A Center for the Retrieval of Christian Wisdom

A place to grow.

The Davenant House Vision

The Davenant House is a center for the retrieval of Christian wisdom for the renewal and building up of the contemporary church.

About Davenant House

We seek to:

Train Christian undergraduates, grad students, and seminarians in Christian wisdom so that they can be equipped to live as servant leaders within the church and their local communities.

Bring together pastors, church leaders, scholars, grad students, businessmen, and public servants to build networks of friendship and collaboration and explore what it means to pursue Christian wisdom.

Our Themes

Our programs generally focus on one or more of the following five themes:

01.

Bible and Core Dogmatics

Sure, you’ve studied the Bible before, but do you understand the grand narrative of Scripture—creation, fall, redemption, new creation? Do you have a sense for which doctrines are central to Protestant faith and which are peripheral. Gain a firmer grounding in your faith through readings from Martin Luther, John Calvin, Zacharias Ursinus, Al Wolters and Todd Billings.

02.

Principles of Christian Philosophy

Given that God equipped us with the gift of reason and called us to the vocation of knowing the world, how is it that we come to knowledge and what can we know? And how, on the Christian view, can an infinite God relate himself to a finite creation? Explore the answers to these foundational questions through readings from Thomas Aquinas, Richard Hooker, Stephen Clark, and Pierre-Marie Emonet.

03.

A Christian natural philosophy
So many conflicts today center on the relationship between the data of faith and the data of empirical science, but few pause to consider the more fundamental questions of a philosophy of nature that should help orient both faith and science in their approach to the physical world. Christians of the past thought deeply about the meaning of the natural world and how best to understand its workings. Discover this older, richer understanding of the cosmos through readings of Richard Hooker, Stephen Clark, E.A. Burtt and C.S. Lewis.

04.

Ethics and the challenge of modernity
Nowhere has modernity’s assault on the foundations of a Christian understanding of the world been fiercer than in the realm of ethics, and few Christians have been equipped with the tools to resist this assault. Learn how a Christian philosophy of nature anchors a Christian understanding of moral order through readings of Richard Hooker, C.S. Lewis, and Oliver O’Donovan.

05.

politics and faithful citizenship
As the Religious Right politics that has sustained evangelicalism for three decades has crumbled, Christians are more confused than ever about what their faith means in the public square. Gain new perspective through readings of political theologians of the past and present, including Richard Hooker, Johannes Althusius, John Ruskin, Emil Brunner, and Oliver O’Donovan.

A Ministry of

The Davenant Institute

We seek:

  1. To fortify evangelical Christian laypeople with the confidence that orthodox Protestant doctrinal and moral convictions are rationally grounded in reality, history, and Scripture.
  2. To equip evangelical pastors to more effectively counsel and shepherd their flocks by drawing on the insights of classical Protestant moral theology and spirituality.
  3. To aid evangelicals serving in government and public policy to more effectively pursue justice by drawing on and creatively applying the collective wisdom of classical Protestant ethical and political theory.
  4. To show critically-minded evangelical students that the Protestant tradition is vibrant, intellectually compelling, and comprehensively catholic.
  5. To transmit the vibrancy of this heritage by demonstrating that it can be creatively drawn upon to address challenges that are, in some respects, unique to our own era and context.

We achieve these goals by building networks of friendship and collaboration among evangelical scholars committed to Protestant resourcement, publishing resources old and new to address these five needs, and offering training and discipleship for Christians thirsting after wisdom.

Click the button below for more about the broader vision of The Davenant Institute.