Todd Rester, Junius Institute Director

Todd Rester, the director of the Junius Institute, introduces the institute and our new digitization initiative over at the Calvin Seminary website. Click through for the whole thing, but here’s a snippet:

How do you make rare 16th century theological treasures available to students and scholars in the twenty first century? The innovative answer at the Junius Institute for Digital Reformation Research (www.juniusinstitute.org) sounds like the whir of a robot, the click of a camera, and the rustle of 1,500 pages an hour.

The Junius Institute for Digital Reformation Research is a new institute at Calvin Theological Seminary. This institute is dedicated to the preservation and presentation of rare works from the Reformation and post-Reformation era to students and scholars at home and abroad. The hum of these mechanized sounds emanate from an automated book scanner designed by one of the doctoral candidates at Calvin Theological Seminary, Todd Rester, who is also the director of the Junius Institute. “We have an opportunity to present and preserve the rare book holdings of the Hekman Library and the Meeter Center for Calvin Studies in a cost-effective and digital way to make a global impact.”

Todd will be posting more details soon on our proposed plan to digitize a first selection of items from the Hekman Library rare book collection and the holdings of the Meeter Center. But in the meantime, you can also view our digitization project page to see some of the very first works we have digitized.

For more information on the development of the Junius Institute, and ways to support our work, please read this letter from our director.

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:

Yuzo Adhinarta
Willem J. van Asselt
Irena Backus
Jordan J. Ballor
J. Mark Beach
Andreas J. Beck
Joel R. Beeke
Lyle D. Bierma
Raymond A. Blacketer
James E. Bradley
Dariusz M. Bryćko
Amy Nelson Burnett
Emidio Campi
Heber Carlos de Campos Jr.
Kiven S.K. Choy
R. Scott Clark
John V. Fesko
Paul W. Fields
W. Robert Godfrey
Alan W. Gomes
Albert Gootjes
Charles D. Gunnoe Jr.
Aza Goudriaan
Fred P. Hall
Byung Soo Han
Nathan A. Jacobs
Frank A. James III
Martin I. Klauber
Henry M. Knapp
Robert Kolb
Mark J. Larson
Brian J. Lee
Karin Maag
Benjamin T.G. Mayes
Andrew M. McGinnis
Paul Mpindi
Adriaan C. Neele
Godfried Quaedtvlieg
Sebastian Rehnman
Todd Rester
Gregory D. Schuringa
Herman Selderhuis
Donald Sinnema
Keith D. Stanglin
David C. Steinmetz
David S. Sytsma
Yudha Thianto
John L. Thompson
Carl R. Trueman
Theodore G. Van Raalte
Cornelis P. Venema
Timothy J. Wengert
Reita Yazawa
Jeongmo Yoo
Jason Zuidema

A major purpose of the Colloquium is to provide doctoral students “an outlet to present research on their dissertations and to be exposed to research projects in progress from graduates and established scholars.”

The Fall 2013 series opens this Friday with a talk from Jay Collier on the topic, “Troubles after Dort: Augustine, Perseverance, and the Real Story of the ‘Arminian’ Richard Montagu.” Details about time, location, and the rest of the Fall schedule are available at the project page.

20th Anniversary Celebration of the Ph.D. Program

Save Wednesday, October 9, 2013 for the 20th Anniversary Celebration of Calvin Theological Seminary’s Ph.D. Program. There will be a special lecture by Dr. Richard A. Muller from 3:00 – 4:30 p.m. in the Auditorium, and a reception in the atrium from 4:30 – 6:00 p.m. Watch for an official invitation in August 2013.

Dr. Muller is the P.J. Zondervan Professor of Historical Theology at the seminary and a senior fellow with the Junius Institute. Among his many contributions to scholarship and the church, Dr. Muller gave a noteworthy inaugural address at CTS in 1995, “Scholasticism and Orthodoxy in the Reformed Tradition: An Attempt at Definition.”

More details about the program will be posted as they become available.

The first dissertation defense yesterday was by Ted Van Raalte, a contributing editor at the Post-Reformation Digital Library and newly-appointed professor of ecclesiology at the Canadian Reformed Theological Seminary.

In a dissertation titled, “Antoine De Chandieu (1534-1591): L’un des pères de la scholastique réformée?” Van Raalte explored a number of sources, including Chandieu’s Locus de Verbo Dei Scripto, adversus humanas traditiones, theologice et scholastice tractatus (Bern: Le Preux, 1580). Visit Chandieu’s page on PRDL for other easily accessible digital sources by this significant French reformed figure.

