2025 Fall Faculty Lectures

Dr. James Eglinton, Meldrum Senior Lecturer in Reformed Theology at New College (part of the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland), will give this year's Fall Faculty Lectures on knowing God and the themes of archetype and ectype in Reformed theology. The lectures are on November 20-21 of this year. 

This three-part series will explore how Christians have understood the difference between God’s perfect knowledge of himself and our limited human knowledge of him. From early Reformed theologians to Kuyper and Bavinck, and into today’s debates about culture and even artificial intelligence, Dr. Eglinton will show us why this old distinction still matters for how we think and live as believers.

Lecture 1: Archetype and Ectype - Theology as the Knowledge of God (Nov. 20 @ 1:30 pm central)
This lecture introduces a distinction common to early modern Reformed scholastic theologians as they defined theology: archetypal and ectypal theology. In archetypal theology, they described God’s infinite, unmediated knowledge of himself. By contrast, ectypal theology concerns our creaturely (and thus finite, mediated, contingent) knowledge of God. Drawing on Franciscus Junius and the Leiden Synopsis, this lecture will set out the dogmatic rationale for the archetype/ectype distinction, before setting out the distinction’s loss of popularity among late modern Reformed theologians.

Lecture 2: Kuyper and Bavinck on Archetype and Ectype (Nov. 21 @ 8:30 am)
This lecture will present the Dutch Neo-Calvinists Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck as notable late modern exceptions to their era’s general aversion to the archetype/ectype distinction. By following the contours—historical and theological—in Kuyper’s Encyclopaedia of Sacred Theology and Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics, we find a thoroughgoing commitment to the distinction’s ongoing importance. In this lecture, however, we will see the creativity with which they maintained it: in repackaging its terminology for their own day, and in drawing on it in addressing historically novel questions.

Lecture 3: Contemporary neo-Calvinism, Archetype and Ectype (Nov. 21 @ 10:30 am)
This lecture will use the tradition of Kuyper and Bavinck as the backdrop to Dr. Eglinton's interaction with two contemporary neo-Calvinist scholars whose writings draw on the archetype/ectype distinction in addressing a host of novel issues in the 21st century: Ximian Xu (Cambridge University), whose work uses the distinction to respond to questions arising from Artificial Intelligence, and Nathaniel Gray Sutanto (Reformed Theological Seminary), whose account of archetype/ectype addresses contemporary questions on theistic logic and cultural diversity. The lecture will argue for the ongoing fecundity of the distinction and its importance in allowing Reformed theology to be both a recognisable historic theological tradition, and a tradition that moves forward in addressing ’the present good of the elect’ in new cultural settings.