The Systematic Place of Reformed Scholasticism: Reflections Concerning the Reception of Calvin's Thought

Modern notions like "Catholicism," "Lutheranism," and "Calvinism" are not helpful in describing the history of the thought at the early modern universities. However, the early modern university forms the context of Reformed academic thought, which has to be interpreted and to be analyzed in continuity and discontinuity with the thought of the medieval centuries. The decisive question to be raised is how a certain movement is related to the classic Christian model of necessity-contingency thinking: God exists necessarily and he acts contingently. The Reformed tradition of theology and philosophy closely followed this model, whereas Calvin did not.