Ted Van Raalte defends his dissertation (Calvin Theological Seminary)

Byung Soo Han also defended his dissertation yesterday, “Symphonia Catholica: The Relation of Reformed Orthodox Theology and the Church Fathers in Amandus Polanus (1561-1610).” Han made the case for the significance of new research into the field of Reformed patristics, and his work makes a significant contribution in this regard.

Byung Soo Han defends his dissertation (Calvin Theological Seminary)

The institute is conceived as a forum to promote research into the Reformation and post-Reformation periods, covering the 16th to the 18th centuries, through the use of digital tools, skills, and resources. The Junius Institute will house the Post-Reformation Digital Library (PRDL), an electronic database covering thousands of authors and primary source documents on the development of theology and philosophy in these centuries. With the click of a few buttons, researchers can now download digital files with source material from hundreds of years ago. Before recent large-scale digitization efforts, like those undertaken by Google and many European libraries, access to these kinds of sources had been difficult, costly, or even impossible. In some cases sources were simply lost or unknown.

The PRDL began as a collaborative project to gather a list of digital sources by doctoral students in historical theology in 2008. “It quickly became apparent that there was a great need for a tool to collect and organize the wide array of digital sources available from digitization projects all over the world,” said Todd M. Rester, director of the Junius Institute. A year later the first version of the PRDL website was launched in partnership with the H. Henry Meeter Center for Calvin Studies at Calvin College and Seminary. After launching an expanded and upgraded website in 2011 the group behind the PRDL began to focus on realizing a stable institutional environment for creating and catalyzing similar projects.

“We are investigating ways of applying what we’ve learned and gathered in the process of producing the PRDL to create different ways of disseminating and displaying research,” said David S. Sytsma, who serves as research curator of the Junius Institute. He emphasized the need to continue to expand and develop tools like the PRDL as well as to seek out new projects, including digitization of sources, pursuing collaborative partnerships with libraries and research centers, implementing crowdsourcing strategies, and using mapping and GPS technologies to illustrate the dynamic networks of communication and exchange in the early modern period.

“The PRDL began as a labor of love by a group of like-minded researchers,” Rester said, “but we soon found that the scale of the project and the possibilities for other tools demanded some significant investment of time and resources.” The Junius Institute provides a framework for keeping a project like the PRDL up-to-date as well as for connecting the seminary community more closely with broader scholarly trends. Richard A. Muller, the P.J. Zondervan professor of historical theology at CTS, explains: “Academic research has been revolutionized by the recent progress of digital tools and methods. We see this in a variety of fields, from science and medicine to art and literature. The Junius Institute and projects like PRDL represent the latest developments in the realms of intellectual history and the theology of the early modern period.”

Muller will serve as a senior fellow of the institute, and has witnessed the maturation of the doctoral program during his tenure at the seminary. Muller helped to establish the seminary’s doctoral program in 1992, and the 2012-2013 academic year marks the program’s 20th anniversary. The Junius Institute is one example of the significant positive impact of the doctoral program for the edification of the church as well as the academic world, Muller said.

Other staff members of the Junius Institute include research fellow Albert J. Gootjes of the Netherlands, a doctoral alumnus in historical theology at Calvin Theological Seminary, as well as associate director Jordan J. Ballor, who holds a doctorate from the University of Zurich in Switzerland and is also currently a doctoral candidate at Calvin Seminary. All of the staff members have direct ties to the seminary as faculty and current or former students.

For more information:

Jordan J. Ballor
Associate Director
Junius Institute for Digital Reformation Research of Calvin Theological Seminary
jordan.ballor@juniusinstitute.org

http://www.juniusinstitute.org/
http://www.prdl.org/
http://www.calvinseminary.edu/

About the Junius Institute

The Junius Institute for Digital Reformation Research of Calvin Theological Seminary seeks to further the advancement of studies in early modern (ca. 16th to 18th century) theology and interconnected disciplines through the use of digital research tools, skills, and sources; to foster the presentation, preservation, and public use of primary and secondary sources within the public domain; and to encourage via educational and curricular means the study of the documents themselves, their content, as well as the technical skills required to interpret and analyze these materials.

About Calvin Theological Seminary

Founded in 1876, Calvin Theological Seminary is the oldest denominational ministry and the sole theological seminary of the Christian Reformed Church in North America, which is comprised of approximately 250,000 members in over 1,000 congregations across the US and Canada.