About The Faith Received

What is The Faith Received?

The Faith Received is a new platform uniting the texts of Christian theology across times, places, and traditions to be read, studied, and shared.

We want to make the full extent of two millennia of Christian thought available to all Christians.

Thousands of these works have long been available only to highly specialized readers. The volumes of the Latin Fathers, for example, have gathered dust in a handful of university libraries, while the theologians who wrote the Reformed confessions relied on texts that most Christians could not access. Now those works are here for you to read.

The Faith Received is for the pastor, the layman, the student, and the scholar. We want to help a new generation of Christians encounter their theological inheritance.

The library draws on the definitive collections of the Latin and Greek Fathers published by Jacques-Paul Migne, alongside the Eastern Christian writings gathered by René Graffin and François Nau. Alongside the Church Fathers is a curated collection of medieval, Reformed, Roman Catholic, and Lutheran theology. From Scotus to Suárez, Calvin to Calov, Chemnitz to Le Blanc, these authors are chosen for their importance in shaping the theological conversation we inherit today.

Bringing these traditions into a common place of study allows readers to understand their relationships more fully. We want Christians to know their own traditions more deeply and to encounter other traditions through their writings.

Why did we make The Faith Received?

Some of these works are familiar to us. Augustine’s Confessions, Calvin’s Institutes, Aquinas’s Summa theologiae, and Luther’s On the Bondage of the Will come to mind. However, there are many works, such as disputation sets, theological courses, and moral examinations, that remain unfamiliar even to many seminary graduates and scholars.

Abraham Calov was a major voice of Lutheran orthodoxy. Gisbertus Voetius helped shape generations of Dutch Reformed theology. The Salmanticenses produced one of the great bodies of Catholic scholastic theology. Anthony Tuckney helped shape the Westminster Larger Catechism, yet his Praelectiones theologicae has remained inaccessible to generations of readers. Christians are influenced by these authors throughout their education without ever having the opportunity to read them at length.

These gaps have many causes. Latin has become less widely taught. Translation requires specialized labor and funding. Publishers must curate whom they can bring to market. As a result, theological education suffers by compressing the tradition through a small selection of its authors and works.

Unfortunately, the authors we cannot read become increasingly remote, and a tradition can become unfamiliar even to its own heirs.

Translation can change that. The renewed English reception of Herman Bavinck stemmed in large part from the new English translation of his Reformed Dogmatics.

We hope to make that same kind of encounter possible across a much wider body of Christian theology. Works that have long remained beyond the reach of most readers are now available for study, teaching, and reflection.

Our hope is a renewed culture of theological learning that enriches all traditions and invites them to drink from the deep wells of tradition.

How did we make The Faith Received?

The texts were either sourced from publicly available Latin and Greek repositories or transcribed from facsimiles page by page. The texts were then translated by an array of machine learning models fine-tuned for translation, and then underwent a series of cleanups to align the source language, the English, and the facsimile.

The majority of these texts engage in technical language, which allows for easier conceptual clarity in translation.

The decision to combine the English translation with the source language demonstrates the advantage of a digitally native text that can continually improve in quality.

Moreover, all texts were mined for theological positions, Scripture references, author connections, and more, which forms the bedrock of TFR’s Ask feature. While we do not view chatbots as a sufficient substitute for theological discipleship, we do see value in creating a natural language interface for asking complex theological questions to enable creative and ambitious paths to wander.

Stiven Peter

Stiven Peter is an M.Div student at Reformed Theological Seminary-NYC. Previously, he graduated from the University of Chicago with a double major in economics and religious studies. He currently lives in NYC.

There have been a number of historic Christian works that have been hugely helpful and influential in my life, especially as I came out of a prolonged season of doubt and deconstruction. Obviously the Apostles and Nicene creeds are part of that. But so are works like Athanasius’s On the Incarnation, Irenaeus’s Against Heresies, Augustine’s Confessions, Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy, Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ, and selections from Calvin’s Institutes. Other works like The Didache, The Letter to Diognetus, The Heidelberg Catechism, and the Book of Common Prayer have helped root me in something substantial when my faith was still looking for ground to stand on.

