Boethius was an interesting and important character of the ancient church, but surprisingly does not receive as much attention as other figures. Boethius, a Roman noble in the 6th century, wrote an extremely influential treatise on an Augustinian formulation¹ of the Trinity which became the academic standard for the church of his day. Apparently, for anyone to be approved to a teaching post, they had to submit a commentary on Boethius’ treatise. Carl Trueman suggests² Boethius “falls between two stools” since he lived between the traditional division of the ancient and medieval churches. If he had been active earlier or later, perhaps he would receive more attention from scholars.

Boethius’ life-long work was the preservation of ancient classical knowledge. His goal was to translate the works of Aristotle and Plato into Latin. If he were successful, the achievement could have significantly altered the course of history. Arabic-speaking cultures received the works of Aristotle and Plato in their native tongue which catapulted them ahead of the West. If Boethius had accomplished his goal, Europe may have had a similar advancement earlier in their history.

Boethius however, was not able to give them Aristotle and Plato in Latin. Theodoric the Great suspected Boethius of conspiring with the Byzantine emperor Justin I and had him imprisoned. While awaiting his eventual execution, Boethius wrote his most well-known work, the Consolation of Philosophy, a dialogue between Boethius himself and the Lady Philosophy. The work is understandably centered around the perennial question “Why do bad things happen to good people?” In the work are several interesting philosophical contributions including linguistics and God’s relation to time.

Boethius’ contributions are many. Those interested in the ancient church and the development of Christian theology should study him. Perhaps in the future he will receive more attention.

1. Thanks to Jeff Waddington who passed on this bit of information.↩
2. November 29, 2007 class lecture.↩

In Volume 15 of Ordained Servant¹, D. G. Hart and John R. Muether point out an interesting piece of Presbyterian history. In 1926, J. Gresham Machen was nominated to be Princeton Seminary’s professor of apologetics - a routine measure that raised an unusual amount of opposition. The opposition was not related to Machen’s abilities in the field of apologetics, but to his position on Prohibition.

Machen opposed Presbyterian support for Prohibition, however, not because he approved of drunkenness or preferred unpopularity. Rather he did so for important theological - even Reformed - reasons. [...] Machen argued that the church had no legitimate rationale taking a side in this political question. Aside from the question of the relations between church and state, he believed that the church was bound by the Word of God and so all of its declarations and resolutions had to have clear Scriptural warrant. The Bible did not, however, provide support for Prohibition. It taught the idea of temperance, that is, moderate consumption of alcohol and the other good things of God’s creation. This meant that Scripture forbade inebriation. But even here the Bible did not give directions to government officials for abolishing drunkenness.

Since the Bible did not answer the questions surrounding this issue, Machen was unwilling to give his support along with many in the denomination. Hart and Muether helpfully observe the extension of the Regulative Principle in this episode. Typically we think of the principle solely in public worship terms, however

just as important is what it teaches about liberty of conscience and the Lordship of Christ. As the Confession of Faith teaches (20.2), “God alone is Lord of the conscience.” To bind the consciences of believers only on the basis of teaching of Scripture is to recognize and extend Christ’s Lordship. But to do so only on the basis of human wisdom or preference is to usurp his rule.

The journal is available from the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. I also refer you to Hart and Muether’s

• With Reverence and Awe: Returning to the Basics of Reformed Worship

as well as Hart’s books

• Defending the Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Crisis of Conservative Protestantism in Modern America
• A Secular Faith: Why Christianity Favors the Separation of Church and State

for related discussions.

1. The Committee on Christian Education of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Ordained Servant, Volume 15, 2006.↩

The Historical Context of Jonathan Edwards’ Discussion of the Intellect and Will

The Great Awakening & Factions

In order to properly understand Edwards at this point, it is essential that we understand his own historical context for it is here that we will clearly see the contours of his views as they are compared and contrasted with those of his theological opponents.

The social context into which Edwards spoke was, of course, the age of the Great Awakening. But what is it about the Great Awakening that could be of interest here? It is the fact that the nature of the human soul and its various powers was at the heart of many of the debates of that era.

The basic question was whether the Great Awakening in its day was a legitimate work of God or the work of excited passions or (worse still), the work of the Devil. Jonathan Edwards, in endeavoring to defend the awakenings that occurred in his parish in Northampton and across the colonies, endeavored to plow a middle row between the two extremes (the “two great armies”) of rationalism on the one hand and unbridled enthusiasm on the other.

What this meant was that he challenged the regnant faculty psychology of his day in order to pioneer a path toward a better understanding of the human personality or soul or mind. In other words, Edwards was not conducting an abstract examination of the human soul. He was endeavoring to deal with the two extremes in the awakening that he deemed problematic.
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Various Ways of Understanding the Relationship between the Intellect and Will

Before I endeavor to answer the question of whether Plantinga has properly understood Edwards, it might be helpful to consider various ways in which the intellect and will are understood to relate to one another in the literature on the subject.¹ What I discuss here is not intended to be exhaustive, but rather it is suggestive only.

Putting the matter as simply as possible, there are two general ways to understand the relationship between the intellect & the will, along with some significant variation within these two broad perspectives. These two categories are intellectualism and voluntarism.
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Plantinga’s Own Assessment of the Relationship between the Intellect and Will

Alvin Plantinga discusses the relationship between the intellect and will in chapters eight and nine of WCB where he deals with that relationship with regard to the occurrence of faith that he outlines in the extended A/C model. According to Plantinga, faith involves both cognitive and affective aspects.

What does this mean?

Plantinga is endeavoring to make the point that faith is more than strictly an intellectual entity (i.e., that faith is more than just knowledge that God exists and assent to that knowledge). If sin has both cognitive and affective elements, so, then, does faith.”¹

It is not necessary to reproduce Plantinga’s discussion of the relationship between the intellect and the will here except to note that he explores various “dependency relations” in which either the intellect or the will has priority and he concludes that he cannot determine which entity has priority.²

In light of this I would label Plantinga a “concurrentist” with regard to the relationship between the intellect and the will. Neither intellect or will has priority.
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Introduction

A few years ago Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga offered an account of how Christian belief acquires warrant (if, in fact, Christian belief is true) in the culmination of his series on warrant, Warranted Christian Belief.¹ Key to his discussion of warranted Christian belief is the presentation and explanation of what Plantinga calls the Aquinas/Calvin model (hereafter A/C model) and the extended A/C model.²

The A/C model is initially comprised of Plantinga’s version of the sensus divinitatis,³ which is then extended to include explicitly Christian belief with three elements: the Bible, the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit and faith.⁴
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Because of John Calvin’s prestige as a great doctor of the Church attempts have from time to time been made to ‘capture’ him for some particular theological claim or agenda. Examples are Karl Barth’s appeal to Calvin in his conflict with Emil Brunner over the issue of natural theology, and Abraham Kuyper’s and Herman Bavinck’s claim that by his doctrine of common grace Calvin overturned the medieval nature - grace dichotomy or dualism.

In each case those appealing to Calvin have treated his ideas anachronistically (Each of these is discussed in Paul Helm, John Calvin’s Ideas, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004)). In writing that book I discovered that if one uses Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae as a kind of template, then there are remarkable coincidences between Thomas’s thought and Calvin’s, even though there are obvious stylistic differences, and very little internal evidence in Calvin of a direct influence.

What does this coincidence show? At least, that Calvin was thoroughly at home in the thought world of the theology of late medievalism, taking on many of its ideas uncritically in areas where the issues of the Reformation were not at stake. Even though he had, from time to time, critical things to say of that theology, or rather of its speculative tendencies.
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