On June 8, 1554, John Calvin labored, as usual, in haste. “I have no time to write at the moment,” he told Guillaume Farel, “because it is nearly time for my theology lecture, and I have not yet had the opportunity to reflect on what I will say.” [1] This concern is replicated in various […]
Monday, 01 May, 2023 by Zachary Purvis
There is a myth about theology that it is written in open, expansive, even leisured times of quiet reflection. To write a commentary on a book of Scripture, or a treatise on some point of doctrine, or an entire system of theology, or an individual sermon—well, perhaps not a sermon—happens on its own schedule, taking […]
Wednesday, 01 March, 2023 by Zachary Purvis
What hath the Reformation to do with stoves? In 1550, Alsatian Reformer Martin Bucer prepared a gift for the Protestant King of England, Edward VI: his monumental book De regno Christi or Kingdom of Christ. Bucer had much for which to be thankful. He had been exiled from Strasbourg the year before, when various rites […]
Sunday, 01 January, 2023 by Zachary Purvis
Early in the sixteenth century, Thomas Platter traveled with five friends through Switzerland, stopping in a small village en route to St. Gallen to attend the Mass. After Vespers, the early evening service, one of the priests called them heretics because they had come from the city of Zurich, which no longer considered the pope […]
Tuesday, 01 November, 2022 by Zachary Purvis
Specters haunt the history of church committees. Today’s disciplined clerks, as we know them, harken back to yesterday’s unseen scribes. Every reader of ecclesiastical documents and every lover of polity, decency, and good order remains in their debt. For without them, there would be no surviving record of church business. No committee—therefore no associated team […]
Thursday, 01 September, 2022 by Zachary Purvis
In 1823, the brothers Guillaume and Adolphe Monod entered a junk shop in Geneva. A mysterious volume, unusually old and musty, caught their attention. When they examined it closely, the smudged ink inside resolved into letters and the letters into words. The script might have misled other men, but Guillaume and Adolphe came from a […]
Friday, 01 July, 2022 by Zachary Purvis
The best stories come from boats. Tales of threatening gale winds and thousand-pound tunas are never blasé. Yet old fishermen are not on their oath when they reminisce about the weather they fought or the fish they caught in their youth. The annals of early modern Protestantism are also filled with stories—both striking and true—of […]
Monday, 02 May, 2022 by Zachary Purvis
Late in 1538, Martin Luther wrote to his Wittenberg colleague Philip Melanchthon. He had just finished reading Melanchthon’s latest manuscript, On the Authority of the Church and the Writings of the Ancient Fathers, which would be published in 1539. As he thumbed through it, he told Melanchthon that his head swirled with thoughts of Aristotle […]
Tuesday, 01 March, 2022 by Zachary Purvis
The University Library of Groningen in The Netherlands possesses a remarkable book previously owned by Martin Luther: a 1527 edition of the New Testament by Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam. Erasmus’s New Testament, first published in 1516, contained the Greek text, Erasmus’s own translation into Latin, and his technical commentary, which justified the choices he had […]
Saturday, 01 January, 2022 by Zachary Purvis