The Vision

I would love to build the CCEL into a theological library containing 1000 of the most important public-domain works for theological study, containing:

How will the Library be Distributed?

What will it take to Get There?

To scan and mark up 1000 volumes of 1MB each, a company might expect to pay around $3,000,000. In order to do this in a project without funding, we will have to depend on on contributions, sales of the CCEL CD-ROM, many hours of volunteer labor, the use of existing Internet resources, a longer time-frame, hard work motivated by love, and the grace of God. The current CCEL CD-ROM has around 200 volumes and is four years in the making; extrapolating suggests a 20-year project.

Immediate tasks include:

How can I Help?

Will it really happen?

Humanly speaking, it seems unlikely. On the other hand, four years ago I would never have expected to be working with old theological texts, let alone maintaining a library accessed millions of times a year or producing a CD-ROM and distributing it worldwide. God has paved the way.

So, it is clear that the project will happen at least in reduced form, because it is happening, through the grace of God. Pray that it will continue to progress. It may be the most significant advance in theological libraries since Gutenberg.


This document (last modified February 05, 1998) from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library server, at @Wheaton College