In a recent post on the Synod of Diamper (1599), I described how European Catholics tried to force Indian Christians into conformity with their ways. This Indian church, the Thomas Christians, had been founded in the second century (conceivably before), and throughout the Middle Ages its connections had been with the Church of the East, based in Iraq, so it had never had been subject to Catholic or Orthodox authority. In light of this, it is fascinating to see what... Read more
I want to share an enthusiasm. I’d also like to point to some very useful resources that are now readily available on the Internet. Last year, I posted on the work of the English scholar Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936), whose work I have been quite unintentionally shadowing for much of my life. Since my teenage years, I have loved his terrifying ghost stories. All these classic tales are now available online. Incidentally, living in Cambridge during the 1970s, his nephew... Read more
Through the Middle Ages, European churches made enthusiastic use of apocryphal scriptures, but matters changed rapidly at the Reformation. Protestants and Catholics alike campaigned against the old alternative gospels and saints’ lives, driving many out of use. A similar process of scriptural cleansing was under way elsewhere in the world in these same years, and it makes for a disturbing and depressing story. It also represents one of the most painful encounters between old and new Christian worlds. The Christian... Read more
I don’t think of the Chronicle of Higher Education as an especially hospitable venue for evangelicals. Thus, I was surprised this week to read a fascinating and even-handed portrait of William Lane Craig. Written by Nathan Schneider, the piece follows Craig from the evangelical subculture (including his part-time teaching at Biola) to debates against atheists held at large, public and private universities. Schneider begins with a smart observation: The enormous kinds of questions that speculative-minded college students obsess over—life, death,... Read more
One of the fascinating—and sometimes disconcerting—things about researching recent history is that my historical characters are still making history. They write books, participate in protests, and occasionally die. This summer, happily, they’re retiring more than dying. In the span of about a month, two subjects of Moral Minority’s eight mini-biographies are retiring. Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary, retired in June. Now it’s Ron Sider’s turn. Founder and president of Evangelicals for Social Action, Sider will step down this... Read more
Over at Kevin DeYoung’s blog, Jason Helopoulos asks “Does Calvinism Kill Missions?” and answers with a resounding historical ‘no.’ I agree, and want to put a little finer point on it: from the perspective of Baptist history, Calvinists birthed the missions movement. (For background on Calvinism/Arminianism in the Baptist context, see links below.) I’ve recently been reading Jason Duesing’s fascinating volume Adoniram Judson: A Bicentennial Appreciation of the Pioneer American Missionary, which has a great deal of fresh information on the celebrated Baptist missionary Judson... Read more
If you have French friends, thank them for their nation’s help during our revolution and I hope you invited them over for barbeque on July 4th. And if they invite you to celebrate Bastille Day on July 14, gladly accept. But you should not necessarily think you are celebrating the same revolutionary spirit. This is acutely true when one considers the two revolutions and religion. The throngs of diverse religious (largely Protestant) communities that had settled this country prior... Read more
Over at realclearreligion, I have a new column on the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha and particularly the very important Slavonic texts that have turned up over the past 150 years. These Slavonic materials are extraordinarily important. They represent a collection of truly ancient documents, mainly from Second Temple Judaism. Through the Byzantine Empire, they found their way to the Slavic world, to Bulgaria and Serbia, where they were translated. In many cases, these texts were utterly forgotten elsewhere, so their modern... Read more
In a number of recent posts, I have argued that long after the time of Constantine, Christians around the world continued to use and cherish alternative scriptures, some teaching ideas far removed from the established churches. Having said that, a time did come when many of those texts really were suppressed, more thoroughly than the medieval church or state ever could achieve. So just what happened, and when? The Reformation marked a critical point in the process. From the start... Read more
For centuries, European Christians (and their American descendants) mostly categorized religious systems according to their similarities and differences vis-à-vis Christianity. There were monotheistic or highly evolved religions versus “primitive” or “idolatrous” religions. There were universal religions versus ethnic, narrow-minded religions (that formulation demoted Judaism in comparison with the previous sentence). Some of those taxonomic schemes suggested a positive appraisal of other religious systems, but only to the extent that they resembled Christianity. [The above mostly represents a very loose and... Read more
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