[A Dutch Leidenian Reformed Divine]

Born at Emden on 17 February 1583, the godly Johann Heinrich Alting—eldest son of the renowned Menso Alting—was fashioned by Providence into a keen blade for the Palatine Church: having drunk deeply of the liberal artes at Groningen and Herborn, he was in 1608 appointed preceptor to the young Elector Frederick at Heidelberg, where, after sojourning with his pupil to the court of King James I, he was advanced (1613) to the chair of sacred dogmatics and soon after to the rectorship of the Collegium Sapientiae. A delegate of the Academy to the venerable Synod of Dort (1618-1619), he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the Contra-Remonstrant fathers, contending, not with carnal weapons, but with the sharp syllogisms of Augustinian grace against Arminian innovation. When Tilly’s sword ravaged Heidelberg in 1622, Alting, escaping but narrowly the mercenary fury, withdrew first to Schorndorf and thence—preferring the pure milk of Reformed truth to the semi-Pelagian admixtures of Lutheran Saxony—to the hospitable Netherlands, where, in 1627, he accepted the theological chair at Groningen and there laboured until his translation to glory on 25 August 1644. Though stedfastly Calvinian, he tempered the austerer rigours of the school with an irenic meekness, counting novelty more perilous than severity; and, by his Historia de Ecclesiis Palatinis and other learned volumes, he hath justly earned the style of chronicler and defender of the Palatine Reformation, leaving to posterity a pattern of scholastic precision wed to Puritan piety.

Born at Emden on 17 February 1583, the godly Johann Heinrich Alting—eldest son of the renowned Menso Alting—was fashioned by Providence into a keen blade for the Palatine Church: having drunk deeply of the liberal artes at Groningen and Herborn, he was in 1608 appointed preceptor to the young Elector Frederick at Heidelberg, where, after sojourning with his pupil to the court of King James I, he was advanced (1613) to the chair of sacred dogmatics and soon after to the rectorship of the Collegium Sapientiae. A delegate of the Academy to the venerable Synod of Dort (1618-1619), he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the Contra-Remonstrant fathers, contending, not with carnal weapons, but with the sharp syllogisms of Augustinian grace against Arminian innovation. When Tilly’s sword ravaged Heidelberg in 1622, Alting, escaping but narrowly the mercenary fury, withdrew first to Schorndorf and thence—preferring the pure milk of Reformed truth to the semi-Pelagian admixtures of Lutheran Saxony—to the hospitable Netherlands, where, in 1627, he accepted the theological chair at Groningen and there laboured until his translation to glory on 25 August 1644. Though stedfastly Calvinian, he tempered the austerer rigours of the school with an irenic meekness, counting novelty more perilous than severity; and, by his Historia de Ecclesiis Palatinis and other learned volumes, he hath justly earned the style of chronicler and defender of the Palatine Reformation, leaving to posterity a pattern of scholastic precision wed to Puritan piety.

Systematic Theologies:

LOCORUM THEOLOGICORUM PARS PRIOR