The Calvinist International
This paper was originally delivered as a lecture to All Saints Church in Lancaster Pennsylvania on Feb. 18, 2017 as a part of a conference on church history and education. The audio from the entire conference is available here. Like all catechisms, the Heidelberg Catechism has a section dedicated to expounding the Ten Commandments. […]
I’m reading Alan Jacobs’ recent book The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis. I’m more persuaded by some aspects of it, less so by others, and stimulated by all. I likely will not have time to write up a full review, which would in any case probably be longer than […]
One of our ongoing goals here at TCI is to rebut the notion that “Calvinism” or “Reformed Theology” has maintained an antagonistic attitude towards natural revelation, natural philosophy, natural law, and wisdom gleaned from pagan sources. This is certainly true of more recent forms of it, what is sometimes termed “neo-Calvinism,” but it is not […]
In a set of Icones contained in his youthful collection of poems (the Poemata or Iuvenilia, or Poemata Iuvenilia), first published in 1548 before his embracing of the Reformation the following year and reissued in expurgated form several times afterwards, Beza includes the following distich about Vergil, a couplet that remains in later editions of the poems. I post […]
Thedore Beza, in addition to being a theologian, pedagogue, and controversialist, was a delightfully ingenious neo-Latin poet. Below is an elegy (in elegiac couplets, natch) in praise of the Horatian aurea mediocritas (though he doesn’t say anything explicitly about Horace), the golden mean–that old standby of ancient philosophical wisdom. It is thoroughly classical and classicizing; all […]
Consider this an exercise in the the analysis of the evolution of the heroic temper. Lewis and Vergil In his chapter on Vergil in A Preface to Paradise Lost, C.S. Lewis speaks of Aeneas’ “reluctant yet unfaltering search for the abiding city (mansuram urbem)” (emph. orig.). The passage in question comes from the “all-important” Book […]
I’ve written in the past a couple of times about Theodore Beza’s Icones, his bio-hagiographical tributes to several Reformers and forerunners of the Reformation from across Europe (see here on Calvin, here on Hus). Many of his vignettes conclude with a poem. Such is the case for his sketch of Philip Melanchthon, which I have translated […]
In the introduction to Niall Rudd’s Oxford World’s Classics translation of what survives of Cicero’s Republic and Laws, Jonathan Powell and Niall Rudd include a section on natural law, which for Cicero stands above all civil and positive law. There they note that Cicero’s view of natural law rests on other commitments, “certain fundamental beliefs” (xxvii). They […]
Eric Parker passes along this observation from John Calvin: Certain of your poets. He citeth half a verse out of Aratus, not so much for authority’s sake, as that he may make the men of Athens ashamed; for such sayings of the poets came from no other fountain save only from nature and common reason. Neither […]
Pastor Wilson has a helpful post here explaining his own relationship with Van Til, and I thought that, given my distant and recent past, I should do something of the same. Of course, I am a far less significant figure than Pastor Wilson, and my own pilgrimage shouldn’t be seen as all that important in the […]