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The scholastic method was used for nearly two centuries in a largely successful attempt to define and defend the faith of the Reformed churches. The result of that effort was a theology, grounded in the confessions of the church and defended at length against all adversaries. In no small measure, we have the nearly two hundred years of scholastic orthodoxy to thank for the preservation of the barely fifty years of theological achievement that was the Reformation. Without the establishment and successful defense of this confessional orthodoxy in the Reformed churches, the reform efforts of Bucer, Zwingli, Calvin, Bullinger, and their contemporaries would probably have registered in the pages of Western history as an evanescent movement long ago vanished from the face of the earth rather than as the foundation of an institutional form of Christianity.