The Works of Samuel Rutherford, Volume 1

From the publisher

The first volume in a landmark 21-volume edition of The Works of Samuel Rutherford is now available for preorder — the fruit of years spent transcribing handwritten notes, translating dense seventeenth-century Latin, tracing marginalia and textual variants, and constructing a thorough scholarly apparatus. What was once scattered and accessible only in Latin to a narrow circle of specialists is now carefully restored for the church and academy.

This opening volume, Arminianism: A Systematic and Theological Response, appears in English for the first time. Rutherford does not confine himself to a handful of theses about salvation: beginning with Scripture and the knowledge of God, he advances through the divine decrees, the fall, original sin, the accomplishment and application of redemption, covenant theology, justification, perseverance, the church, the sacraments, the magistrate, and the resurrection. Arminianism is exposed not as an isolated doctrinal misstep but as a rival account of God, grace, and the moral order.

Throughout, Rutherford writes as a convinced Augustinian, treating the debate as the perennial contest between divine grace and Pelagian self-reliance. His arguments are exegetical, scholastic, and rigorously ordered, yet never detached from pastoral consequence.

Description adapted from the publisher, Reformation Heritage Books.