In the second part of his essay, Richard Burnett follows Bonhoeffer from London to Finkenwalde and on to his warnings about American Christianity, then asks what the visible church owes the world today.
Bonhoeffer was not always bold. In autumn 1933 he fled to London, weary and anxious, and Karl Barth answered with a sharp letter. Richard Burnett asks what that exchange teaches about finding courage to stand.
Why did Constantine summon the bishops to Nicaea, and how did the church remember the moment afterward? Andrews traces the council through the eyes of Eusebius and Theodoret, the historians who first preserved its witness for the centuries that followed.
Augustine is loved for the introspective Confessions, but Andrews argues he was never alone. This chapter follows Augustine's circle in Hippo, his theology of friendship, and the sometimes-uncomfortable question it puts to pastors today: who walks with you, and what are you actually accountable to one another for?
American culture treats the past as a burden to leave behind. Small argues the Reformed tradition does the opposite: it carries Calvin and the confessions forward not because they're old, but because they witness to a gospel the present urgently needs to hear.
A hundred years on, Machen's Christianity and Liberalism still outsells most seminary faculties combined. Burnett examines what Machen actually meant by 'liberalism,' how that target has shifted since 1923, and why the book still feels uncomfortably current to readers on both sides of the line he drew.
Bullinger's Decades sat alongside Calvin's Institutes as a foundational statement of Reformed theology in the sixteenth century. Slemmons offers Bullinger's own short summary in English for the first time, a fifty-article distillation of what every Christian should know.
Princeton was founded in 1746 by a group of Presbyterian clergy and laymen bound together by what they called spiritual friendship. Longfield traces that brotherhood through Belcher and Edwards into the eighteenth-century awakening, and asks what kept the network theologically coherent across distance and time.
John Owen has become a stick used to beat people, his name shorthand for whatever kind of Reformed Christian someone wants to oppose. McDonald sets the polemics aside and reads Owen on the beatific vision, recovering a Reformed spirituality that has more to give the present than its caricatures suggest.
When did you last think about the beatific vision? Most Protestants haven't, leaving the topic to Roman Catholics. McDonald argues we lose something important when we cede it: the destination of salvation itself, the unmediated sight of the Triune God in whose face we will at last be at home.
If we could time-travel to first-century Galilee and look for Jesus, what would we find? Edwards uses the thought experiment to trace the leap from a small itinerant Jewish movement to the church Ignatius wrote to seventy years later, and what survived intact in the transition.
Edwards encountered Ernst Lohmeyer's name as a footnote in his doctoral research and was haunted by the cryptic note that a 'higher power' had carried him off to a 'still-unresolved fate.' The piece traces Lohmeyer's witness under three regimes and what his disappearance can teach us.