After a while, I had the recurring wish that I could carry all of these works around with me in my pocket. They are the reference points in my mind for so many things and yet I could never pull them up when I wanted to actually reference them. Some of these works do exist elsewhere, but they weren’t easy to find, helpful to use, or beautiful to read.

So I decided to do something about it. In 2023, I had the idea for The Faith Received. I bought the domain name and started putting some of these works on a simple website. I never told anyone about it. It was just for me with a glimmer of hope that one day it might be something for others too. But for three years, the site sat dormant and unused.

Until April of 2026 when I began redesigning the Mere Orthodoxy website. It occurred to me that I could use all of the same tools I was using for Mere Orthodoxy to finally create The Faith Received and make it as good as I thought it deserved to be. I also realized that a project like this might fit perfectly with Mere Orthodoxy’s mission of bringing the best of the church’s thinking to bear on our present day. I brought the idea to Mark and Jake and they agreed that it fit. So we decided to start working on it after the new website launched.

I had a basic prototype working when I got a call from one of Mere Orthodoxy’s contributors, Stiven Peter. Stiven told me that he had just spent a few months using artificial intelligence to translate hundreds of primary source works from church history into English for the very first time and wanted to know if Mere Orthodoxy wanted to publish them. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I told Stiven he had to see what I was working on. I showed him The Faith Received and we both realized these were the same project. We needed to add as many works from the history of the church to The Faith Received as possible.

From then on, Stiven worked on translating thousands of works and thinking through the features that would be the most helpful for pastors, academics, and anyone who is trying to find their place in the faith. I worked on making The Faith Received as beautiful and usable of a platform as I possibly could, making it a place where people would actually want to dive into this library and have a great experience doing it.

This is the website I wish I had when I was younger. When I had doubts and felt alone in my faith, I wish I could have found myself surrounded by the witness of the saints who had gone before me and passed down the faith to be received. Some of it was simply inaccessible or nearly unreadable. Some of it had never even been translated to our language before.

All of that has changed.

The Faith Received is built to make these works of historic Christian theology publicly accessible, practically usable, and beautifully readable. It stands as the theological leg of Mere Orthodoxy’s stool and our hope is that it serves our generation and generations to come.

Ian Harber

Ian Harber is the Director of Communications and Marketing for Mere Orthodoxy. He is the author of the book, Walking Through Deconstruction: How To Be A Companion In A Crisis Of Faith (IVP '25). He has written for The Gospel Coalition, Mere Orthodoxy, RELEVANT, and more. Ian lives in Denton, TX with his wife and two sons.

When I was growing up in a fundamentalist church, we had a simple way of thinking about church life and Christian theology: In practice, we related to the faith the way a surveyor relates to the boundaries between counties. If you drive about 30 minutes from my home in Lincoln, you’ll pass a sign welcoming you to Saunders County. That’s how all our states are split up in the US, of course: The states are chopped up into small geographic regions called counties and at all times you’re either in one county or another. It is not possible to be a little bit in Lancaster County and a little bit in Saunders County. This is how we approached the Christian life at my church growing up.

On every imaginable theological position we took as a church, that position simply was Christianity. Anything that wasn’t that position, was not. We were the Christian county, so to speak, and everything that disagreed with us was plainly from some other not-Christian county. So, for example, it was quite common to speak of both Reformed Christians and Roman Catholic Christians as non-Christians. Indeed, it sometimes veered toward the plainly absurd: A former seminary professor of our pastor used the phrase “half-born” to describe professing Christians who did not believe in a young earth and seven 24-hour day creation account. Of course, given that it is not actually possible to be “half” born, this was just a particularly bizarre way of saying “not really Christian.”

