Evangelical Resourcement

Basilica will offer a collection of primary sources, biographical sketches of forgotten doctors and academies, important theological articles, and modern examples of reformed catholic scholarship.

“Up Into”

The two men Basilica regards as specially exemplary, CS Lewis and Francis Schaeffer, both pointed their readers ad fontes, toward the great sources; and not “back” to these, but rather, “up into” them; they both conceived engagement with the works of great Christian teachers as an elevation, not a retrogression. Schaeffer especially tried to correct certain tendencies prevalent among modern evangelicals- individualism, parochialism, ignorance of history- and called his readers to realize their status as heirs of a great tradition.

Unfortunately, many of those who heard that call often didn’t bother to correct that ignorance of history, which Schaeffer himself had diagnosed, before they did so; then, confusing the evangelical faith as such with the meager offerings of much modern evangelicalism, they often left the evangelical faith altogether, thinking that the only fontes deep enough to drink from were ancient and medieval ones, and consequently, any supposedly direct continuations of those- which “continuations” in fact, though, were very often simply unreformed appropriations of earlier patrimony.

But Schaeffer and Lewis both knew better. The Reformation tradition produced writers, deeply rooted in the truths of the ancient and medieval Christendom, who excelled in and advanced all branches of learning, both sacred and mundane; and helped build the world we live in today- for better, but sometimes for the worse too. But, even with respect to the flaws of the Reformation traditions, one has to understand them first in order to judge them and their effect on us now. Part of what we wish to do here is to offer a comprehensive view of the Reformation traditions especially, so that readers who do take the urgings of Lewis and Schaeffer seriously can do so in an informed manner.

We aim to take full recognition of scholarship which breaks free from those conventional categorizations which often obscure the real connections between people and ideas. We strongly admire the work of the Reformed compiler Heppe, the Lutheran compiler Schmid, and the Reformed historian Richard Muller. But, following Lewis and Schaeffer, we are not at all interested in “repristination;” we believe that the old masters are there to help teach and inform a Christian life lived now, and we hope to place them in conversation with more recent teachers.

Although we will focus especially on writers in the Reformed tradition, our principles for inclusion are broadly Reformational, comprehensive and irenic: if a writer has “the root of the matter” in him, and is especially useful either directly or indirectly, we are willing to include him whatever his distinctives or even flaws might be. We may also include works for the illumination they give about their own time in history and the breadth of acceptable positions at such time. We are especially interested in those writers in whose works the unity of wisdom is most patent: whose works reveal a genuinely comprehensive vision of the truth that Jesus is Lord of all things. These writers differ widely, not only on matters of theologoumena and adiaphora, but sometimes on more basic things; even on the question of exactly what defines the scope of those basic things. Nevertheless, if they were not always friends, in hindsight, we think, it can be seen that they were brothers.

This page will be consistently updated.

1st Generation Reformers

Evangelical Centers of Learning

The visible church is always local, and the evangelical clergy were famous for their culture of learning, in which the best traditions of the middle ages and the Renaissance were brought into the service of divine wisdom. So rather than overemphasize abstract categories of affiliation, we think it useful to draw a map, as it were, of the regional centers of learning and their radiant influence, and group significant thinkers around the centers where they taught or whence they derived their primary inspiration. We call these schools after either the academies or the chief cities with which they were associated.

Some of these schools are hardly remembered anymore, or are little known outside their native places or certain small academic and denominational circles; we aim to give special attention to these.

Geneva

Wittenberg

  • Martin Chemnitz
  • David Chytraeus

Heidelberg

Canterbury

The opinion of the Divines of England, the most celebrated in the whole Christian world, is requested on this controversy, as it appears that this might conduce not a little towards confirming the peace of the Reformed Church in France.

-John Davenant


“Fog in Channel: Continent Cut Off”, or so goes the famous and possibly apocryphal British headline, exemplifying the peculiar British view of its relations to Europe. This anecdote has been cited by a recent historian to make the point that there is certainly something foggy about a great deal of early modern British ecclesiastical history written from the late 19th c until just a few years ago. In this case, the continent which gets obscured by that fog is Continental Protestantism, a movement which the English Reformers considered themselves unqualifiedly part of. The historical revisionism of the Oxford Movement, which systematically misread and misrepresented early modern English formulae and theological works in the doomed hopes of finding them closer to the unreformed, found a sort of broad appeal with an insular-minded sensibility present among many popular writers and even academics, who liked the thesis of English exceptionalism even if more or less indifferent to the essential project of the Oxford revisionists. And of course those who sympathized with the Oxford project were more than happy to promote that account of things. The trouble is that it was largely false. The view that the English Church from the accession of Elizabeth I onward was something other than a Reformed church was contested, of course, by those who knew better, from the time of Newman until recently. But the number of those who know better has been increasing, due in part to the remarkable restorative work of historians such as W.J. Torrance Kirby, Nigel Atkinson, and Peter Nockles.

