A DISREGARDED PAST A DISREGARDED PAST

Since the end of the sixteenth century, Protestant theologians, both Reformed and Lutheran, began to insert at the opening of their systematic treatises “prolegomena” devoted to introductory questions about the object of theology. Structured around the four Aristotelian causes (matter, form, efficient cause, end), these introductory discussions often reproduced the order of the medieval prologues to the commentaries on the Sentences: What is the nature of theology? What is its matter or subject? What are its cause and its end? Beyond the diversity of the answers given to each of the questions treated, these prolegomena raise important issues, which make it possible to revisit, from a perspective generally neglected by modern research, problems as important as those of the continuity between early Reformation and orthodoxies, and of the link between early-modern Protestant theology and the theological tradition of the Middle Ages. As part of the research project A Disregarded Past, supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Institute of Reformation History organizes a conference devoted to these prolegomena on 21-22 April 2022 in Geneva. During two days of study and exchange, the conference will bring together an international group of specialists in the history of Protestant theology of the 16th and 17th centuries.

Click here to download the program.