23 articles from 18 issues, 1997 to 2024
What makes a Reformed church Reformed? Small begins with Peter DeVries's wry novelistic portrait of a Calvinist boyhood and works toward a serious answer: shared Protestant emphases, yes, but with distinctive accents on Scripture, election, the priesthood of all believers, and worship as covenant response.
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.
Why insist that pastors be trained as scholars? La Montagne separates the Reformed tradition's actual answer from the modern research-university definition that's quietly replaced it, and shows how the original conception still serves congregations better than the institutional one.
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.
John Leith spent his career teaching Reformed theology and rarely tried to summarize it. Republished from a new collection of his writings, this essay is his bold attempt to name what is most basic about the tradition: a theology of the catholic church, anchored in Scripture and confession.
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.
The Reformation was as much a reform of spirituality as of theology. Old shows how Protestants moved devotion out of the cloister and into the workshop, the kitchen, the field, treating the whole of ordinary life as the place where Christians live before God.
Western Christianity is increasingly described as a community in exile. McNutt asks what the Reformed tradition has to teach a displaced church, drawing on a tradition that has known persecution, dispersion, and the long discipline of being a minority before.
B. B. Warfield called Calvin pre-eminently the theologian of the Holy Spirit. Burnett walks through what Calvin actually taught, why Presbyterians have argued about pneumatology ever since, and where the tradition's habits of thought still serve and where they leave gaps.
Working interviews Jennifer McNutt about her book Calvin Meets Voltaire, which traces the Geneva clergy who held the Reformed line through the Enlightenment. The Geneva pastors offer a longer view for any congregational leader feeling outnumbered by the cultural moment.
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