The trouble here is you can’t sustain this sort of thing with much honesty. You definitely can’t sustain it once you start reading historic Christian theology. But even just the Bible alone is enough to refute it. After all it was St Paul–nobody’s idea of a squish–who said that if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. I remember the first time I read that verse after I started to question fundamentalism. It messed with my head. By that time I had known enough Christians from other churches to know that they all, even the Catholics!, professed with their mouths that Jesus was Lord and believed that God raised him from the dead. So what then? Were they Christians? Paul would say “yes,” seemingly. So why didn’t we? I didn’t have an answer to that.

Eventually I had to leave that church and I found my way, for a short time, to broader evangelicalism. The sort of County Christianity I knew as a child was nowhere to be found here. But what I did find wasn’t especially helpful either: Instead of counties, we seemed to have frontiers: we had no history, no infrastructure, no boundaries, save those asserted by the individual leadership of individual churches.

If County Christianity offered a certain degree of clarity, but at the cost of honesty and charity, then the Frontier Christianity offered open possibilities and energy, but at the expense of clarity and fidelity. It took only about 12 months for me, an intellectually engaged and curious young adult, to start asking questions that no one at the church seemed able to answer. So I left. The County Christianity couldn’t engage history or questions with any integrity. But the Frontier Christianity seemed unable to engage history or questions either, unless you approached them in the highly limited and quixotic way your particular congregation did—and even then it may not be sufficient.

I needed something different.

My guess is if you’re reading this you probably understand that struggle. You recognize that people and history and theology and church life are all far too complex for the trite answers of fundamentalism. But when you have gone in search of depth, clarity, and seriousness in broader evangelicalism you have too often found faddishness, triviality, and a very tribal mode of intellectual life that consists largely of amassing a small set of clearly labeled boxes sorted by worldview into which you can place the ideas you encounter as you go about your life.

At Mere Orthodoxy we have always tried to offer something distinct from either the County or the Frontier. We have offered our readers something more like a city–the messy and complicated and beautiful thing that is Christian intellectual history down through the ages. There are buildings here of varying degrees of soundness and beauty and age. There are also real boundaries, but also a lot of gradation: after all, cities don’t really have boundaries in the way a county does, though they do have limits. We know Bloomington MN is not part of New York City, for example. But it is part of the Twin Cities, even if it is not named “St Paul” or “Minneapolis.” There are less explored parts of town too as well as neighborhoods ripe for development and new life. Much of our work could be thought of as trying to help Christians, particularly Protestant Christians, recognize that the church is a city, not a county or a frontier, that it is their city, and that within it there is both clarity and rigor as well as room to breathe and explore and enjoy the common life you share with your brothers and sisters in Christ.

Introducing The Faith Received

While that has always been our heart at Mere Orthodoxy, our work has traditionally consisted of commentary around the news of the day, books old and new, and the many theological and cultural debates Christians have always had.

That began to change this past August with the addition of “The Daily Liturgy” to our podcast network: Now in addition to commentary, we have an aid in piety and discipleship that can help you begin or end your day with prayer and scripture. But our plan was never to stop there. Rather, we want to build an online hub to aid churches, other Christian groups, and individual Christian believers in comprehensive Christian formation–social, spiritual, and intellectual. Today is the next step in that work.

The Faith Received is a collection of historic creeds, confessions, catechisms, theological works, and biblical commentaries now freely available to all Mere Orthodoxy readers. We have built TFR to be publicly available, practically usable, and beautifully readable.

You can read the introductory essays by TFR principal architects Stiven Peter and Ian Harber to learn more about the project itself. For my purposes here, I want to briefly come back to that city I mentioned above. I think the city has seen better days in many ways. Certainly there are lots of beautiful old buildings now largely forgotten or abandoned. TFR is something like a thorough account of the city’s history: historic photos, blueprints, phonebooks, and all the rest. If you want to work for renewal, to remember the glories that have existed in the past and could exist again… well, this is for you. We want The Faith Received to help you see more clearly what the city has been, and what your inheritance as a member of that city is.

We cannot simply repristinate the city that was, of course. The reality of sin as well as our own finitude means that will never happen. But we can receive our inheritance with gratitude and seek to live into it and improve upon it. That is the goal of this project. Dive into the texts. Ask your questions. Learn. Think. Probe. And do so with a sense of freedom and joy.

