Welcome back to Five Minutes in Church History. I am not Dr. Stephen Nichols. I am Lee Webb,

and yes, I am the retired host of renewing your mind. It was a distinct honor and privilege

and blessing to be able to serve at Ligonier Ministries for 10 years and to work alongside the

regular host of this podcast, Dr. Stephen Nichols, who is president of Reformation Bible College,

a Ligonier teaching fellow. And this episode is really about, turn about, is fair play,

because Dr. Nichols, you have sent so many of our friends and colleagues off to this deserted

island of yours with five books. And so now I am playing the role of host so that we can send

you off to this deserted island. And in the last episode, you told us about three of the five

books that you're taking. We got through the third book, which was Augustine's Happy Life.

And now we move on to the fourth and fifth books. Well, the fourth book has been a challenge

for me Lee. And I've been waiting to see where I'm going to land, but I'm going to land on

Charles Hodg, systematic theology, three volumes. I love the Princetonians. I really do. And I know

Hodg these days has fallen on some hard times. There are those who think he's far too scientific

in his approach to theology. But I find Hodg incredibly refreshing, not only for his clear thinking.

I mean, it's it's sharp analysis in Hodg. But there are also just these moments that are very

devotional where you just find whole paragraphs where truly your mind has been stirred, but your soul

was stirred. Hodg, you know, is is the English version of Turton. Turton is the summation of all

that great post-reformation scholasticism. So it's just crucial texts, three volumes that you keep

me busy. What was Princeton like when Hodg was? Oh, yeah. I mean, it was the heyday. It was it was the

epicenter of theological conservatism in the United States. Princeton was a small institution,

but one of those small institutions that the shadow loomed large and not only in terms of what it

did there, but the people that produced in the lives they impacted. So it's hard to hard to

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