Volume 11, Issue 2

Franciscus Titelmans (1502–1537) is known to scholars of biblical humanism as a critic of Erasmus’ Novum Instrumentum . His own biblical works have been, however, little studied. This article discusses his approach to humanist methodology on the example of his commentary to the Book of Job. It demonstrates that he used original languages of the Bible to correct copyists’ mistakes and elucidate the meaning of ambiguous passages. Nevertheless, the application of philological tools had strict limits for him: the Church’s dogma. The Vulgate could be corrected where no doctrinal issue was at stake, but whenever an important proof text of the Vulgate differed from the Hebrew and Greek versions, the ancient Latin translation was to be preferred. Titelmans went as far as to claim that it was the Vulgate, which expressed fully the true meaning of the Word of God, the meaning that the Hebrew and Greek texts contained in a hidden from.

The spirituality of the Early Modern Period – and especially in the Devotio Moderna and Ignatius of Loyola – is often associated with a turn to “interiority.” The question is then: to what does one turn? The Pro Theologia Mystica Clavis (1640) of Maximilianus Sandaeus offers a useful hermeneutical principle. In his explanations of the nature of interiority, he emphasized that it is fundamentally a “turning to the Other,” to God, which strips the human person of its own images and forms. This “turn inwards” is a response to the initiative of God, who is present in the “ground” of the soul, and is thus more present to the human person than the human person is to himself. This “ground” is not the “self” as such, but the fundamental relationality. Interiority concerns the encounter and the deepening relationship between the human person and God, and thus indirectly the human person as a “person” and not the “self” of the individual. This perspective has older roots, as it can be seen, e.g., in the discussion between Peter Abelard and William of Saint-Thierry in the twelfth century.

This article engages with the moral theology of William Perkins of Cambridge (1558–1602), with particular attention to his celebrated and influential case divinity. Perkins’s case divinity set the stage for a Protestant return to casuistical ethics, following the eschewal and neglect of such applied moral reflection in the initial phases of the Reformation. While his cases originally received a positive reception, more modern evaluations have been less approving. Perkins has been accused of attempting to curtail Christian liberty by forging codes of piety and morality that crowd out space for personal deliberation and judgment. This essay argues that such evaluations misapprehend Perkins’s casuistical enterprise, overlooking or obscuring its chief and ultimate aim, which is didactic rather than prescriptive.

This paper explores seventeenth-century Scottish theologian Samuel Rutherford’s (1600–1661) views on adiaphora and the regulative principle of worship (RPW). Rutherford criticised those who endorsed the authority of civil magistrates and church government to legislate ecclesiastical laws concerning indifferent matters in worship. Scholars have focussed on the RPW of the Westminster Standards, but the theological and philosophical controversies surrounding the RPW and its relationship with adiaphora in early modern Britain remain understudied. While the Scottish Presbyterian understanding of the RPW and its relationship with adiaphora has faced criticism for perceived inconsistency, this paper argues that Rutherford’s view on the RPW and adiaphora is coherent. It further asserts that Rutherford’s RPW and his notion of adiaphora were rooted in the Reformation emphasis on Scripture and grace given through Christ. Also, the study highlights that Rutherford’s RPW was supported by his Two Kingdoms doctrine, emphasising Christ’s evangelical rule in the Church.

This article examines religious coexistence and survival tactics of the religious minority groups in the Dutch Republic and the Kingdom of France, comparing Utrecht’s Catholics and Nîmois Huguenots in three respects: legal systems, battles over sacred spaces, and minority resilience. The distinct legal systems in the two countries – the Union of Utrecht and the Edict of Nantes – shaped two different forms of religious diversity in Utrecht and Nîmes, that is, de facto and de jure coexistence. Under these divergent legal settings, both Catholics and Protestants in the two cities similarly asserted their presence in the urban space and sought to practice their faith publicly. However, the minorities’ tactics in the conflicts over sacred spaces and the extent of physical violence in those battles differed significantly. While facing challenging circumstances in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, both minority groups demonstrated a remarkable resilience, mobilizing various survival tactics. They constantly negotiated the detailed conditions of coexistence with the dominant faith, attempting to carve out their own positions within their local, precarious environment.

