Welcome
We are delighted to welcome you to The Davenant Institute. Founded to renew Christian wisdom for the contemporary church, our work spans historical scholarship, theological education, and the recovery of the Reformed and evangelical tradition. We seek to build networks of friendship and collaboration across the Protestant world, and to equip pastors, scholars, and lay readers with time-tested resources for life and faith in the modern age.
Through our journals, our courses at Davenant Hall, our publishing imprints, and our gatherings, we hope to provide a deep well of Protestant intellectual life: one that draws from the great reformers and the broad catholic tradition they recovered. We are glad you are here, and we hope you will find resources that nourish both mind and heart.
About Davenant
Mission Statement
The Davenant Institute retrieves the wisdom of classical Protestant Christianity for the renewal of the contemporary church.
Motto
Renewing Christian Wisdom for the Church
Vision Statement
The Davenant Institute envisions a renewed church whose doctrine, worship, learning, and public life are ordered by the Word of God, integrating Word and world for the faithful pursuit of truth and the common good.
Our Story
The Davenant Institute’s first conference was held about six months before the organization formally existed. Born from online fellowship, Davenant brought together young men and women from Evangelical (mostly Reformed) backgrounds who were reckoning with the challenge of ideas, new and old. Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, political dissonance, philosophical reactions, and doctrinal amnesia; these were just some of the conversations that forged an army of friends.
An email list launched a conference, which developed into a Trust and eventually became an Institute. We wanted better answers, as well as better questions. We wanted to know what our intellectual forebears knew so that we could apply that wisdom in new ways to the real world around us. We wanted to learn how rightly to be who we were, and to foster real relationships along the way.
The group that would become the Davenant Institute held its first conference in the summer of 2013. Delightfully named the Convivium Calvinisticum, this somewhat improvised gathering in the Blue Ridge Mountains north of Greenville, SC, brought together academics, pastors, and theologically inclined lay professionals in the pursuit of Reformed irenicism. Distinct from mere ecumenism, irenic theology seeks peace through reasoned discourse, including spirited debate. The conference was marked by lecture and discussion, but also by worship, singing, and camaraderie. Fellowship, understood in its fullest sense, was integral to the event. Something distinctive was taking shape, and plans were soon laid for a more formal organization. From these beginnings emerged the Davenant Institute. More than a decade later, that work continues.
The name itself captures something of the spirit of the endeavor. Largely unknown to American audiences, John Davenant was a seventeenth-century English theologian and bishop, The Lady Margaret’s Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, and a delegate to the Synod of Dort. His theological style exemplified a broad and comprehensive form of Reformed Anglican thought, a model of the irenicism the Institute seeks to cultivate. And, it must be admitted, Davenant also had the more suitable surname for an institute than our other favored option, the judicious Mr. Hooker.
Since those early days, the Davenant Institute has grown in both size and scope. We have continued to host conferences, while also expanding into publishing, online learning, and public engagement through books, a journal, podcasts, and courses.
The Davenant Institute exists to renew Christian wisdom for the Church.
We seek to serve the whole people of God: clergy, academics, and lay Christians in their various vocations. Our method embraces retrieval without repristination. We pursue a faithful and living tradition, cultivating both contemplative and active piety within what Francis Schaeffer called “real reality”: the concrete time and place in which the Lord has set us. We invite others to join us in this work of Reformation ressourcement for today’s challenges.
Guiding Principles
The work of the Davenant Institute is shaped not only by its mission, but by enduring principles drawn from the classical Christian and Protestant intellectual tradition. These principles guide our scholarship, publishing, teaching, and life together.
Scholarly Rigor
Our work is grounded in close engagement with primary texts, historical context, and the longstanding debates that have shaped Christian theology and the Western intellectual tradition. Scholarly rigor resists both reductionism and novelty for its own sake, and honors the accumulated wisdom of the church. It reflects the conviction that the present can only be understood—and faithfully addressed—through patient attention to the past.
Friendship
We affirm the necessity of community for intellectual life. Our work is sustained by the conviction that truth is best sought in conversation with others. Friendship, in the classical sense, is not merely cooperation or professional collaboration, but a shared pursuit of truth ordered toward the good of the church. Such friendship requires candor, trust, patience, and charity—virtues that make genuine inquiry possible across differences of discipline, temperament, political judgment, and confessional nuance.
Wisdom
We seek to cultivate wisdom received from God through His Spirit, and not from the spirit of the age. This means patiently hearing the wisdom of the past on its own terms, rather than merely to serve current purposes; and ordering our quest for wisdom to what God has freely given, not status, power, or esteem. Our aim is to know, love, and communicate truth, and to promote a culture of persuasion and gracious, reasoned discourse in all of our public engagements.