Courtesy of the Hultink Family Foundation, the Cántaro Institute is now the new home for the Reformational Digital Library (formerly known as the Reformational Publishing Project). All rights reserved.
Document: H. Evan Runner, The Relation of the Bible to Learning (Jordan Station, ON.: Paideia Press, 1982).
Excerpt: This book contains the lectures which Dr. H. Evan Runner presented to two student conferences in 1959 and 1960. Runner was professor of philosophy at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, from 1951 until 1981, when he became professor of philosophy emeritus. The conferences were sponsored by the Association for Reformed Scientific Studies, now called the Association for the Advancement of Christian Scholarship, which today owns and operates the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto. They were presented at a conference center in Unionville, a lovely little village just to the north of Toronto. The audience consisted primarily of students, teachers and preachers of Reformed background who had emigrated from Holland to Canada after the second world war.
These lectures throughout bear the marks of the very specific situation to which they were addressed. These marks can be an obstacle in understanding Runner’s message for a new generation of readers. In this essay I will explain the background of the events which led to the presentation of these lectures so that the reader may grasp the significance of those events as well as Runner’s message itself.
The first striking thing about these lectures is that they were delivered by Evan Runner, an American of Scotch-Irish-Welsh descent, to an audience almost exclusively of young Dutch immigrants in Canada. What brought speaker and audience together? Why was their meeting at that time in terms of these lectures so significant for subsequent developments? We need a bit of historical background to see this.
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The Relation of the Bible to Learning – H.E. Runner.pdf