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An Attempt at Systematic Reconstruction in the Theology of Thomas Chalmers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Daniel F. Rice
Daniel F. Rice
Affiliation:
associate professor of philosophy and religious studies inthe University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire.
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Extract

According to William Hanna “it had for many years been the highest object of [Thomas Chalmers'] literary and professional ambition to leave behind him a complete body of Divinity containing the fruits of his maturest reflections, both on the credentials and contents of the Christian Revelation.” Thus in 1845, after the epochal events of the Scottish Disruption had been put behind him, Chalmers undertook the project of writing his Institutes of Theology which were published in 1849, two years after his death. In approaching the systematic problem Chalmers felt that he was contravening “the order of every system and every text-book in theology that we are yet acquainted with” and proposing a radically altered arrangement of topics ”from that in which Calvin and Turretin, Pictetus and Vitringa have delivered them.” Chalmers' assumption that a continuity exists between Calvin and the theological systems of the seventeenth century need not detain us except to point out that Chalmers merely reflects a tradition, uniformly established until recent times, in which theology as “system” was projected retrospectively from its formulation in seventeenth-century thought back onto the theological work of the Reformation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 48 , Issue 2 , June 1979 , pp. 174 - 188
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1979

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References

1. Hanna, William, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Thomas Chalmers, 4 vols. (Edinburgh and London, 1852), 4:426–427.Google Scholar

2. Chalmers, Thomas, Institutes of Theology, ed. Hanna, William, 2 vols. (Edinburgh and London, 1849), 1:xix.Google Scholar

3. See Dillenberger, John, Contours of Faith: Changing Forms of Christian Thought (Nashville, 1969), pp. 37–42, 48–56.Google Scholar

4. Hill, George, Lectures in Divinity, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1833), 1:326.Google Scholar

5. Dillenberger, , Contours, p. 52.Google Scholar

6. Chalmers, Thomas, On Natural Theology, 2 vols. (Glasgow and London, 1835), 2:416.Google Scholar

7. See my article “Natural Theology and the Scottish Philosophy in the Thought of Thomas Chalmers,” Scottish Journal of Theology 24 (02 1971): 34–40.Google Scholar

8. Chalmers, , Institutes, 1:355.Google Scholar

9. Ibid., p. 365.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid., p. 372.

12. Ibid., 2:513.

13. Ibid., pp. 514–515.

14. Ibid., 1:368.

15. Ibid., p. 360.

16. Ibid., p. 364.

17. “We are aware,” Chalmers writes,“that there are theorists in Christianity; but ever remember, that to systematize is not to theorie The one is just as unlike the other, as the philosophy of modern times is unlike to the philosophy of nature in the middle ages. To frame a speculation from the gratuitous fancies of one's own spirit, is a wholly different exercise from that of classifying according to their observed resemblances, the observed individuals which have a place and a substantive being in some outer field of contemplation. In the case before us, these individuals are Biblical texts; and the theologian who systematizes these fancies nothing, conjectures nothing. He deals not with what he fancies, but with what he finds—not with the specious plausibilities which himself hath pictured, but with the solid materials which Scripture or the Scripture critic hath put into his hands.” Ibid., p. 360.

18. Ibid., p. 372.

19. Ibid., p. 357.

20. Ibid., p. 360.

21. Chalmers, Thomas, Prelections on Butler's Analogy, Paley's Evidences of Christianity, and Hill's Lectures in Divinity, ed. Hanna, William (Edinburgh and London, 1849), pp.219–220.Google Scholar

22. Chalmers, , Institutes, 1:366.Google Scholar

23. Ibid., p. 367.

24. Ibid., p. 377.

25. Chalmers, , On Natural Theology, 1:v–vi.Google Scholar

26. Chalmers, , Institutes, 1: xi–xii.Google Scholar

27. Ibid., p. xiii.

28. Ibid., p. x.

29. Chalmers writes: “Such is the natural theism that more or less prevails throughout the world—a certain sense of God and of His law; and, along with this, as its unavoidable accompaniment, in all various degrees of strength and sensibility, a certain sense of guilt. For inseparable from their feeling of a law must be the feeling with all men of their distance and deficiency therefrom. Their own consciousness will tell how short, nay how contrary they are, from the standard and rule of their own consciences; and by their disobedience to the voice of the monitor within, will they estimate the measure of their disobedience to the counterpart voice of the Divinity above them. It is thus that Nature's sense of a God is so generally, we could even say so universally, followed up by Nature's fear of an Avenger; for she is wholly a stranger to that perverse and artificial sophistry which would sink the justice or authority of the Sovereign in the mere fondness of an indulgent parent; and so the theology of conscience, or which is the same thing, of humanity at large, is in all nations the theology of fear.” Ibid., p. 151.

30. Chalmers, , On Natural Theology, 1:vii.Google Scholar

31. Chalmers, , Institutes, 1:x.Google Scholar

32. Ibid., p. 388.

33. Pascal, Blaise, Thoughts, Harvard Classics Series (New York, 1910), Number 194, p. 73.Google Scholar

34. Chalmers, , Institutes, 1: xx.Google Scholar

35. Ibid.

36. Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics, 4 vols. (Edinburgh, 1960), vol. 1, pt. 1, p. 39.Google Scholar

37. Chalmers, , Prelections, p. 176.Google Scholar

38. Ibid., p. 175.

39. Chalmers, , Institutes, 1: xix.Google Scholar

40. Henderson, G. D., The Burning Bush: Studies in Scottish Church History (Edinburgh, 1957), p. 195.Google Scholar

41. Rice, , “Natural Theology and the Scottish Philosophy in the Thought of Thomas Chalmers,” pp. 23–46.Google Scholar

42. Dillenberger, , Contours, p. 54.Google Scholar