Church History

It's a tad late for this, but the story only broke a few days before Christmas. The London Times ran with the headline, "Wise Men seek a virgin Mother." Another newspaper ran the headline, "Lizard's Immaculate Conception." The story was not about Mary and the baby Jesus born in a stable in...

The Trinitarian formulations of the early Church often seem to our postmodern culture as the inevitable brainchild of monastic orders, burlap habits, deserts, and Neoplatonic philosophy. Austere, abstract, and unconnected from everyday life - just like the stereotypical image of a monk. Even worse...

The Trinitarian formulations of the early Church often seem to our postmodern culture as the inevitable brainchild of monastic orders, burlap habits, deserts, and Neoplatonic philosophy. Austere, abstract, and unconnected from everyday life - just like the stereotypical image of a monk. Even worse...

We can now take this point a stage further: in this context, that of the god-like aspirations of leadership, sin becomes incredibly attractive. In the Confessions, Augustine makes it clear in relation to a trivial act of the youthful crime of stealing some pears from a neighbour's tree. It was not...

Books, they say, are a preacher's whiskey. Like many students of theology and Church History, my study walls are encrusted with volume after volume beckoning me to, as C.S. Lewis once said in his essay, On the Reading of Old Books , "work my way through a bit of tough theology with a pipe in my...

William Knibb (1803-1845) is rightly remembered as one of the great heroes of Baptist history for the key role that he played in the emancipation of the slaves in the British Empire in the 1820s and 1830s. In fact, so powerful was his championship of this cause that some called him "King Knibb"!...

Along with The Epistle of Barnabas , 1 & 2 Clement , The Shepherd of Hermas , The Epistles of Ignatius and Polycarp , Te Epistle of Diognetus , and The Martyrdom of Clement, Ignatius and Polycarp , The Didache comprises one of the documents of the "Apostolic Fathers" - documents written in the...

American President Theodore Roosevelt once said that "it is not the critic that counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and...

It should not escape the attention of the Christian disciple that some of the most profound spiritual mysteries are very often closely tied to time and history. Take the incarnation for example. Arguably the most weighty of spiritual realities, and yet Luke's accounting of this inscrutable...

"To invert a famous quip of Gore Vidal, in theology, it is not enough for heretics to fail; the church must succeed." Last summer, I was fortunate enough to spend some weeks working at a church in Scotland, just outside of Edinburgh. It was certainly good to enjoy extended time back in the old...