Reformed orthodoxy

Reformed orthodoxy or Calvinist orthodoxy was an era in the history of Calvinism in the 16th to 18th centuries. Calvinist orthodoxy was paralleled by similar eras in Lutheranism and tridentine Roman Catholicism after the Counter-Reformation. Calvinist scholasticism or Reformed scholasticism was a theological method that gradually developed during the era of Calvinist Orthodoxy. Theologians used the neo-Aristotelian form of presentation, already popular in academia, in their writings and lectures. They defined the Reformed faith and defended it against the polemics of opposing parties. While the Reformed often used "scholastic" as a term of derision for their Roman Catholic opponents and the content of their theology, most Reformed theologians during this period can properly be called scholastics with respect to the method of theology, though they also used other methods. J. V. Fesko describes scholasticism in this sense as "a method of doing theology that sets out to achieve theological precision through the exegesis of Scripture, an examination of how doctrine has been historically defined throughout church history, and how doctrine is expounded in contemporary debate." In the past, scholars described the theology of Protestant scholastics following John Calvin as more rationalistic and philosophical than the more exegetical biblical theology of John Calvin and other early Reformers. This is commonly described as the "Calvin against the Calvinists" paradigm. Beginning in the 1980s, Richard Muller and other scholars in the field provided extensive evidence showing both that the early Reformers were deeply influenced by scholasticism and that later Reformed scholasticism was deeply exegetical, using the scholastic method to organize and explicate exegetical theology. Medieval schools of theology used methods of instruction known as lectio-meditatio-quaestio and disputationes. In the first method, teachers would first read an authoritative text with some commentary (lectio), allow students to consider the text silently (meditatio), and finally the students would ask questions of the teacher to get at the meaning (quaestio).