It is exciting to read the seventeenth century reformed Dutch theologian Peter van Mastricht’s Theoretical-Practical Theology (RHB), the best systematic theology existent in English.  Volume 4 is out, on Christ’s Person, filled with wonderful material.

Three topics in the volume, however, may occasion some head scratching:

(1) His extended treatment of Christ’s human nature as being impersonal,
(2) That human life and the soul only start at around 42 days after conception; and so it was with Christ’s personal union of his natures in the Incarnation; and
(3) That Mary probably remained a perpetual virgin throughout her life.

A new readable but scholarly article by Travis Fentiman, MDiv, introduces and contextualizes these issues and shows:

(1) Mastricht’s view on Christ’s impersonal human nature was largely representative of Reformed Orthodoxy, and is right;
(2) The coherency and plausibility of life starting at around 42 days after conception, philosophically and Scripturally, as was the common view of Mastricht’s era; and it
(3) Documents that Mary’s de facto perpetual virginity as a historical belief, in contrast to Romanism holding it to be formally of the faith itself, was the near-universal view of Protestantism in that era, and the article shows the ethical and Scriptural coherence of this view.

You will learn more about the metaphysics of Christ’s Person than you ever have, and that is just the beginning.  See what you think and may it whet your taste for reading more of Mastricht!

Fentiman, Travis – ‘An Introduction to Peter van Mastricht on Christ’s Human Nature as Non-Personal, the Time of Ensoulment in the Womb & the Perpetual Virginity of Mary’  (RBO, 2024)  21 pp.

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“Give instruction to a wise man, and he will be yet wiser: teach a just man, and he will increase in learning.”

Prov. 9:9