Upcoming Colloquium on Junius’ Legacy

October 22, 2014 | By Jordan Ballor

We are now midway through the Fall 2014 Colloquium series, and next up is a panel on the institute’s namesake, “Franciscus Junius and the Development of the Reformed Tradition.”

The panel will feature comments from David C. Noe, the translator of a new publication from Reformation Heritage Books, A Treatise on True Theology, as well as JI senior fellow Richard A. Muller, who contributed a foreword to the volume. JI director Todd Rester, who is working on a translation of Junius’ On the Observation of the Mosaic Polity, will also speak, as will JI research curator David Sytsma, who will introduce a new digital companion tool developed in conjunction with the RHB publication. Calvin Seminary president emeritus James A. DeJong will serve as a moderator for the panel discussion and presentations.

Join us in the auditorium at Calvin Seminary if you are in the area on Tuesday, November 11, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm for this event, marking the publication of a major new translation of one of the most formative theological texts of the early modern period.

Muller Festschrift Presented at CTS PhD Anniversary Celebration

October 14, 2013 | By Jordan Ballor

Last Wednesday Calvin Theological Seminary held a celebration of the 20th anniversary of the school’s doctoral program. Part of the agenda included a lecture by Richard A. Muller, the P.J. Zondervan Professor of Historical Theology at Calvin, who also serves as senior fellow of the Junius Institute. Dr. Muller and Dr. Ronald Feenstra were two of the key faculty appointments at the founding of the doctoral program, and Dr. Muller’s talk focused on the past, present, and possible futures of the doctoral program.

After Dr. Muller’s lecture, Dr. Feenstra introduced an item for the event that did not appear on the schedule: the presentation of a Festschrift to Dr. Muller on the occasion of his 65th birthday this past weekend. I served as a co-editor of the volume along with Dr. David Sytsma, the research curator at the Junius Institute, and Dr. Jason Zuidema. The three of us spoke about the volume and presented a copy to Dr. Muller at the event, who was taken by surprise at the gift and treated to a standing ovation.

Richard Muller (holding book) stands with the editors of his Festschrift (from left to right): David S. Sytsma, Jordan J. Ballor, and Jason Zuidema

The Festschrift is published by Brill, and appears as no. 170 in the Studies in the History of Christian Traditions series, a series which was founded by Heiko A. Oberman, who was the doctoral supervisor of Dr. Muller’s own supervisor, David Steinmetz of Duke Divinity School. The theme of the volume is captured by the title: Church and School in Early Modern Protestantism: Studies in Honor of Richard A. Muller on the Maturation of a Theological Tradition. As we write in the acknowledgements and dedication:

The scope and scale of Richard Muller’s influence on more than a generation of scholarship of the Reformation and post-Reformation periods is unlikely to be properly appreciated in the near future. But this volume represents an initial attempt toward that end. The size of this collection of essays produced in his honor is merely emblematic of the literature inspired by his helpfully revisionist career. The variety of the essays, both in terms of content as well as in terms of the institutional affiliations of the authors, speaks to the diverse audiences in which Richard’s insights have found positive reception. In attempting to find a unified theme around which to organize this Festschrift, the dynamic relationship between the church and the academy, between the pulpit and the lectern, was chosen, not because it exhausts the implications of Richard’s work, but because it represents one of the key insights of his approach to the sources.

The volume includes work from 55 different contributors, whose variety of institutional affiliation, geographical location, and research interests speaks directly to the significant of Richard Muller’s intellectual legacy. The volume runs in excess of 800 pages, including a 40 page bibliography of Dr. Muller’s work.

You can view photos from the celebration here, and the video of the entire event is available here. A full list of the contributors to the Muller Festschrift in alphabetical order follows, and you can download a table of contents for the volume here:
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“European Calvinism: Church Discipline” at EGO

April 26, 2013 | By Jordan Ballor

I had the privilege of collaborating with Brad Littlejohn on an article that was recently published at EGO | European History Online, a valuable digital reference project intended to be “a transcultural history of Europe on the Internet.”

As we note in our apparatus, we made extensive use of the Post-Reformation Digital Library in locating source material, and it is appropriate again to highlight here the usefulness of that tool for a variety of efforts of secondary scholarship.

Our piece, “European Calvinism: Church Discipline,” argues:

While most Reformed churches shared a stress on the importance of discipline, its implementation varied considerably from region to region, due to varying political circumstances and theological emphases. Such differences, however, did not rise to the level of confessional disagreements, and traditional dichotomies between ecclesiologies modeled on Zürich and Geneva, or two-mark and three-mark ecclesiologies, are often overstated.

Take some time to explore the other entries that are already available, such as “Wittenberg Influences on the Reformation in Scandinavia,” and “Religious Orders as Transnational Networks of the Catholic Church,” which has a section on the development of the Jesuits and the transitions in orders after the Reformation. The item “The Wittenberg Reformation as a Media Event” has particular relevance for the voluminous production of source material from the early modern period, which now forms the basis for research tools like PRDL.