You don’t need to police every boundary, but you also don’t need to ignore history altogether. History certainly isn’t bunk, but neither is it a straitjacket. You can receive it, learn from it, and commend it to others. Be “untroubled in your seeking” as Joe Pug once put it in a favorite song of mine. And, with the aid of your fathers and mothers in the faith, take your learning into the world and better radiate the love of God to your neighbor.

Does this contradict your other policies regarding generative artificial intelligence?

I imagine some of you will have that question, especially given that we only just published a writer’s covenant that placed some significant limits on how we expect our writers to use generative AI. I want to address that here, briefly, though we’ll have more on this in the months to come. There are a few points that I want to make regarding our use of AI to translate many of these texts as well as the Ask feature you’ll find inside TFR.

First, let’s talk about the research tools in The Faith Received. As we noted in our writer covenant, we have never had a policy of banning the use of AI for research purposes. Indeed, there is no point in doing so since the only way to fully erase AI from a writer’s research work these days is to give up digital tools altogether, given that even the search engines we have been using for 20 plus years are now largely powered by large language models.

In that case, the best way to think about the research tools in The Faith Received, including the Ask feature, is that it is roughly equivalent to using an LLM for search–which if you use Google you are already doing. The only difference is that the TFR Ask has an extremely defined data set–it doesn’t search the internet as a whole, but only the texts that are part of The Faith Received. This makes it more limited in most ways, but far more powerful in some particularly valuable ways for our readers.

Second, again as we said there, research is one thing, but the work of making arguments and structuring sentences and paragraphs is another. The latter is essentially human work. So the point here is not that you can outsource your theological formation to a machine. Rather, you can use the research tools provided in TFR to help deepen your own theological knowledge and understanding so that you can then turn around and convey the truths you have learned in your own words to others, either in writing or in conversation.

In any case, our testing has found that all text generated by the TFR Ask feature registers as AI generated when tested in Pangram. So if someone submitted a piece to us that was “written” by the Ask feature, we would be able to recognize it very easily both because Nadya and I are getting much better at recognizing LLM copy and because our testing tools would tell us. Anyone else who has concerns along these lines can also use the same tools we can to root out the use of LLM-generated copy in text purported to be human written.

But what about AI translations?

I can anticipate a skeptical reader replying here by saying that if the work of making arguments and structuring essays is human work, then surely so is the work of translation. I respect the argument and it is the one I have wrestled with the most as we have worked on this project. That said, there are a few factors that led me to think this is still a worthwhile endeavor.

First point: The good enjoyed by the translator of a text and the good enjoyed by the reader of a translated text are distinct things. (While one could make a similar argument about the work of a writer and the work of a reader more generally, I do think it matters that we are talking here about translation, not writing more generally. Text wholly generated from AI is distinct from human-written text that is then translated into another language with the aid of AI.) The benefit I have taken from reading Bavinck in English, for example, is thanks to the particular work done by John Bolt and others who have translated the Dutch master. But there is nothing about my experience as a person reading Bavinck in translation that is uniquely enriched by the fact that John Bolt translated it rather than someone else. The pleasure he felt while translating is different from the pleasure I felt while reading in English. Both are significant, of course, but they are distinct. As a reader, my experience is that I am encountering Bavinck, via the mediation of Bolt. I am grateful for Dr Bolt’s labors. But the core person in my encounter here is Bavinck, not Bolt. That is the whole point of translation of such works, I think: for the translator to remain in the background and the words of the original author to be foregrounded. AI translations do not compromise that basic encounter, I think: When I read Polanus in English via The Faith Received I am encountering his words.

