Why I Translated a 17th-Century Dutch Theologian No One Asked For
Turns out I wasn't the only one who needed him.
I was deep in the corners of archive.org reading facsimiles from corrupted scans trying to make sense of what Thomas Hooker was saying about the the souls preparation for Christ. I love research. But this felt like research on dumb mode. It used to be that you would have to visit specific archival libraries to find original manuscripts if you were studying a historical subject or idea. Now with the internet at least you could find the sources online. That part is exciting but lacks the thrill of finding what feels like a treasure when you go to a library.
If I was going to study Hooker, I couldn’t just read Hooker. I needed to read Perkins, Ames, Cotton. I had to read Dutch theologians writing in Latin. All in all there were over 300 books I needed to read and research in order to answer the question: How did the theological anthropology of Thomas Hooker inform his approach to Christian spirituality and community?
Somewhere in the middle of all this I started translating Cocceius. Johannes Cocceius was a Dutch federal theologian whose Summa Theologiae ex Scripturis Repetita shaped covenant theology on the continent and, downstream, in New England. I needed to read him in English, and I couldn’t. So I started translating it myself.
Months in, I went looking for an existing English edition to check my work against. Not a partial, not a selection in a journal but a real edition. There isn’t one. As far as I can tell, no complete English translation of Cocceius’s Summa has ever existed in print.
That got me thinking. I had been thinking of this as personal study. It wasn’t anymore.
I realized this wall I kept hitting in research, the late nights reading corrupted scans on a computer screen, wasn’t unique to me. It was common for anyone doing research. And more than that, the non-academic Christian didn’t even know where to look to find these resources from our Protestant history. The retrieval project has been working on this issue for at least a decade. Institutions like Davenant have been translating works, reprinting old works, and providing education for Protestant Christians on these old sources for years. I myself took a course on Richard Baxter’s political theology from Timon Cline and Michael Lynch.
But some of the works of Baxter and many others still lay dormant for Christians today. Worse, many Christians don’t even know these figures exist.
So I built it. Commonplace.study.
Maybe you’re not a scholar. You’re just a Christian who wants to read good books (books that have stood the test of time and aren’t found on the shelves at Hobby Lobby). This site is for you too. You can read works that have never been translated into English. You can read works that have shaped Protestant history. You can read works that will deepen your walk with God.
Three years ago I was up late on archive.org trying to read corrupted scans of Thomas Hooker. Commonplace.study is the thing I needed then.
A clean library with readily accessible English translations of Zanchi, Keckermann, Cocceius. A library retrieval system that quotes real sources with real footnotes instead of telling you what it thinks they said. And study guide that pulls Scripture, commentary, and sermons into one place with notes you can export (I’m a pastor after all).
If you’re doing research, it will save you nights. If you're a curious Christian who suspects there's more in our Protestant inheritance than what's on the shelves at Mardel, now there is. Start a 14-day trial at commonplace.study and read the full translation of Cocceius Summa, plus the rest of the exclusive translations, while you decide.
