Category: Evangelical History

Justin Taylor

Blog can be found on:

https://blogs.thegospelcoalition.org/evangelical-history/

By micoots
20/09/2016 0

85 Years Ago Today: J.R.R. Tolkien Convinces C.S. Lewis That Christ Is the True Myth

On an early Sunday morning, September 20, 1931, three thirtysomething English professors took a walk together on Addison’s Walk in the grounds of Magdalen College at the University of Oxford:

32-year-old C.S. Lewis (Fellow and Tutor of English Literature at Magdalen College, Oxford),
39-year-old J.R.R. Tolkien (Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford), and
35-year-old Hugo Dyson (Tutor and Lecturer at Reading University).
Their time together had begun the night before at dinne..

By micoots
20/09/2016 0

85 Years Ago Today: J. R. R. Tolkien Convinces C. S. Lewis That Christ Is the True Myth

On an early Sunday morning, September 20, 1931, three 30-something English professors took a stroll together on Addison’s Walk in the grounds of Magdalen College at the University of Oxford:

32-year-old C. S. Lewis (Fellow and Tutor of English Literature at Magdalen College, Oxford),
39-year-old J. R. R. Tolkien (Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford), and
35-year-old Hugo Dyson (Tutor and Lecturer at Reading University).
Their time together had begun the evening before at d..

By micoots
19/09/2016 0

Five Great Books on The Enlightenment in America

Those who have followed my writing for a while know that I am a self-proclaimed “skeptic about the ‘Enlightenment.’” Here I explain why:

The Enlightenment is an ideologically loaded term that implies that much of the western intellectual tradition before The Enlightenment was “dark.” Much of that tradition was, of course, Christian. “The Enlightenment” presupposes an arc of history toward secular democratic scientific liberalism.

There is something to this presupposition, of course. Even the m..

By micoots
13/09/2016 0

A Classic Book on an Evangelical History and Theology of Renewal

There is not another book quite like Richard Lovelace’s The Dynamics of Spiritual Life: An Evangelical Theology of Renewal (IVP, 1979).

It was published before Tim Keller and John Piper had written any popular books.

It was written back when Jonathan Edwards was hardly anybody’s homeboy.

It was written by an author who is a bit eccentric, but whose every page—agree or disagree—is worth wrestling with and pondering.

Tim Keller says that if you read this book, you’ll say that you now know wher..

By micoots
12/09/2016 0

Jonathan Edwards and the Bible’s Historical Reliability

We normally associate the rise of “higher criticism” of the Bible with the nineteenth century. But by the 1600s, authors such as Benedict Spinoza had already begun to question the reliability of the Bible on matters such as whether Moses wrote the Pentateuch.

I recently read Michael Lee’s fascinating monograph The Erosion of Biblical Certainty: Battles over Authority and Interpretation in America (2013). In Lee’s account, Jonathan Edwards is one of a cast of characters who responded to the new ..

Maryland_Toleration_Act
By micoots
09/09/2016 0

How the Colonies in America Moved from “Tolerance” to “Free Exercise” of Religion

In his very engaging and accessible book, The Right to Be Wrong: Ending the Culture War Over Religion in America (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2005), Kevin Seamus Hasson—founder of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty—has a helpful way to summarize the different approaches to religious toleration among the refuge colonies.

Here are some notes, using his categories. Just keep in mind the history is complex, and to put this into a manageable summary simplifies things a bit.

1. Maryland: How ..

the_nortons
By micoots
08/09/2016 0

The Day Missionaries Explained to Mussolini that He Might Be the Prophesied Antichrist

Edith and Ralph Norton, c. 1930. Courtesy of the Archives of the Belgian Evangelical Mission, preserved at Evadoc, Leuven (Belgium)

In his book, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism, Matthew Avery Sutton recounts what he calls one of the great ironies of fundamentalist history: the day fundamentalist missionaries secured an appointment in April of 1932 with the fascist prime minister of Italy in order to explain how he was fulfilling biblical prophecy.

For background, it hel..

John_Knox_statue_St_Giles_Edinburgh-225×300
By micoots
07/09/2016 0

The Real John Knox

If you ever go to see the John Knox statue at St. Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh, you won’t come away with warm and fuzzy feelings. Knox, in statue and in Scottish historical memory, comes off as stern, formidable, and unapproachable. To admirers, he was also a man of deep principle and driven conviction. But still, our conventional Knox can seem hard and cold.

John Knox, Kim Traynor, Wikimedia Commons. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license…

MarkNoll
By micoots
06/09/2016 0

Top Biography Recommendations from 12 Christian Historians

A while back I asked several historians for their top five biographies, representing the genre at its best, with a little explanation for each.

Here are their answers:

Mark Noll
Mark Noll is Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at Notre Dame.

1. Malcolm Muggeridge, The Chronicles of Wasted Time, 2 vols. (vol. 1, The Green Stick; vol. 2, The Infernal Grove)

This is a great book, although what kind of great book is hard to say. Muggeridge presented this two-volume work as an autobiography,..

Clarence_Darrow_and_William_Jennings_Bryan_during_the_Scopes_Trial
By micoots
30/08/2016 0

The Most Important Legacy of the Scopes Trial

Matthew Avery Sutton, in his impressively researched American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), argues that the primary legacy of the 1925 Scopes trial was not how it changed the law, or how it changed education or the perception of Darwinian evolution, or even how it led to a retreat by the Fundamentalists. Rather, he argues as follows:

Perhaps the most important legacy of the Scopes trial was not its impact on American education ..