Education

Ephrem was still a young man when his quick understanding, knowledge of Scriptures, literary skills, and love for the church captured the attention of the local bishop. Jacob had been bishop of the Christian community of Nisibis (a commercial center on the Persian border) since 309, when Ephrem was...

What comes to mind when you hear the words “systematic theology”? For many Christians, they think of the halls of academia and the debating of obscure and minor details related to God. But for most of the history of the church, systematic theology was a discipline done for the church and by...

I am an avid history reader. I have been since about the age of five. That’s 48 years of history reading. I became an avid church history reader when I came to faith in Christ in 1983. Since then church history, among all sorts of historical works, has been a staple part of my reading diet. As a...

Why should history have to make a case for itself? No one questions why we should study mathematics or science. The humanities are always having to justify their existence in a way that is not expected of other disciplines. Even so, I do not mind the question—either as a writer of historical...

It is possible to make disciples that are just too new. Case in point. In his book, The Creedal Imperative (Crossway, 2012), Carl Trueman relays the story of a pastor who regularly declared his devotion to Scripture by dismissing creeds and confessions. With the Bible held high before his church,...

During the Reformation, as young preachers were being trained and sent out, people complained about the quality of the preaching. Some things never change, do they? Martin Luther had little patience for such complaints, responding that the people of God 1) needed to appreciate the gift that God had...

Jesus thinks reading is a big deal. After all, he wrote a book. And Jesus thinks reading his book is a big deal, because, well, he is. For a blog post on the sufficiency of Scripture and biblical scholarship this may seem overly simplistic. Aren’t scholars supposed to talk about really complicated...