Ch 2 Sec 4 Roman Catholic Dogmatic Theology

After the Great Schism with the East, the Roman Catholic Church began to flourish with the birth of new universities which led to a scientific methodology using the scholastic method. The scholastic method, or scholasticism, is a method of thought employing “dialectical reasoning”. Dialectical reasoning is the process of making logical inferences through a sort of question and answer dialogue. The typical scholastic formula would be something as follows:

Question “Does God Exist?”

The Scholastic then would provide the opponents view and reasons why God does not exist. Then, the Scholastic would site an authoritative source to support his own inference or conclusion why God does exist.

The scholastic method had a very logical foundation and a very philosophical nature, but as Bavinck remarks, this method lost its connection to scripture as theologians focused more on Greek Philosophy than the original Greek New Testaments manuscripts. This caused theology to loose its certainty and mysticism began to creep into dogmatics. Rather than starting with God and His word, and then using any insight that may be helpful from philosophy to construct a system of dogma, the pre-reformation Scholastics would start with Plato or Aristotle as primary and foundational in thought, and then attempt to baptize that philosophy into God’s word. Perhaps the best of the Scholoastics, at least in the eyes of the Catholic Church, was Thomas Aquinas, which Bavinck himself uses greatly, although Bavinck does inform us that Thomas himself was not free of unhealthy mysticism. As mysticism crept into Roman Catholic Theology through the middle-ages and into the modern period, so also did the attacks from secular philosophy. This led Rome to begin to condemn modern philosophy and finally in 1879 Pop Leo XIII acclaimed Thomas as the teaching doctor of the Church. Which was good in one manner, this would hedge of any modern speculative philosophy and post modern relative philosophy, but still is stuck in pre-modern thought and mysticism.