B.H. Carroll’s Pastoral Theology
Southwestern Journal of Theology
Volume 58, No. 2 – Spring 2016
Managing Editor: W. Madison Grace II
Brill’s Series in Church History, Vol. 64. By Albert Gootjes. Leiden, Brill, 2014. 252 pages. Hardcover, $145.00.
Contemporary interest in post-Reformation history and theology has developed at what seems to be an exponential rate in the last few decades. Brill’s Series in Church History is much the catalyst for this, having become something of an academic industry. Albert Gootjes’s Claude Pajon (1626–1685) and the Academy of Saumur: The First Controversy over Grace is but one of the most recent evidences of this.
Goojtes’s work is a carefully researched exposé of Claude Pajon, a hitherto little known and underappreciated seventeenth-century French theologian, and sometime professor of the notoriously controversial academy of Saumur—famous for the propagation of that strain of Reformed thought known as “Hypothetical Universalism.” A theological innovation first developed by the Scottish theologian, John Cameron (1579–1625), later disseminated (and further developed) through his student Moïses Amyraut (1596–1644) and later Pajon, Hypothetical Universalism (and its close cousin, Amyradianism) is roughly the view that Christ dies in some sense for the sins of all humanity, but that the benefits accruing from his death are only applied to God’s elect (a doctrine constructed largely upon the so-called “sufficiency-efficiency” distinction made by the twelfth-century Roman Catholic Archbishop, Peter Lombard.
Gootjes labors with great precision (and what is obviously a herculean archival effort) to show the significance of Pajon’s role in carrying on the theological tradition of the academy at Saumur. Rather than attending the propagation of hypothetical universalism at Saumur, Gootjes fixes his attention on a controversy with which Pajon became entangled around the time of his installment at Saumar, and that followed him, though intermittently, to the end of his life. According to Gootjes, Pajon’s account of the psychology of conversion in the context of Reformed debates about the so-called mediate versus immediate role of the Spirit of God in effecting not only the mind, but the will, of a converted soul raised a great deal of suspicion amongst the wider European Reformed community. Gootjes carefully parses out the highly nuanced positions held by Pajon’s predecessors, Cameron and Amyraut, and most importantly for Gootjtes argument, Paul Testard (1594–1650), who argued that in the conversion of a soul, the Spirit of God works immediately upon the mind (or intellect) to effect the soul’s initial receptivity to the idea of one’s need for conversion, after which the Spirit works only mediately through various means of grace that effect the will, through the mind, that lead the individual to conversion. Pajon’s involvement in the affair and the principal worry of this theological innovation, Gootjes points out, involved several factors, including, but not limited to: the role of Sprit of God in the doctrine of conversion, human moral ability, the medieval philosophical theory of causation, known as concursus, and the pervasive influence of Cartesian thought that had recently emerged on the continent.
Beyond the thoughtfully argued and well-written intellectual biography and its bringing to the fore an important and until now, mischaracterized theologian, the achievement of Gootjes’ work is his bringing to light the philosophical significance of causation for and the influence of Rene Descartes upon the Reformed tradition. Gootjes’ attention to the post-Reformation response to the rise of the ‘new philosophy’ of Cartesianism in particular, a subject that is unto itself a veritable treasure trove of research possibilities and a lacuna of sorts in the contemporary literature.
Those not given to an interest in intellectual biography or the subtleties of historical-polemical theology will likely pass over Gootjes’s work. For those interested in what has recently and increasingly become known as ‘Deviant Calvinism’, Gootjes’s work is an exciting effort to make luminous yet another dark corner of theological history.
