Reformed Heritage Study Center (RHSC) is an exciting new online learning platform providing foundational and formational instruction in the Bible, theology, and the liberal arts. Qualified instructors offer personalized college-level courses and other learning experiences from a reliably biblically faithful perspective. Students of all ages from high school to older adults now can have access to transformational class experiences and mentoring relationships otherwise only available in certain expensive Christian college degree programs.
A Study Center
Some decades ago, as I began college, I was searching for a way for my Christian faith to help make sense of the confusing array of ideas and perspectives on offer in the study of history, philosophy, literature, and yes, religion (this was a “Christian” college). Then I discovered the books of Francis Schaeffer, and for the first time really understood that Christianity provided an adequate framework for understanding everything in the world. Schaeffer was a pioneer in this presuppositional worldview analysis, and it was liberating and exciting. Those books had originated as lectures at the Schaeffers’s (Edith as well as Francis) L’Abri study center in Huémoz, Switzerland, and later I was able to study there. The principle of honest cultural engagement which flowed from that comprehensive Christian worldview was on display in the structuring of their study center model.
Subverting the traditional school, it operated as a residential community charging a fraction of the cost of regular college tuition, room and board. Students of all ages would study for half a day, work at practical chores for half a day, and share meals in common where all ideas were discussed. It was energizing to discover that our historic biblical Christian faith indeed gave us “honest answers to honest questions,” as Schaeffer often said.
Today, L’Abri study centers are still flourishing around the world. While Reformed Heritage Study Center is not aiming to replicate the L’Abri model, we do share many of those principles. Chief among them is the goal to make biblical truth and a Christian perspective on all of life available affordably for all kinds of people, apart from the cost and commitment of a regular credit degree program. And with our online platform, we can reach people wherever they are, and however busy they are with work or other study schedules. We do this by delivering classes where live lectures and discussion happen, which are then recorded and archived for later watching or rewatching. Like L’Abri also, we value learning in mentoring relationships and community discussions, and so we add in-person experiences as feasible: For those able to be in Southern California, one-on-one coffee meetups, special events such as museum trips or live plays, and special conferences. And at least annually, immersive travel experiences are planned to Israel (2027), Greece (2028), and the UK (TBD).
The Need
Today we increasingly have a crisis of insufficient Christian intellectual formation, a formation that enables Christians to read their Bibles well, explain and defend their faith, and wisely and sympathetically engage the modern/postmodern world. Even in Reformed churches, our young people are often unable to identify the Scripture passages which undergird our confessions and catechisms. When they consider their future educational and career directions, they often do not understand or even see the relevance of careful Christian thinking about these broader areas of life. If they find their way to an evangelical Christian college, they increasingly find their assumed biblical and theological convictions under assault. Unless they are prepared to meet these challenges, they will withdraw from engagement, or more likely give in to every wind of doctrine.
Meanwhile, the high cost of higher education is not only making the better institutions inaccessible to more families but also making it harder to see any specifically Christian value in it to justify the investment. What is more, the economic pressures are making it more difficult for biblically faithful institutions to survive. If the only reasonable path is community colleges and state schools, and students pursue these for mainly utilitarian purposes, is it likely they will encounter genuine truth, goodness, and beauty in general education courses? And if they do, will they be equipped to respond to the dominating secular anti-Christian framework for these subjects? Even critical thinking itself is under assault in the relativistic postmodern academy.
If higher education is increasingly reduced to the utilitarian, if it is pursued at all, it will become harder to resist the illusions of information technologies, and to mistake such “knowledge” for true wisdom and discernment. High school and college age young adults already typically take YouTube, podcasts, and the social media environment as neutral and even authoritative. The ubiquity of AI answers for everything seems to circumvent the need for discerning judgment (especially when that is more difficult and time consuming) and may even be quenching the desire for learning and creative thinking as God-glorifying activities essential to our discipleship in God’s world.
The rise of classical-Christian schools and classically oriented homeschooling are certainly a countertrend, but the resources in these sectors are not uniformly biblically Christian, and certainly not mainly historically confessionally Reformed. Even many of these students are not finding honest answers to honest questions sufficient to meet all our modern challenges.
Besides young people wondering about the value of college, perhaps taking one or indefinite gap years, students already in secular or evangelical colleges, or having already graduated, may yet see the need for a fuller, richer holistic Christian perspective—if there was a reliably faithful, affordable resource. In fact, this is the need for all Christians of all ages who are (whether they realize it or not) in this world, in this culture.
And what of Christians that discern their callings in graduate studies, especially graduate study for the ministry? The lack of basic but quality biblical and theological training, and discerning appreciation of critical thinking and the liberal arts, will have serious consequences for them as well. The students now heading to seminaries can be woefully unprepared for the necessary academic rigors of their calling.
