Matthew Barrett, Craig Carter, and many others are attempting to renew the church through retrieving their reading of the Protestant Reformation. All they are really doing is retrieving Roman Catholic neo-Thomism, and the attending medieval categories therein, as the balm of Gilead they believe such retrieval will accomplish for the failing evangelical church. And yet this is the irony: they are simply promoting a substance metaphysics, and the decretal God therefrom, which the OG reformers were intent on dismantling in the name of Christ and revelation. TF Torrance underscores these matters for us:

That is what happened at the Reformation. The very foundations of medieval Roman theology were subjected to searching criticism in the effort to purge it of alien conceptions of deity and nature, and to restore in its fullness the biblical doctrine of the living, acting God as Creator and Father. The result was an immense upheaval which substituted a more dynamic and active way of thinking for that of the medieval schoolmen, and it was that foundation that made possible the equally great mutation in scientific thinking from static to dynamic and kinetic questions, resulting in a corresponding change in terminology. Thus as professor E. A. Burt has written: ‘It is obvious, from a causal observation of the medieval and modern methods of attacking the difficulties of metaphysics, that a radical shift has been made in the terminology used. Instead of treating things in terms of substance, accident, causality, essence and idea, matter and form, potentiality and actuality, we now treat them in terms of forces, motions and laws, changes of mass in space and time, and the like.’ These changes derived from the new science, and it is significant that the men chiefly responsible at first for initiating these changes were men like Bacon and Newton whose scientific work was so closely tied up with their faith, and their explicit rejection of Aristotelian notions of deity and nature.[1]

Reading popular renditions of Reformation history, like those being produced by Barrett, Carter et al., one would never realize that in fact the Protestant Reformation was all about upending the [substance] metaphysics that propelled the very ecclesiastical system the OG reformers were intent on deconstructing. And so, when popular writers today tell inquisitive Christians that the Reformation actually entailed the same metaphysics that underwrote the Roman Catholic church, these unbeknowing folk simply ingest it as the truth. But as TFT is demonstrating, that couldn’t be further from the truth. The original Protestant Reformation, at a depth dimensional level, was all about introducing the church of Jesus Christ to a radical theology of the Word; wherein the old superstructures that helped provide the Roman church with its fundamentum were scrapped by way of appealing to the power and reality of Holy Scripture, in the prosopon (face) of Jesus Christ.

The Calvinists and Arminians continue the struggle, one against the other, from the very Aristotelianism that the OG reformers were intent on scrapping vis-à-vis a direct line to the mediator between God and humanity in the ‘man, Christ Jesus.’ What people like Barrett and Carter are doing is a hyper disservice to folks who have no critical resource. Because they conflate the works of the so-called 16^th and 17^th century Post Reformation orthodox reformers with the work of the OG reformers, they end up flattening things, thus not recognizing that the real sword of the Reformation was in fact a rejection of the very metaphysics that Barrett et al. are intent on retrieving for the evangelical masses. This is not serious scholarship, and ought to be abandoned posthaste.

What TFT rightly notes is that if someone is really committed to Protestant reformational reality, rather than the ecclastics of the ‘schoolmen,’ that they will repudiate the metaphysical and “revelational” foundations upon which retrievers of Post Reformed orthodox theologians are promoting today. This isn’t simply a matter of choosing this system over that one, so on and so forth. It is a matter of recognizing that in fact the way reality ought to be conceived of, particularly by Christians, is how that is given in God’s Self-revelation and exegesis, as that is provided for in Jesus Christ. This is not an easy task, or for the faint of heart. This whole theological milieu represents a complex; particularly, because terminology is often used equivocally. The OG reformers, and those following, will use language like ‘Trinitarian theology,’ right alongside folks like Barrett et al. And yet, the former are attempting to think this from a principial commitment to a Christ conditioning that cuts across the metaphysics that the latter appeal to; that is in regard to articulating a doctrine of God, in a God-world relation.

[1] Thomas F. Torrance, Theological Science (Oxford/London/New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 65.