At the end of the sixteenth century in the (nascent) Dutch Republic, a new balance between government and Church was set as the Reformed Church became the public church. In the public church, the government had the authority to announce special days of prayer without permission from the ecclesiastical authorities. Furthermore, ministers were expected to give religious justification for the government’s policy. This article presents a case study of special days of prayer in the city of Groningen. Every year a special church service was held in Groningen on the so-called Groninger Landdag , the day on which the States distributed the official positions. This paper discusses two sermons delivered by Groningen ministers on such a Groninger Landdag. The first is the 1650 sermon from Johannes Martinus, the second the 1666 sermon from Thomas Alberthoma. I will argue that these sermons show how the ministers operated as civil servants and followed the government, and at the same time operated as servants of the Word of God and therefore could be critical towards the authorities. The regents needed divine warrant for their position.

George Berkeley’s (1685–1753) condemnation of freethinking arose from the social, political, and, above all, moral repercussions that he believed this heterogeneous group was bringing about in British society. In the first part of this paper, I set out the challenges posed by the freethinking movement, drawing extensively on Berkeley’s Alciphron . In the second part, I address both the reasons behind his aversion to freethinking and his response, which involved advocating for the union of Church and state and while rejecting secular governance. This analysis relies primarily on lesser-known works from Berkeley’s socio-political writings. The paper argues that Berkeley’s opposition to freethinkers was driven by his concern for the public good and his belief that the Christian religion, particularly in its Anglican tradition, was the most effective means to achieve it.

In the second half of the sixteenth century, the Jesuits Luis de Molina (1535–1600) and Leonardus Lessius (1554–1623) had been forced to defend their views on grace, free will and predestination against multiple attacks by fellow Catholic theologians. By comparing Molina’s commentaries on Matt 11:21–22 in his Concordia of 1595 with Lessius’ remarks on the same verses in his De gratia efficaci (1610), this contribution seeks to provide insights into the extent to which the theological views of both Jesuits differed. The article concludes that Lessius’ theological view diverges from Molina’s where it concerns the physical workings of grace. Furthermore, the two Jesuits differ on the question whether God grants equal aid to all or bestows some with more aid than others. Molina held the latter view, while Lessius, in keeping with the ideas of Henry of Ghent, defended the former.

The present article analyses Jacobus Janssonius’ (1547–1625) theology of grace and free will against the backdrop of the enduring polemics of the Louvain Faculty of Theology with the Jesuit order on grace, free will and predestination. As one of the protagonists in the Faculty’s conflict with Leonardus Lessius, Janssonius was tasked with teaching a lectio publica intended to counter the Jesuits’ optimistic evaluation of human free will. In this ad hoc course, Janssonius discussed the reconciliation of efficacious grace with human free will, a topic he would return to as Regius professor of Sacred Scripture (1598–1616). On the basis of previously unstudied manuscripts – fragments from his 1587 lectio publica and student notes taken during his tenure as Regius professor – I will challenge the traditional portrayal of Janssonius as a watered-down dupe of Michael Baius’ radicalized anti-Pelagian theology. Rather than slavishly transmitting Baianism to his students, Jacobus Janssonius actively incorporated Baius’ pessimistic theological anthropology into a scholastic framework, allowing him to teach an anti-Pelagian theology of grace that respected the boundaries of Gregory XIII’s definitive condemnation of the Roman interpretation of Baianism with Provisionis nostrae (1580).

This essay takes its starting point in the critique the Leuven theologian Libertus Fromondus (1587–1653) formulated against the theological legacy of Leonardus Lessius (1554–1623) a quarter of a century after the Jesuit’s death. This criticism is part of the long-standing controversy that raged in the Leuven theological milieu between the professors of the University, on the one hand, and the Jesuits, on the other. The former, following the anti-Pelagian Augustine, stressed the overwhelming necessity of God’s grace for the salvation of humanity, fundamentally corrupted after the Fall, while the latter gave more space to the contribution of humans’ free will and agency in their attaining eternal salvation. This article first situates Fromondus’ engagement with Lessius’ theological legacy in the setting of this decades-long debate in the Leuven theological milieu from the sixteenth century onwards. It then focuses on how the controversy between the aforementioned key figures was reflected in their commentaries on three scriptural passages, specifically Song 5:2–6, Rom 8:29–32, and 1Tim 2:4–6. When relevant, we also include references to the Augustinus of Cornelius Jansenius “the younger” (1585–1638), Fromondus’ predecessor as Royal professor of Sacred Scripture in Leuven.