Church History

It is fitting that Christians should love the springtime of the soul, the bodily resurrection that will come in God’s time. But how much do we really know about the resurrection? Children often ask, “Will I know my mommy and daddy in heaven?” Wives want to know what kind of relationship, if any,...

Jan Hus is often considered a disciple of the English John Wycliffe and imitator of his views. In reality, much of his thought developed independently, along similar lines. Born in Husinec, southern Bohemia (approximately in the same area as today’s Czech’s republic), Hus studied at the prestigious...

Anyone who felt perplexed – even outraged – the first time they read Romans 9 may identify with Thomas Bradwardine, a 14 th -century Archbishop of Canterbury. His age was, like ours, entrenched in Pelagianism, exalting man’s free will and ability to come to God on his own terms. That’s the...

Natural theology, to be contrasted with Revealed Theology, is that human response to divine revelation where truths about God, or arguments for his existence, are discerned from the created order without aid of special revelation. In a sense, natural theology does not take special revelation into...

I teach a small weekly Bible study that is attended by a couple of Roman Catholics one of which is practicing and the other is not. A third member has embraced the Gospel and broken ties with Rome. Recently, in one of these studies, I mentioned purgatory and received an instant, “Oh, we don’t...

The topics of apologetics and natural theology are, to say the least, complex and controversial. Yet as Christians we have to deal with them. So let us try informed by God’s word and the history of the Church. We must define our terms, and while broad summary definitions can generally be agreed...

Natural Revelation God has revealed himself in nature, as Romans 1 affirms, but should natural revelation be the starting point of conversation in an apologetic or evangelistic encounter? James and Jonathan consider the text of Acts 14, with Paul’s apologetic approach to Jews and Greeks. Is seeing...

Five hundred years ago the Protestant Reformation changed the theological and ecclesiastical landscape forever. And yet, was that something that only made sense in their historical context? Is the Reformation over, a quirk of history, only brought up in Church History classes? Perhaps we should we...

As we pass Labor Day and settle into the fall, I want to label a few of the most influential ideas about work in Western thought and invite you, my reader, to see which thoughts might be informing you and supplanting more biblical ideas about work. Without further ado Most Greeks thought work was a...

There has been a steady stream of Protestants converting to Roman Catholicism in recent years, and many of these converts claim challenges with Protestantism itself. Darryl Hart is professor of history at Hillsdale College, and has recently written Still Protesting: Why the Reformation Still...