Reformed Heritage
The long and rich Reformed heritage is the obvious answer to the many ills plaguing our cultural moment. While many may rightfully be wary of competing labels, this label stands for a clear and definite inherited and lived tradition, with a clearly defined content (the Three Forms of Unity and the Westminster Standards). Identifying with this heritage does not require inherited familiarity with its current confessing branches. Just as I did not initially perceive the Reformed theological context of the L’Abri experience, people genuinely searching for biblical truth can acquire it without concern for defending the label.
On the other hand, many from within the confessing Reformed churches can defensively misperceive their current minority status in relation to their rich Reformed heritage. For we do not mean by this label a small sectarian separating branch out of mainstream Protestantism. As Reformed, that is, biblically faithful Christ-centered Christians, we need to reclaim confidence in our mainstream Christian identity in union with the confessing church down through the centuries.
Those articulating the Reformed faith in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—particularly clarifying the authority of Scripture over tradition, justification by grace alone by faith alone in Christ alone, and the purity of the worship of the church—were not intending their confession as a repudiation of the faith of the church down through the centuries. What they stood against was defection and corruption within that church. And so with them we learn from and celebrate the positive achievements of the church Fathers and the medieval scholastics.
In all the subsequent centuries we have the blessings of great teachers and theologians that preserved and advanced the Reformed faith, such as Puritans and Reformed scholastics. In particular in our post-Enlightenment age, we stand on the shoulders of our nineteenth and twentieth century forbears who were able to appreciate common grace goods in modernity, even while standing firmly against all God-denying rationalisms and secularisms (the antithesis). And so we learn from and celebrate the positive achievements of Abraham Kuyper and the Dutch confessing church, and of Old Princeton, as they were carried over into the Westminster seminaries.
As I had learned from Schaeffer, I was privileged to learn in the same Westminster tradition as he had. And besides a clearly articulated Reformed theology for the twentieth and twenty-first century, it upheld a God-given value of human cultural achievements. For the study of the Bible itself, the contributions of modern scholarship for advancing our understanding of its language, history, and literary character are indispensable. But beyond that there are goods to be appreciated to enrich our humanity. Science, literature, and art are not to be dismissed or avoided, nor allowed to reshape our Christian convictions. As J. Gresham Machen said, “Instead of destroying the arts and sciences or being indifferent to them, let us cultivate them with all the enthusiasm of the veriest humanist, but at the same time consecrate them to the service of our God.”1
How then can our Reformed people, with all those Christians genuinely seeking biblical truth and its connection to all of life, discover this rich theological and whole-life tradition? It is not only for the scholars and the elite. It is our heritage, and by it we will grow into the fullness of our humanity in Christ, find our valuable callings in the world, and love our neighbors enough to understand their ideas and actually communicate the difference our faith makes in the world. Again, quoting Machen, at the first convocation address at Westminster Theological Seminary in 1929:
We believe that we shall best serve our fellow Christians, from whatever church they may come, if we set forth not some vague greatest common measure among various creeds, but that great historic faith that has come through Augustine and Calvin to our own Presbyterian church. Glorious is the heritage of the Reformed faith. God grant that it may go forth to new triumphs even in the present time of unbelief!2
Please join us at Reformed Heritage Study Center in this great endeavor! You may still sign up for a Fall course; most are still available. And spread the word!
©Scott Swanson. All Rights Reserved.
Notes
- J. Gresham Machen, “Christianity and Culture,” in Selected Shorter Writings, ed. D.G. Hart (P&R Publishing, 2004), 402.
- Machen, “Westminster Theological Seminary: Its Purpose and Plan,” in Selected Shorter Writings, 191.
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Scott Swanson
As Professor of Biblical and Theological Studies, Dr. Swanson taught at Providence Christian College (Ontario, and then Pasadena, California) for all of its 21 years. He then became co-founder with Prof. Flora Krook of Reformed Heritage Study Center.
After studying Greek, New Testament, and philosophy at Westmont College, Dr. Swanson’s graduate studies included Westminster Theological Seminary (Philadelphia), Faculté Jean Calvin (Aix-en-Provence, France), L’Abri (Huemoz, Switzerland), and the Hebrew University (Jerusalem, Israel), where he lived with his wife Kim for seven years and studied Ancient Semitic Languages. His doctoral degree was earned at the Hebrew Union College—Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, Ohio, in Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament) and the History of its Interpretation. His dissertation was a comparative study of the church Fathers and the Jewish Rabbis in their interpretation of the Old Testament.
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