“These are the guys in your footnotes.”  That is a good way to describe “Classic Reformed Theology.” If one peruses a manual Heppe or reads Richard Muller, he will come across names such as Heidegger, Cocceius, and Olevianus.  If he then tries to find English language material on the men, he would have been hard-pressed.  This problem is being remedied by the “Classic Reformed Theology”series.
J. H. Heidegger (1633-1698) ministered in Zurich during the latter end of the Reformed scholastic era. Following “marrow manuals” like the one by Ames, Heidegger works through the key loci in dogmatic theology.  Unlike Ames, at least in this volume, he does not work through the Heidelberg Catechism.  Rather, as the introduction makes clear, he wants to provide youth a reliable and ready-to-use guide for theology, whereas Ames’ work might be better used for sermons or lessons.  There was a certain logic behind “marrow theology”: “In the Renaissance schoolchildren throughout Europe were taught to keep notebook in which they were to record passages from their reading worth saving for memorization and later use” (Ann Blair, The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 65).

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J. B. Aitken | “Concise Marrow of Theology (Heidegger)” | November 9, 2023

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Post authored by:

• Jacob Aitken

  

  Jacob Aitken teaches junior high English in Monroe, LA. He is an elder-elect in the Evangelical Presbyterian Church. He studied at Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, MS and earned his M.A. at Louisiana College.

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