Date of Award
2016
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
First Reader
Richard A. Muller
Second Reader
Lyle D. Bierma
Third Reader
Henry Zwaanstra
Fourth Reader
Aza Goudriaan
Abstract
Some scholars have identified a certain amount of vagueness in continuity theses of scholarship regarding medieval, Reformation, and post-Reformation thought. A criterion of continuity is necessary in order to prosecute a continuity thesis. One way to root intellectual history within a particular social context over time is to examine a conceptual framework as it develops, changes, and even declines within an academic institution like an early modern university. Institutional continuity is a methodological approach that seeks to clarify the relationship between continuity, influence, confessionalization and deconfessionalization diachronically within an institutional context of an early modern university. The test case for this method is the prolegomenal framework of Franciscus Junius, as first propounded in De Theologia Vera (1594) and developed by various theologians at Leiden University, but especially as it was deployed by Bernhardinus De Moor in his seven volume Commentarius Perpetuus during his tenure as a theology professor at Leiden (1745-1779). This dissertation examines that prolegomenal framework in light of the pedagogical methods employed through lectures, disputations, and published works. Bernhardinus De Moor also deploys this prolegomenal framework thematically in his academic orations delivered first upon assuming the chair of theology and second as a valedictorian address at the close of his tenure as rector magnificus. A subsidiary point in the De Theologia Vera, the theologia viatorum, also is examined in terms of how it constructs the relationship between faith and reason, methodological doubt, natural and supernatural revelation, the necessity of Scripture, and academic theology as a form of scholastic piety.
Recommended Citation
Rester, Todd M., "Theologia Viatorum: institutional Continuity and the Reception of a theological Framework From Franciscus Junius's De theologia Vera To Bernhardinus De Moor's Commentarius Perpetuus" (2016). CTS PhD Doctoral Dissertations. 46.
https://digitalcommons.calvin.edu/cts_dissertations/46