Church History

In the summer of 1542, Peter Martyr Vermigli reached the northern side of the Alps with mixed emotions: thankfulness, excitement, relief, but also homesickness, concern, and occasional doubts. Born to Teach Born in Florence, Italy, in 1499, he had entered the Augustinian order at the young age of...

When Martin Luther took his stand at the Diet of Worms, proclaiming, “Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason…, I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God,” [i] he affirmed that divine revelation is the only...

When Satan tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden his angle of attack was to bring into question the sufficiency of God’s word. “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden?” Not only did Satan, like a good legalist, subtly add on to God’s word by adding the command 'any tree in...

The Lord through the prophet Jeremiah prophesied of a day when He would establish a new covenant for His people, a covenant unlike the old one enacted under Moses. It was under the Old Covenant where Israel was called to be a nation of priests to a watching world, a mediatorial son who would make...

As we contemplate the 500 th anniversary of the beginning of the Protestant Reformation we are reminded of the glorious truths (and their entailed spiritual experiences) rediscovered and recovered that had been long lost under centuries of encrusted extra-biblical tradition. Clericalism was one...

This week on Theology on the Go, our host, Dr. Jonathan Master is joined by Rev. Richard Davis Phillips. Dr. Phillips has been the Senior Minister of Second Presbyterian Church in Greenville, South Carolina (PCA) since July, 2007. He earned his bachelor’s degree at the University of Michigan, and a...

In the Protestant family of churches, the phrase “church tradition” raises a red flag and is almost immediately rejected as an assault on the Bible’s authority. After all, sola Scriptura is a key Protestant rallying cry. At the same time, our churches have a plethora of their own traditions—...

This week on Theology on the Go, our host, Dr. Jonathan Master is joined by the Rev. Dr. Carl Trueman (Ph.D., Aberdeen). Dr. Trueman holds the Paul Woolley Chair of Church History and is professor of church history at Westminster Theological Seminary. He has written more than a dozen books, and is...

Adoption ism is an early Christian heresy regarding the person and work of Jesus Christ. This false teaching advanced the view that God the Father came upon an already-existing man called Jesus of Nazareth and adopted him as his “son” after the fact of his birth and maturation (perhaps adopting him...

Our extraordinary God loves the ordinary. And it seems that in his extraordinary salvation of sinners he loves to use ordinary means. This is true even in the extraordinarily gracious preservation of his children; ordinary means mark the road all the way home to our final rest in Christ. Indeed,...