Incidentally, I think many of us have had experiences of relating to works in a language we do not know in a relatively pragmatic way. 30 years ago I could have, theoretically, set out to use other available translation tools, such as they were, to translate Bavinck’s Dutch into English. Indeed, when I was attempting to learn German this is more or less what I did with certain texts we read in class: I got a German-English dictionary as well as my German textbook, and got to work translating. I did not know German at all; I simply had a couple reference books and was doing the best I could. There were two goods I was pursuing in that work. One was to learn German. The other was simply to render a text I could not read into language that I could through the use of various tools in the absence of a thorough knowledge of the original language.

Any graduate student has had experiences along these lines at times. They do not need to speak French or German fluently; they simply need enough to allow them to understand the text they’re reading, and they relied upon various supplemental aids and tools to help them “unlock” the text. This project fully honors the second of those goods, I think, while relativizing the first in ways admittedly far more extreme than a dual-language dictionary does, but in ways not altogether different.

Second point: One of the arguments Stiven made as he and I discussed this was that both of us could recognize how dramatically certain debates in reformed evangelicalism were changed by the translation of Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics. Well, he said, surely there are other previously untranslated texts that could prove similarly helpful and generative if only they were available to the average English speaker? I found that persuasive.

Even thinking about my own denominational context in the Presbyterian Church in America, I am struck by the fact that the discourse in the PCA often amounts to southern presbyterians behaving as if southern presbyterianism is the only faithful expression of the reformed faith while missional PCA members act as if the tradition is somewhat of a liability in the work of evangelization and therefore must be relativized at certain points. What Bavinck did and what we hope TFR will do is show that both sides are wrong: Theological traditions are far broader than many realize and a closer encounter with the Christian intellectual tradition should make us better, more faithful evangelists, preachers, and theologians. Our theological traditions are treasures, not millstones.

Third point: As a fourth-generation Nebraskan and first-generation college student, I have a strong draw toward egalitarian, democratized approaches to knowledge and learning. When Tyndale was translating the Bible into English, a skeptical Catholic rebuked him, arguing that the common person was not equipped to understand scripture. Tyndale was undaunted and said that if he had his way a common plowboy would know the Bible better than most of the Roman church’s bishops. I have a similar inclination here. This library will not suddenly push college and seminary professors out of a job. It will simply put the texts that a small number of people have been able to read into the hands of a far larger group of people, so that they can read and learn from these texts for themselves. If anything, I hope this will make for better students who can now read primary sources for themselves, rather than relying on secondary sources in order to understand their respective theological traditions.

Fourth point: Because we do care deeply about the integrity of our work and never want to betray the trust of our readers, we have tried to approach this project in the most transparent way possible. You can read our transparency commitment here. Additionally, the reason we are launching this in Beta today is so that prior to the official launch we can have a few months with readers interacting with the texts and the research tools and offering feedback.

I will leave off there for now. But I do expect we will continue to have conversations about the use of AI in intellectual work in the months to come. We have an essay coming from me later this week on the site that offers a more extensive treatment of the question. The upshot, however, is straightforward: We can recognize some uses of AI are obviously wrong, some are obviously OK, and others are complex and require a certain degree of patience and tolerance for one another as we work through the issues together. We can’t promise we’ll always arrive at positions you agree with. But we will do our best to show our work, be honest about what we are and are not doing, and be open to constructive criticism about these issues.

One final note on this: Our goal for The Faith Received is to essentially serve as a trusted guide to the great texts of the faith. That’s why we are building in the way we have. That said, the work that has gone into building this is significant–in terms of time spent working directly on the project and time spent talking about how it needs to be built in order to best serve our readers and preserve their trust. So as with anything, the work of a good guide is not cheap or easily replicated. So if you value what we have built here and want to see us be able to continue doing such work, please give to support the work. We have some big dreams for the years to come, some of which are built directly off the work we are doing in The Faith Received. But we can only do the work if we have the resources needed to support it.

Jake Meador

Jake Meador is the editor-in-chief of Mere Orthodoxy. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Commonweal, First Things, Books & Culture, National Review, Comment, Books & Culture, and Christianity Today. He is a contributing editor with Plough and a contributing writer at the Dispatch. He lives in his hometown of Lincoln, NE with his wife and four children.