Today (August 29) is the birthday of Charles Grandison Finney (1792–1875), whose accomplishments as a revivalist preacher are staggering. The most striking statistic usually reported is that when he came to Rochester, the population tripled but the crime rate dropped by two-thirds. Other preachers might be bold enough to preach against the evils of saloons, but when Finney ca...
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Today (August 28) is the day Augustine of Hippo died in the year 430. His first biographer, Possidius, tells us how it happened in his Life of Augustine.
Augustine died in the city of Hippo, which was under siege by barbarians throughout his final illness (he contracted a fever "in the third month of the siege"). Augustine was cheered that the city's church still stood, tho...
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William Henry Griffith Thomas (1861-1924) wrote an excellent one-volume systematic theology called The Principles of Theology. Published in 1930, it takes the form of an evangelical commentary on the 39 Articles of the Church of England. According to J.I. Packer, the book "may be said to have rounded off a four-hundred year era of Protestant Anglicanism." Packer also praises th...
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Today (August 27) is the day Ceasarius, Bishop of Arles, died in the year 542. He is most important because of things he didn't write.
Caesarius never wanted to be original, and he wasn't. He was a conservator and transmitter of the Christian tradition as he received it. He had been a monk at Lerins in the decades just after Vincent of Lerins made his famous statement that "...
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My friendship with Dr. Soong-Chan Rah goes back over a decade. When I was a first-year M.Div. student at Gordon-Conwell Seminary in Boston, Soong-Chan was my pastor. I attended the church he planted, CCFC (Cambridge Community Fellowship Church), a thriving, urban, multiethnic, vibrant new church in the heart of Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, located literally...
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Today (August 25) is the birthday of Karl Friedrich Bahrdt (1741-1792), a theologian so bad that it is hard to find anything good to say about him. (He liked tolerance. There, I said one good thing about him.) He was, says one encyclopedia, "a caricature of the vulgar rationalism of the eighteenth century."
A Lutheran preacher's kid, Bahrdt started studying theology in 1757 ...
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Featured Essay
What is the Trinity for?
I hear this question all the time, in churches and classrooms. It comes from different kinds of people: From well-established Christians who have the basics of a life of discipleship figured out, are spiritually healthy, and who are getting along just fine without thinking often of the Trinity. From apologists who wish there were one fewer "hard doc...
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Government already has the biggest guns and so we should not give them control over the scalpels as well. The reason is simple: anything big is likely to hurt us and needs something just as big to check it.
Government power in the United States is great, but it is a blessing of living in our nation that it is not as great as in some other lands. We are in less danger of tyra...
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(Authors Note: Recently I was asked about my argument against the video claiming Barack Obama is the Antichrist. Isn’t the basic scholarship impressive in the video and aren’t the coincidences in it amazing? To help the person, I have constructed a parody argument in less than thirty minutes demonstrating the opposite point of view from the video: thinking Obama is the Anti...
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Left-of-center Evangelical Jim Wallis recently said that health care, the subject currently dominating the news for political reasons, is a "deeply theological issue, a Biblical issue and a moral issue." For once I can say Jim Wallis is right, though he is wrong to wish for greater government involvement. Health care is such a deeply theological, Biblical, and moral issue that ...
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Two of the most influential academic theologians of the twentieth century share today, August 20, as their birthday: Paul Tillich (1886-1965) and Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976). What an odd coincidence. I wonder if they ever celebrated it together.
Both men were prolific, and their theological projects were very different: Tillich was above all a theologian of culture, seeking ...
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Cyrus Ingerson Scofield was born this day (August 19) in 1843, and died in 1921. A confederate veteran, Scofield had a shameful life (alcoholism, prison for forgery, divorce, etc.) before his conversion and call to pastoral ministry.
His fame is linked to his 1909 Reference Bible, the resource that put the first draft of dispensational premillenialism in the hands of a wide ...
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