Matt Marino has been appointed the inaugural Professor of Theology for New Aberdeen College in Charlotte, North Carolina. He presently serves as Pastor of Grace Church in the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church (or ARP) in Winter Springs, Florida. He is married to Emily and they have four children: Joshua, Hannah, Isabella, and Aiden.
He obtained his B.A. in Philosophy and Apologetics from Trinity College in Newburgh, IN, his Master of Theological Studies from Columbia Evangelical Seminary in Longview, WA, and his Master of Divinity from Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, FL.
He is currently completing his PhD at Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, MI. The dissertation entitled God, Reason, and Nature: The Role of Natural Theology in the Whole of Christian Thought is scheduled for defense and publication in the summer of 2024.
The Reformed Classicalist exists to teach and pass on the historic Christian faith for the glory of God in all of life.
The “Reformed Classicalist” school of thought is the product of two decades of reflection and ministry by its founder, Matt Marino.
At a moment of church history where the so-called “New Calvinism” has withered on the shores of progressivism, and with the outposts of “Old Calvinism” dominated by epistemological and ethical pluralisms, a downgrade in the churches, denominations, and seminaries was really only a matter of time.
As time slips through our fingers, young men who have grown up in those churches are turning elsewhere at alarming rates—to any mirage that seems to promise something more historic or more masculine. What they are unwittingly looking for is what is embodied in Reformed Classicalism.
Reformed Classicalism appropriates that traditional vision of orthodoxy that was articulated by such figures as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, retained by the magisterial Reformers, the seventeenth century Reformed Scholastics, the Puritans and early Princeton, and into the present day through R. C. Sproul.
Reformed Classicalism does not pit the gospel against ethics, the sacred against the secular, the wisdom in tradition against the duty of individual reason. It does not pit the transcendence of what will last forever against the goodness of protecting the image of God in time. Consequently, in this model, it is paramount to reconstruct natural theology in apologetics and natural law in ethics, and in so doing to provide a sturdier framework for Reformed dogmatics as expressed in the historic confessions and catechisms.
In our day, there is a unique opportunity to provide clarity for the saints and to equip those who would lead in resistance to the present downgrade. Theological retrieval is therefore no elitist hobby, but the accumulation of proven weaponry for present battles.
Whether through brief Q & A’s on doctrine or practice, articles, sermons, larger teaching series, or books, this ministry is seeking the Lord’s will on further projects.