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The Faith Received Beta

The Christian tradition is
the Christian’s inheritance.

The Faith Received gathers the creeds, confessions, and classic works of the Christian tradition into a single library, designed to be publicly available, practically usable, and beautifully readable.

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Where to start

Read

Find any work in the library by name.

The library →

Scripture

A whole Bible commentary using historic primary sources.

The index →

Topics

What the church has said on every major topic.

The index →

Research Members

Search everything and keep what you find.

The tools →

Devotional

The tradition was written to be read.

The church wrote for use rather than for the archive. Treatises and commentaries, catechisms and confessions, disputations, sermons and prayers, all of it set down for people who needed to know what to believe and how to say it. Most of it has been out of reach: untranslated, out of print, or shelved in libraries you cannot walk into. It is here now. Read it a page at a time.

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30,748Works
2.1MPages
13,167English translations
FreeEvery page

Who The Faith Received Is For

Laity

Have the creeds, catechisms, confessions, and riches of church history always in your pocket. Reference, memorize, and explore the great Christian tradition.

Pastors

Prepare your sermons and counsel your people with the width and depth of historical Christian thought.

Academics

Explore a vast library of primary theological sources across the Christian traditions, most of which are now in English for the first time.

In the collection

The whole church

c. 2nd–4th Century

The Apostles’ Creed

The ancient baptismal confession of the Christian faith in three articles.

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The whole church

325 / 381 AD

The Nicene Creed

The definitive creed of the universal church on the Trinity and incarnation.

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Reformed

1563

The Heidelberg Catechism

129 questions and answers for the Christian life, organized into 52 Lord’s Days.

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Reformed

1647

Westminster Shorter Catechism

107 questions and answers teaching the essentials of Reformed Christian doctrine.

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The early church

c. 50–120 AD

The Didache

16 chapters of early Christian teaching on ethics, worship, and church life.

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Athanasius

c. 318 AD

On the Incarnation

Athanasius’ classic defense of the Incarnation, why the eternal Word took flesh to restore fallen humanity and conquer death.

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Augustine of Hippo

c. 397–400 AD

Confessions

Augustine’s autobiographical meditation on sin, grace, memory, and time. The first great Western autobiography.

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Thomas à Kempis

c. 1418–1427

The Imitation of Christ

The most widely read devotional work after the Bible, a guide to the interior life of prayer, humility, and union with God.

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Jonathan Edwards

1722–1723

Resolutions

70 personal resolutions for holy living, written between ages 18 and 20.

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John Calvin

1536 / 1559

Institutes of the Christian Religion

The foundational work of Reformed systematic theology, covering God, Scripture, Christ, salvation, and the Church across four books.

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Stephen Charnock

1682

The Existence and Attributes of God

A comprehensive Puritan treatise on the divine perfections. Fourteen discourses exploring God’s existence, eternity, immutability, omnipresence, and other attributes.

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Reformed

1561

The Belgic Confession

37 articles of faith confessing the core doctrines of the Christian faith.

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Browse the whole library →

Study

Over a million pages unlocked for the first time.

This theology has sat in folio in a handful of research libraries where only a few specialists could read it. The English now runs beside the Latin with the scanned page beside both.

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The collections

Creeds, Confessions, & Catechisms

260 documents

The confessional record from the second century to the twentieth. The conciliar acts sit alongside it.

Nicaea · Chalcedon · Augsburg · Trent · Westminster

Patrologia Graeca

2,976 works

Migne’s Greek fathers, the Apostolic Fathers to the fall of Constantinople.

John Chrysostom · Origen · Athanasius · Basil the Great · Gregory of Nazianzus

Patrologia Latina

8,967 works

Migne’s Latin fathers and medievals, Tertullian to Innocent III.

Augustine · Jerome · Ambrose · Bernard of Clairvaux · Peter Damian

 Patrologia
Orientalis

Patrologia Orientalis

400 works

The Christian East: Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Ethiopic and Arabic.

Severus of Antioch · Philoxenus of Mabbug · Jacob of Edessa · Bar Hebraeus · Mark of Ephesus

The Latin Library

2,383 works

Scholastic and reformation divinity in Latin with English alongside.

Thomas Aquinas · Martin Luther · John Calvin · Duns Scotus · Francisco Suárez

Early English Books

15,569 works

Nearly everything printed in English before 1700, sermons and controversy alike.

John Owen · Richard Baxter · John Bunyan · William Perkins · Richard Hooker

Browse Full Library

Everything in the library

Free during the beta

Get the most from The Faith Received.

Ask the library a question and read a cited answer. Search nineteen thousand works by meaning rather than by word. Set two authors against each other, keep what you find, and write from it. Every one of these is free while the beta runs. All it takes is an account.

  • AskA question answered from the corpus. Every page it drew on is cited inline.
  • Power SearchSearch by meaning rather than by word, across every collection.
  • CompareTwo to four authors on one topic, side by side, grouped by the work.
  • Latin word formsOne search across every inflection of a word.
  • ConstellationsThe passages that stand behind a passage. Share the set as a link.
  • The notebookKeep a passage, write a note on it, and gather passages into collections.
  • DeskWrite with what you have kept beside you, citations already attached.

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Beta

We are actively working on The Faith Received. We expect there are bugs. If you find one, please tell us so we can make it better.

Our Commitment to Transparency

Artificial intelligence was used to translate many of these works. We believe trust comes through transparency. We are committed to always disclosing when artificial intelligence was used, and to continuing to improve these translations over time.

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