Classical Calvinism, or Westminsterian Calvinism, or scholasticism Reformed, or Federal theology, so on and so forth has a particular way of exegeting Holy Scripture, and for me it is an absolute turn-off; it should be for you too. Have you ever heard of Peter Ramus? If you haven’t, you should look him up. His locus methodology was appropriated by Federal (Covenantal) theology, and used to abstract particular doctrinal topics (loci) from Scripture’s greater canonical whole, and then harmonize said topics through theological confessions like we find in the Westminster Confession of Faith. The problem with this approach, for my money, is that it propositionalizes teachings in Scripture that never intended to be read in the sort of haphazard or broken way that they are; that is relative to the canonical reading Scripture intended to be read from as that is ruled by the reality of Jesus Christ. Paul Hinlicky has this nice description of ‘Ramism’ as he contrasts its approach to Scripture, and how that is fleshed out in what he calls Protological Divine Simplicity (he uses James Dolezal as his example) versus what we find in a canonically oriented reading of Scripture (and he refers us to the post-liberal, George Lindbeck for that alternative—prior to this he refers to Brevard Childs, who I am a fan of, and was trained to read Scripture from in his canonical critical approach). So, Hinlicky:

The rule theory of Christian doctrine is above all credited in recent times to George Lindbeck’s seminal critique of propositionalism in theology, The Nature of Doctrine. Dolezal’s book is a textbook case, hermeneutically, for propositionalism in that the diverse testimonies of Scripture are ahistorically and uncritically torn from their context in God’s history with His people, principalized (i.e. turned into free-floating abstractions) and as such harmonized according to an agenda other than the revelation: “God consigned all to sin in order to have on all.” Lindbeck’s hermeneutical critique of propositionalism, however, does not amount to noncognitivism in theology; rather, it specifies the way in which cognitive claims regarding God are to be made—that is, in first order, directly Spirited discourse (“Be of good cheer, your sins are forgiven!” For “Jesus is Lord.” And Jesus is Lord because “God has highly exalted Him” who undertook your lot and bore your burden. And God exalted Jesus because God freely chose to surpass the wrath of His love by the mercy of His love).[1]

To help explicate what Ramism entails even further, let’s read along with Richard Muller as he describes the impact Peter Ramus had on the Post Reformed orthodox biblical hermeneutic:

In this era, the French and Dutch Reformed also developed, and did so under the pressure of intense persecution at the hands of Roman Catholics. In addition to the framing of the French Reformed faith by the Gallican Confession, the third quarter of the sixteenth century saw the development of a distinct French Reformed style that would be exported to other Reformed centres, notably to England, in the latter part of the century: specifically, the rhetorical and logical or dialectical models of Petrus Ramus (c. 1515-72), much debated in their time, had a vast impact on the structuring of Reformed theology in the early orthodox era. Ramus argued for the replacement of Aristotelian categories of predication with topics elicited from the materials of argument, at least in the organization and exposition of the major academic disciplines, including theology. This approach itself was not at all revolutionary: the use of a topical or place logic had been effectively advocated in the fifteenth century by Rudolf Agricola, and the Agricolan pattern had been developed by Melanchthon and, arguably, adopted by Calvin as well. Ramus’ importance stems instead from the pointedness of his advocacy of the topical method and, above all, from his connection of the topical model with a method of division of the topic into subtopics, all organized into the form of charts utilizing ‘French brackets’ as a visual tool.

The massive impact of this approach is seen in Reformed tracts, treatises, theological systems, and commentaries of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In brief, Ramus offered his age as an approach to organization and, indeed, architectonics, that proved eminently useful in the construction of well-argued systems of theology and in the production of clearly organized biblical commentaries. In the latter case, as evidenced in the works of Johannes Piscator (1546-1625) and Jean Diodati (1576-1649), the diagrams could be effectively conjoined with the rhetorical analysis of text. Ramus’ influence, however, must be fairly strictly limited to method: older scholarship has claimed an association between the advocacy of Ramist logic and non-predestinarian, a posteriori, salvation-historical and covenantal approach to theology. This claim, however, fails for lack of any solid historical documentation. There is, in the first place, a clear use of Ramist method by staunch predestinarians; in the second place, there is no ultimate separation in Reformed theology between covenantal and predestinarian thinking, and in the third place there is no clear association of Ramism with the foundations of Reformed covnenant thought.[2]

Muller helps us appreciate the sort of deep impact that Ramus had on the development of Post Reformed orthodox theology as it sought to exegete Holy Scripture. I mean, you know, if you’re into slicing and dicing Scripture up into bite-sized pieces without any real concern for its canonical whole as that finds its res (reality) in Jesus Christ; more power to ya! I’m just not a fan of reading Scripture this way. I really do prefer reading it as a contextual whole, and allowing its very composition and final canonical form, as that is regulated by its witness to Jesus Christ, to shape the way that I read and meditate on Holy Scripture.

Yes, I am being a little snarky, but that’s what Ramism does to me. I take my Bible reading rather seriously, so when I come across someone who has injected a methodology into its reading that abstracts its intended contextual flow to be broken down into pieces, per an a priori system of theological development, I find myself balking at such attenuations. I would say this is a fundamental flaw in the whole of classical Calvinist theology. If its biblical hermeneutic presents us with this sort of artificial apparatus for reading Scripture, and developing doctrine, just think of what it is doing to its whole theological presentation. I shudder at the thought of being submissive to such biblical gymnastics as we hope to develop the sacra doctrina of Holy Writ. Solo Christo

[1] Paul R. Hinlicky, Divine Simplicity: Christ the Crisis of Metaphysics (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2016), 202.

[2] Richard Muller, The Cambridge Companion To Reformation Theology, 136-37.

*I would have rather found a thug life picture of someone like Amandus Polanus or someone, but Edwards will have to do.