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While insisting on the need to separate theology from philosophy, Descartes developed a philosophical theology that was intensely debated in the early modern period. This article asks the question how the receptions of Cartesian philosophy were related to different confessional profiles. Confessional controversies certainly played a role: some feared that Cartesian philosophy was inspired by Jesuits, while others accused it of supporting Calvinism. Descartes’s theory of transubstantiation could never obtain trans-confessional consent. Still, the reactions to Cartesian philosophy reveal significant trans-confessional agreements. Cartesianism, it seems, was only loosely related to confessional specifics. Jansenists and Cocceians apparently had only few specifically theological reasons for espousing Cartesianism. Supporters of Cartesian ideas were found across the confessional spectrum. In a parallel way, critics of Descartes from Roman Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed backgrounds alike made theological objections against Cartesian notions such as doubt, the dualism of thinking and extension, and an indefinitely extended world.

In a doctoral dissertation De recta ratiocinatione (), Gisbert Wessel Duker claimed that "the divinity of Scripture cannot be demonstrated except by reason." During the promotion session at the University of Franeker, the legal scholar Ulrik Huber (-) objected to this statement by reading from a copy of the Institutes he had in hand what John Calvin had written about the necessity of the testimony of the Holy Spirit. This article traces Huber's use of Calvin in various writings published during the ensuing controversy, most notably the De concursu rationis et Sacrae Scripturae (). That Huber used him as an authority is significant because he was a legal scholar, and not a theologian, who appealed to Calvin in support of the need for the Holy Spirit and for humble piety in order to counter tendencies in the (legal) philosophy and theology of his day to grant natural human reason a normative status in religion.

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