maligned Theodore Beza, taught a theology far closer to Calvin's than prevailing views often admit, and Paul Shaefer's depiction of the late-sixteenth-century English Puritan, William Perkins, as a preacher who featured Christ's saving offer of mercy much more prominently than the Puritans are sometimes supposed to have done.

Similar illumination for a more limited topic is provided by the essays in John Roney's and Martin Klauber's book, which traces the progress of Geneva from its theological heyday under John Calvin to its much more modern (and modernist) theological existence in the nineteenth century. This book too overturns ill-grounded stereotypes, especially when it shows how much the quintessential scholastic Francis Turretin (1623-1687) relied on intuitive realities of faithful Christian practice in constructing an ideal picture of Christian truth. Yet the book's prime contribution is to demonstrate that the theological transit from Calvin to nineteenth-century intellectual pluralism was a product of multiplied contingency: rather than responding to long-enduring tendencies built into this theology or that, Geneva's religious history was shaped by a multitude of particular decisions related to a wide variety of political, economic, and social—as well as theological—developments.

Philip Ryken's theological portrait of Thomas Boston, who ministered in Ettrick, Scotland, from 1707 to his death in 1732, also punctures stereotypes. Boston was known in his lifetime as defending views of salvation in which Christ's grace was offered to all. His renown long survived his death through a book of sermons entitled Human Nature in its Four-fold State. By carefully reconstructing Boston's theological sources (which included a lot of Luther as well as Calvinists from all over Europe) and by carefully exegeting Boston's account of the Innocent State, the Natural State, the Gracious State, and the Eternal State (in heaven or hell), Ryken shows how pastorally sensitive, Christ-centered, and broadly evangelical one of the old preachers of the late-Scholastic period could be. Even as he remained in touch with the main emphases of what Ryken calls "international Calvinism," Boston was a preacher whom all sorts of leading evangelicals recommended for a very long time. With his more particular subject, Ryken does what the other two books also accomplish for their broader topics—which is to unmask the deficiencies of stereotypes while opening up the era of Protestant scholasticism for its complex, and often edifying, realities.

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