The Reformation is usually remembered as a dispute over conclusions: whether indulgences could shorten purgatory, whether the Mass was a sacrifice, whether a sinner is justified by faith alone. Those were the battlefields, but they were not the root of the war. Every one of those conclusions grew out of a way of seeing God, the world, and the knowing mind. The medieval church had built that way of seeing by joining the Bible to the Greek philosophers. John Frame describes medieval scholasticism as precisely that, “a synthesis between the Bible, Plato, and Aristotle.”¹ The Renaissance scholars who came just before the Reformers recovered the ancient texts, Scripture among them, yet, as Frame observes, “none of them (until the Reformation…) challenged philosophical and cultural assumptions with the worldview of the Bible.”²

The Reformers did. They “did not consider themselves philosophers,” Frame writes, “but what they taught was extremely significant for philosophy. They presented alternatives in metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics that had not been seriously considered by the previous philosophical communities.”³ Luther’s God was not the nameless One of the Neoplatonists but the personal King before whom a sinner must be forgiven, and in his hands grace ceased to be “an impersonal, metaphysical substance that trickles down to people through the sacraments” and became again the free favor of a Father.⁴ Calvin opened the Institutes not with proofs for the existence of God but with the knowledge of God and of ourselves, a knowledge that “does not proceed through rational demonstration, as in Aquinas, but through repentance and faith.”⁵ In this, Frame concludes, Calvin broke sharply with medieval and Renaissance thought alike, for “these previous movements all made some compromises with the doctrine of intellectual autonomy.”⁶

Cornelius Van Til pressed the point further. Because “Reformed theology has a distinctive doctrine of Scripture,” he argued, it must also have “an equally distinctive doctrine of natural revelation”: the Bible does not merely add a few articles to what unaided reason already knows, but tells us what nature is and how it must be read.⁷ Rome, by contrast, had “undertaken the task of harmonizing Aristotle’s philosophic method with the Christian notion of God,” so that Scripture and nature alike were finally made subordinate to the church's voice. Or, in the words of Van Til, to “the voice of Aristotle speaking through the Pope.”⁸ Greg Bahnsen, one of Van Til’s ablest students, drew out the principle beneath the whole conflict: “As a matter of fact, no man is without presuppositional commitments. As a matter of philosophical necessity, no man can be without presuppositional commitments. And as a matter of Scriptural teaching, no man ought to be without presuppositional commitments.”⁹ When Luther refused at Worms to recant unless convinced by Scripture, he was not trading one conclusion for another. He was changing the starting point. It was a worldview issue.

That is why this part of the site is organized around worldview rather than doctrine alone. The pages below take up five questions every worldview must answer — about truth, God, man, redemption, and purpose — and trace how the Reformers answered each from Scripture rather than from the inherited synthesis of a medieval mindset. Their aim, and ours, is the apostle’s: to take “every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5).

The Church Next: World Impact