Why should we care? British Christians and members of the Anglican Communion have to, because this is the history of their own congregations. The rest of us should care because the history of the English church,and the works of its great writers, have had an incalculable effect on English-speaking Christians and indeed on English-speaking people altogether. Also, we feel that the English church under Elizabeth and James offers a fascinating example of a very irenic, comprehensive, and cosmopolitan model of Reformed reflection and community; and it is a shame that many Reformed are unaware that writers such as Hooker, Andrewes, and Field were Reformed too. We hope to be of some help in amending this problem. We hope that British evangelicals especially will find this resource very useful as it continues to develop here.

The later history of the English church is profoundly tragic; and the circumstances of the time prevented the development of a strong consensus. But although certain later 17th c British writers have received excessive attention to what seemed to be the possibility of their greater usefulness to the Oxford revisionists, we will soon be posting sketches and essays regarding those so-called “High Churchmen” of the 17th and 18th centuries, as well as the Westminster divines of the Commonwealth period.

English Puritans

Aberdeen

Saumur

The Halle Tradition

  • Johann Arndt
    Primary:
    True Christianity
  • Philip Jakob Spener
  • August Hermann Francke
  • Justus Henning Boehmer
  • Christian Thomasius
  • John Wesley

Slavic Reformation

Other Forgotten Doctors

Irenic writers

The writers who appear in this category could appear in others too, and sometimes we will duplicate the entries for the sake of completeness. They did not necessarily constitute a tightly unified school of opinion, but they were all animated by a spirit of charity and love of unity where unity was possible, and their willingness to stand above faction and the odium theologicum distinguishes them. They were often charged by their contemporaries with “indifferentism” or “syncretism”. We will not excuse their occasional weakness of conception; but to call men who cared for Christ above all things “indifferent” seems the grossest of mistakes. We will include those who not only sought composition of differences in doctrine, but also those who sought for unity in the family of Christian commonwealths, such as Leibniz.

  • Georg Calixtus
  • Rupert Meldenius
  • John and Conrad Bergius
  • Jan Amos Comenius
  • Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski
  • John Dury
  • Richard Baxter
  • William Forbes
  • Daniel Ernst Jablonski
  • Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
  • Hugo Grotius

AMERICA


19th c Writers

The 19th century saw tremendous changes in the Christian regions. The relatively settled effects of the two great revolutions, the American- in some respects a continuation of the British Civil War- and the French, which installed godless nationalism for the first time in European history, had begun to be clear. And Napoleon, who undid much of the extremist character of the French Revolution, also abolished the Holy Roman Empire, which by that time had become largely symbolic, but whose loss was nevertheless felt acutely in the European mind- perhaps all the more so, precisely because it was more a symbol than a political power. The many and divergent opinions which went under the name “Enlightenment” had begun to develop into new and very distinct schools, and throughout the Germanies and England, a response to these began to arise; a response which had some the best aspects of the Enlightenment in its very makeup, and which would be called, in time, Romanticism. Print media became cheaper and more available, and transportation developed new range and power, and advanced financial systems had begun to integrate markets and commerce, all of these things bringing the Western nations into closer interdependence and similarity. Above all, what seems to us to be a fairly constant trait of Christian sages writing in the 19th c is the character of standing contra mundum: they are writing against the age. Thus, although we feel it best to stay away from facile timeline categories and abstract history-of-ideas categories in our arrangement of resourcement materials, for now, we will organize the presentation of the 19th c writers we consider simply by their century, that century with which most of them were so uneasy.

  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
  • Frederick Denison Maurice
  • Friedrich Julius Stahl
  • Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig
  • Soren Kierkegaard
  • Franz Delitzsch
  • William Augustus Muhlenberg
  • Philip Schaff
  • John Williamson Nevin
  • William Shedd
  • Friedrich August Gottreu Tholuck
  • Rudolph Sohm
  • Charles and AA Hodge
  • Abraham Kuyper
  • Herman Bavinck
  • Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield

20th c Writers

  • AA van Ruler
  • Regin Prenter
  • Gustaf Wingren
  • Geerardus Vos
  • Emil Brunner
  • Walter Lowrie
  • KH Miskotte
  • Peter Taylor Forsyth
  • Karl Barth
  • Thomas Torrance
  • R Tudur Jones
  • Bobi Jones
  • Rene de Vismes Williamson
  • George Forrell
  • Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
  • Herman Dooyeweerd
  • James Jordan

Modern Scholars of Special Interest

Even a brief perusal of a great many academic works regarding the Reformation and its consequent traditions will reveal a striking unawareness of the doctrinal principles of the old teachers, since theology, either systematic or historical, has become more and more of an exile from central academia. The result is that the historical depiction of the old writers, and the causes of many past events, is often badly skewed, sometimes beyond recognition.

The scholars listed below are among those whose works can be generally relied on for an accurate, and even profoundly insightful, recounting of the beliefs of the Reformers and the history of the times. We aim to provide helpful summaries of their work, book reviews, and links.

  • Paul Avis
  • W J T Kirby
  • Richard Muller
  • Bryan Spinks
  • F Edward Cranz
  • Harold Berman
  • Nick Thompson
  • Paul Helm
  • Randall Zachman
  • Jaroslav Pelikan
  • Alister McGrath
  • Kenneth Stevenson
  • Oliver O’Donovan
  • Joan Lockwood O’Donovan
  • Iain MacKenzie
  • John Witte
  • Stephen Grabill