Maarten Wisse

Protestant Theological University | PThU · Department of Beliefs

In this historical contribution, we assess Duns Scotus’s analysis of atonement (Commentary on the Sentences bk. III). We also include a partial exploration of his analysis of penance (Sentences bk. IV), because certain topics which we tend to discuss within atonement‐theory, for example the analysis of the virtue of punishment, pertained to the sub...

A precisely formulated research question is becoming increasingly important within the humanities. This applies not only to research funding applications, but also to articles, papers, and student theses. This article presents a tool allowing students to develop research questions on their own, which is open enough to allow for a wide variety of re...

The authors of this article, two liturgical scholars and a scholar in dogmatics, engaged in a public discussion of whether or not a Holy Communion should be celebrated online. Speaking about the case afterwards, they found that both the discourse of liturgical studies and of dogmatics introduced comparable normative elements. Barnard and Klomp in l...

Reformed theology remains one of the most vibrant fields of discussion in the study of Christian faith and practice. This volume looks back to past resources that have informed Reformed theology, and surveys present conversations among those engaged in Reformed theology today. First, the volume offers accounts of the major historical contexts of Re...

In this paper, I argue that contemporary dogmatics shares a common interest in the representation of God and God’s acts in human language, be this in a more narrowly propositional way or a more broadly defined doxological or dramaturgical way. I argue for an alternative way of looking at the task of dogmatics in terms of the classical distinction b...

In this contribution we investigate the conceptual coherence of penal substitution and its moral validity. After assessing two opposing modern contributions (Stevin Porter and Mark Murphy), we turn to Reformed and medieval scholasticism (Owen, Van Mastricht, and Duns Scotus). This scholastic manoeuvre sheds additional light on the analytic question...

Based on an ethnographic case study of three recently erected church buildings in the Dutch Bible Belt, this article demonstrates how orthodox Reformed congregations in the Netherlands define church buildings—especially the auditoria—and bibles as simultaneously profane and mediating the sacred. These at first glance ambivalent discourses are infor...

In Nicholas Wolterstorff’s ‘Toleration, Justice and Dignity’, he argues for tolerance between religious traditions on the basis of human dignity. In this response to his paper, I argue that a general philosophical argument from human dignity will at best lead to indifference or mere praise, but not true tolerance. In the second part of the paper, I...

Sermo 122, which does not have a clear date, is a complicated sermon, like so many others. In this sermon this has to do with a high level of allegory on all sorts of levels, where it is initially not so clear what Augustine aims at. We want to propose a narrative logic for the understanding of Sermo 122 that explains the argumentative flow of the...

In 2004, Mark Edwards published John through the Centuries, one of the first volumes in the new Blackwell Bible Commentaries series, a series with a strong focus on the reception history of the Bible. In this review article, this commentary is taken under scrutiny in order to see how a reception-historical approach to the Bible affects the modern c...

Europe is in crisis, but what sort of crisis is it? Should it be explained in terms of leaving Europe’s Christian heritage? In this paper, the European crisis is described as a crisis which has its origins within early modern Christianity. This crisis can be made visible through the study of the reception of the Johannine prologue. All the dominant...

In this paper, I propose a new approach to the role of the Bible in systematic theology. I take my starting point in the contemporary clash between those who follow the Enlightenment disintegration of Scripture, and conservative attempts to do theology on the basis of Scripture as the infallible Word of God. Subsequently, I present my research proj...

In his Cities of God, Graham Ward advocates for what he calls an ‘analogical worldview’. On the one hand, he suggests that this analogical worldview has its roots in pre-modern theology and philosophy, especially in Augustine and Aquinas. On the other hand, Graham Ward draws heavily on contemporary critical theory to express this view. The thesis d...

In recent years, a new type of Neo-Augustinian theology has received extensive attention: Radical Orthodoxy. Leading figures behind Radical Orthodoxy such as John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward assert that they reclaim Augustine's theology over and against almost every major types of modern theology. Their leading claim is that an Au...

This article aims to reassess the relevance of Augustine’s theology for contemporary theological discussion. The author argues for an ‘Augustinian paradigm’ that provides a helpful alternative to popular ways of doing theology. First, the theological paradigms of contemporary trinitarian and negative theology are introduced in terms of the role tha...

Van den Brink’s A Public Affair: Theology between Faith and Science, is the result of the course in theory of science that Van den Brink gave at the Faculty of Theology of the University of Utrecht. It is a passionate plea for the public role of theology among the sciences, criticizing those who want to lay theology on a positivist Procrustus’ bed...

An important development in Christian theology during the second half of the twentieth century was what we might call the ‘narrative turn’—i.e. the idea that Christian theology’s use of the Bible should focus on a narrative representation of the faith rather than the development of a set of propositions deduced from the data of revelation. This pap...

In this review article, the author provides an in-depth review of LeRon Shults’s proposal for reforming theological anthropology. Shults aims to reform theological anthropology in a truly relational way. His proposal for a relational theology is rooted in the turn to relationality in philosophy and science. While the author finds many interest...

Traditional Reformation scholarship argued that conceiving faith as a habit is one of the differences between Reformed orthodoxy on the one hand, and Reformation thought on the other. Two theses have been defended in this respect. First, it has been argued that conceptualising faith as a habit was a typical example of introducing Thomistic and Aris...

L'a. se propose d'explorer la these developpee par N. Wolterstorff dans son livre paru en 1995: Divine Discourse - Philosophical Reflections on the Claim that God speaks. La question posee par Wolterstorff est la suivante: quelle est la signification reelle de l'expression parole de Dieu telle qu'utilisee par exemple lors des cultes? Pour Woltersto...

What does it mean to say that the Bible has authority? The author introduces and develops J. M. Bochenski's philosophical theory about the nature of authority. On this basis, he distinguishes between different kinds of authority, which he applies to the authority of the Bible. Subsequently, he shows that the theory of Bochenski should be improv...

In a survey of Internet resources available to philosophers of religion, the authors critically discuss philosophy sites, e-journals, virtual libraries etc that are relevant to philosophy of religion. They conclude that the Internet is increasingly becoming a helpful and even indispensable source of information.

One important means by which religious communities try to cope with evil is by bring- ing their canonical texts to bear on it. In the process of interpretation of canonical texts, not only the meaning of the text plays its role, but also the context in which interpret- ation takes place. Along the lines of a thesis propounded by Wilfred Cantwell Sm...