Confessional policy for sources
How the school chooses its teachers and readings, and how it marks what it uses.
Every source has one role
Each lecture and reading in a course is marked with the role it plays, so a student always knows whether he is hearing the school’s teaching or studying someone else’s.
| Role | What it means |
|---|---|
| Doctrinal | Teaches doctrine as the school’s own teaching. The teacher subscribes to the Westminster Standards or the Three Forms, or is a historic divine of that line. |
| Primary text | Confessions, catechisms, church orders and the works of Reformed divines, read as the tradition’s own voice. |
| History | Narrative or academic history that does not teach doctrine. It may come from a historian outside the tradition, and his affiliation is shown. |
| Source studied | A source outside the tradition, read as an object of study. It is never presented as the school’s position. |
| Comparison | American Presbyterian material used to show where the traditions differ. |
| Supplementary | Optional further listening or reading, under the same rule as doctrinal sources when it teaches doctrine. |
Who may teach doctrine
A source is removed, or moved to the “source studied” role, when its teacher holds or teaches against the standards. That includes Arminianism, neo-orthodox views of Scripture, denial of inerrancy, Federal Vision, the New Perspective on justification, open theism, theistic evolution taught as doctrine, women in church office, continuationism, paedocommunion and sacerdotalism.
For each source the school records the teacher, his church, which standard he subscribes to, and the date the source was checked.
Historians outside the tradition
This is the school’s working policy while it is being finalized.
Some of the best free history of Geneva, Dort and Reformed orthodoxy comes from academic historians. They are used only for history, and only under four limits:
- They narrate events, documents and context. They never teach doctrine or give the course’s judgment of a doctrine.
- Their affiliation is shown on the page.
- They are never the only source for a unit when a confessional teacher covers the same ground.
- Scholarship hostile to the faith, or that treats the confessions as errors to be outgrown, is excluded even as history.
Standing notes
- Material from the Protestant Reformed Churches is used, but never as the only treatment of common grace, the free offer of the gospel or the covenant.
- Teachers who subscribe to the 1788 American text are used freely, except on Westminster chapters 20.4, 23 and 31, where their lectures are marked as comparison.
Free sources
Every required lecture and reading is free to use. Books that must be bought appear only as further reading. The school links to the source; it does not copy material it has no right to host.
Spanish quotations
Every Spanish quotation is marked either as a published Spanish edition or as the school’s working translation, with the original beside it, and as verified or carrying a stated caveat.