The Relevance of Religious History for Today
One of the perennial struggles in church life is balancing our approach to the work of the Holy Spirit. On one side of the evangelical continuum, there are self-conscious “cessationists” who believe that the “sign gifts,” such as prophecy and speaking in tongues, ceased with the closing of the New Testament canon. On the other [...]
The past couple years years have seen a great deal of criticism and allegations about Sovereign Grace Ministries (SGM), with a number of churches breaking away from the organization, and a lawsuit charging leaders with covering up child physical and sexual abuse in the 1980s and 1990s. Last Friday came the news that SGM founder [...]
A remarkable political asylum case has raised questions about whether the U.S. government should defend the right of families to homeschool. The case concerns the Romeike family of Germany, where homeschooling is illegal, and where families who attempt to homeschool their children can face heavy fines and even have their children taken from them. An [...]
As I discussed in my post “Puritans: The Original Republicans?“, few historians today remain interested in Puritanism as the seedbed of American democracy. But as demonstrated by Michael Winship’s excellent book Godly Republicanism, the Puritans may well have been America’s first republicans (small ‘r’), with their loathing of political and ecclesiastical tyranny. It has been interesting [...]
Over at the Old Life website, our friend D.G. Hart has a piece, “Between Whitefield and the Vatican,” which argues that George Whitefield (the greatest evangelist of the eighteenth century, and the subject of my current book project) focused too much on the Spirit and personal experience, while Roman Catholics focus too much on the institutional [...]
Melanie Kirkpatrick’s disturbing yet riveting Escape from North Korea: The Untold Story of Asia’s Underground Railroad tells a story the desperate souls who try to flee totalitarian North Korea, and the few who make it. Those who succeed often receive aid from Christians, both Asians and westerners, who are courageous laborers in what Kirkpatrick describes as [...]
Today marks the fortieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, which critics regard as one of the most overreaching decisions in Supreme Court history. Citing an expansive interpretation of the 14th amendment and the “right to privacy,” the court determined that abortion on demand should be legal in all 50 states. As I have written earlier, the [...]
In his magisterial biography of Jonathan Edwards, George Marsden reminds us that there was a time, in the decades after his death, when Jonathan Edwards was more popular in Scotland than in America. Indeed, there was a fleeting moment, after the Northampton church dismissed Edwards in 1750, when Edwards might have moved his family to Scotland. [...]
I recently read Jonathan Yeager’s excellent Enlightened Evangelicalism: The Life and Thought of John Erskine (Oxford, 2011), and am struck by Yeager’s thesis that Erskine, one of the leading evangelical pastors in eighteenth-century Scotland, was especially significant as a “disseminator of enlightened evangelicalism.” Of course, Erskine was also an important theologian and preacher, but where he [...]
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