Ancient Christian Witness

Quote
"But many more of the Protestant confession came
from the second, third, and subsequent generations. Those confessions, moreover,
are not only more numerous but usually much longer, than the earlier texts had
been. Nor is the difference a matter only of comparative length as such. For it
was, paradoxically, the writers of confessions who had not been trained in
medieval, Roman Catholic scholasticism who laid the foundations for a new,
Protestant "confessional scholasticism." As Horatius Bonar put it, speaking
about The Westminister Confession of Faith from the seventeenth century in a
description that could as readily have been applied also to The Canons of the
Synod of Dort from the same century or to The Formula of Concord from late in
the preceding century,

It may be questioned whether the Church gained
anything by the exchange of the Reformation standards for those of the seventh
century. The scholastic mould(british form of "mold") in which the latter are
cast has somewhat trenched upon the ease and breadth which mark the former; and
the skillful metaphysics employed at Westminister [or in The Formula of Concord]
in giving lawyer-like precision to each statement, have imparted a local and
temporary aspect to the new which did not belong to the more ancient standards.
129

Bonar's use of "scholastic", therefore, which commonly refers to
Western Roman Catholic theology from the twelfth to the fourteenth century and
to the revival of that theology in the modern era, may also be applied to the
Protestant "confessional scholasticism" of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, which manifested itself in both Lutheran and Reformed theology.

One presuposition for its rise, as it had been for rise of medieval
scholasticism, was the cultivation of Aristotelian philosophy, which, after its
rejection by Luther and other Reformers, enjoyed a strong revival of interest
during subsequent generations of Lutheran and Reformed theologians. It had been
Melanchton's ambition to prepare a new edition of Aristotle. Aristotelianism
gave the Protestant dogmaticians of the seventeenth century a precision in their
vocabulary and a capacity for making careful distinctions. Partly as a
consequence of this renewal of interest in the philosophy of Aristotle, another
component of medieval scholasticism, the investigation of "natural theology,"
played a prominent part in this Protestant scholasticism, too. Therefore an
exploration of what the unaided human reason could know about God, including the
traditional proofs for the existence of God, became the prolegomenon to the
systematic exposition of the revealed doctrines of Scripture.132"