NOSTER

In my research thus far I discovered a growing gap between the external authority of the Bible and the internal certainty of the believers. Theologically spoken, the relationship between the word of God and the Spirit of God developed along the lines of an object-subject scheme. This interesting development deserves further research. First I will study the development of the relationship between the internal and external sides of faith in Protestant theology in two phases.

• In the writings of the early Reformation the internal work of Spirit that was deemed necessary next to the external preaching of the word of the Gospel.
• In the further development of Protestant theology in the 17th century the focus will be particularly on the doctrine of the divine call (vocatio). In the reformed tradition – contrary to the Lutheran tradition – the call was split into an external and internal vocation. The question for both phases of the protestant tradition is whether the relationship between external and internal prepares its later theological understanding from the object-subject dichotomy.

In the second place, the discussion between reformed orthodoxy and Cartesian philosophy will be examined. This controversy has attracted some scholarly attention. The issue of the starting point of knowledge (principium cognoscendi), however, has not yet been fully dealt with; an intolerable niche, because of the fundamental character of this issue. Orthodox Protestant theology deemed the authority of the Bible as the self-convincing starting-point, while the inner work of the Spirit was deemed necessary for the acceptance of this authority. Descartes, however, chose his starting-point directly in the human subject with his statement: “I think, therefore I am” (ego cogito, ergo sum). This position undermined orthodox theology. The question is whether it was so threatening, exactly because of the subjective tendency in Protestantism.

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