22,512 notes of Christian primary texts in English - from the classical world the New Testament was written into, through the Fathers, Councils, and Scholastics, to the Reformers, Puritans, the eighteenth-century revivals, and the Victorians. This vault is aimed as an ecumenical equivalent of New Advent, including both Catholic and Protestant works.
This is the web version of the open source Obsidian Vault
All text is public domain and scraped agentically using Claude code. Wishing to reflect God’s grace, all resources are free without any obligation. Created by the computer scientist and armchair theologian Benjamin Poole
QuickStart 🚀
The best way to find resources is to search using the search bar or Ctrl+k e.g. try searching for The Westminster Shorter Catechism
Each folder or author has a helpful index in the folder root. Have a look at the Church Councils and Puritans indexes.
Sections
My chart demonstrating the historicity of the Christian faith, supported by the wide range of Christian and classical material on this site.
| Section | Contents | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 01 Classical Background (c. 750 BC – AD 120) | Greek and Roman historians, poets, philosophers — Homer, Plato, Herodotus, Thucydides, Sophocles, Euripides, Demosthenes, Caesar, Livy, Tacitus, both Plinys — and Josephus | 68 |
| 02 Church Fathers (c. 95 – 749) | 61 Fathers, Apostolic Fathers to John of Damascus, by ANF/NPNF volume, plus the Didache and Venerable Bede | 3,820 |
| 03 Councils, Creeds & Confessions (325–present) | Ecumenical and regional councils, creeds, Reformation diets and synods, confessional documents | 284 |
| 04 Medieval (750–1500) | Medieval Scholastics — Ratramnus, Anselm, Abelard, Hugh of St Victor, Bernard, Bonaventure, Aquinas, Eckhart, Ruusbroec, Catherine of Siena, Julian of Norwich, Gerson, Nicholas of Cusa, Thomas à Kempis | 2,193 |
| 05 Reformers (1500–1600) | Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Knox, Cranmer, Tyndale, Bullinger, Melanchthon, Beza, Hooker, Vermigli, Ursinus, Wishart; Wycliffe and Hus under 00 Forerunners | 2,720 |
| 06 Puritans (1600–1700) | Owen, Trapp, Bunyan, Baxter, Watson, Flavel, Charnock, Gurnall, Scougal, à Brakel | 2,943 |
| 06 Scientists (1600–1700) | The theology of the scientific revolution — Bacon, Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Browne, Wilkins, Pascal, Boyle, Ray, Newton, Leibniz | 638 |
| 07 Revival (1700–1800) | The Great Awakening and the Evangelical Revival — John Wesley, Jonathan Edwards | 1,989 |
| 08 Victorian (1800–1900) | The nineteenth century — Schleiermacher, Hodge, Newman, Kierkegaard, Ryle, Spurgeon, Kuyper, Warfield | 7,754 |
| 09 Modern (1900–present) | The twentieth century — The Fundamentals | 103 |
Design Philosophy
My diagram of the divine attributes, from Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Contra Gentiles, White marks attributes that are knowable by natural theology (human reason), while red is by revealed faith only.
As an evangelical Anglican and computer scientist, I was really annoyed that the only good historical websites for studying historical sources was the Catholic New Advent. Which is excellent, but Protestants need an equivalent that includes our confessions and writings. CCEL has poor usability and Logos is behind a paywall.
With this in mind, I built a lightweight, text-based site optimised for reading like a book. No waiting for PDF downloads, you can just click or search with Ctrl+k, loading instantly. Most of what reaches your browser is the text itself, no bloated JavaScript.
The site is generated from my Obsidian vault with Quartz 5, plus pre- and post-build steps to optimise performance. Because everything is generated from my collection of Markdown files, it is easy to maintain.
Support and Contributions
You can add (out-of-copyright) material to this vault by opening a pull request on the GitHub repository
I believe all the resources scraped to build this site are either public domain or freely available. However, if you are the copyright holder and there is a copyright issue, please open an issue on the GitHub repository. See license.txt.
If you find this helpful consider supporting me with Buy Me a Coffee