Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics

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MRC

Puritan Board Freshman
I plan to read (numerically by chapter over the period of a number of years) à Brakel, Bavinck, Turretin, Calvin and Frame in order to get a foundation of reformed biblical and systematic theology. Would you recommend I read Muller as I read these systematics? How would this enhance my understanding of these works?
 
Absolutely. No theological discipline can stand on its own, and the present case will help make clear why Systematic Theology as it is found in the historical continuum cannot be understood apart from Historical Theology. Reading Muller's PRRD with, for instance, Turretin, will place his System of Theology within usable and workable categories for you: you will begin to be able to answer the questions, Why does Turretin adopt this method; is it essential to his system? or, how does his understanding of the Divine Attributes harmonize with the prior and contemporaneous traditions? When you read Turretin or Brakel, you will probably be asking questions of them which come from your present perspective in history; asking these questions of them *directly* will inevitably yield wrong and damaging results (e.g., the neo-orthodox reading of the Reformed tradition); reading a work such as Muller's will help understand the questions which they were actually answering, and in the forms and manners in which they were being answered -- this understanding is what makes the Systems of ages past still useful.
 
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