Friday, 3 May 2024

Evangelical History

Justin Taylor

Blog can be found on:

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

What Was It Like to Hear Billy Sunday Preach?

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In the first half of the 20th century, Billy Sunday (1862–1935) was America’s best-known evangelist and revivalist.

Born to poverty in rural Iowa, Billy was sent to an orphanage at the age of 10. He would later used his hard-scrabble past as a justification for his plain-spoken style:

The mal-odors of the barnyard are on my feat. I have greased my hair with goose-grease; I have blackened my shoes with a cob; I have wiped my proboscis with a gunny sake; I have drunk coffee out of my saucer and ..

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Wayne Grudem made quite a splash with his recent description of Donald Trump as a “morally good choice” for evangelical voters. Unlike many of Trump’s so-called “evangelical” supporters, Grudem really is an evangelical, and a formidable one at that. This is what makes his column worth noticing.

I want to preface my response to Professor Grudem by saying that, amid the madness of the 2016 election cycle, we evangelicals need to remember that we are part of a much bigger, longer-lasting movement…

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In the most famous passage of the Declaration of Independence, it is easy to see the connection between theism and human rights: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” As I explained in God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution, Thomas Jefferson and the Continental Congress could have chosen more generic ..

Aaron Burr’s Mother: An Example of Evangelical Friendship

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When I was in high school (and this is dating me now), a new ad campaign for milk became the most famous pop-culture reference to Aaron Burr:

But now, with the popularity of the Hamilton musical, more young people know more about Aaron Burr than at any other time in recent memory.

At the age of 45, Burr became the third Vice President of the United States (1801–1805), serving under President Thomas Jefferson. But in 1804, he became most famous for being the first sitting Vice President to shoo..

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I recently had a productive exchange at First Things with historian Molly Oshatz about the issue of diversity, intolerance, and hypersensitivity to disagreement at America’s elite colleges. It allowed me to test out a theory I’ve had for some time: Christian colleges and universities may be the best educational institutions today for fostering real political diversity.

Here’s the exchange:

Kidd: I commend Molly Oshatz’s “College Without Truth” for getting at the heart of the political hypersen..

An FAQ on America as a “City on a Hill”

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Where does the phrase “city on a hill” come from?

This is a metaphor used by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, addressing his disciples—those who are knowing and trusting and following him.

Here is the wording of Matthew 5:15–16 from the 16th century Geneva Bible that would have been used by Puritans coming to America:

Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill, cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick, and it giveth light..

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William and Mary historian Christopher Grasso has an excellent roundup [subscription] of recent writing on the role of faith and skepticism in the new American nation, in the most recent Journal of the Early Republic. In it, he contrasts my book God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution with several others, including Matthew Stewart’s Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic. Here’s an excerpt:

The Revolutionary era has been a flashpoint in discussions a..

Goodbye Mr. Chipps: The Day a Fundamentalist Pastor Shot and Killed a Catholic Layman in His Baptist Church

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The Rev. J. Frank Norris (49 years old) sitting at his desk in First Baptist Church, Fort Worth (11/02/1926), four months after he had pulled a gun from this desk to shoot a man. UTA Libraries, accessed June 29, 2016, http://library.uta.edu/digitalgallery/items/show/11429

Barry G. Hankins is professor of history and graduate program director at Baylor University.

In August, Oxford University Press will publish his spiritual biography Woodrow Wilson: Ruling Elder, Spiritual President as part of..

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The media was buzzing this week with news from Pew Research that 78 percent of white ‘evangelicals’ plan to vote for Donald Trump this fall. (It is not clear whether the addition of Mike Pence as his running mate will help or hurt, since Pence is by all accounts an evangelical himself, but he caved in to critics in the 2015 controversy over Indiana’s religious liberty law.) Although evangelicals do not seem overly enamored with Trump, this survey confirmed that the Religious Right is alive and w..

A 1991 Conversation with Carl F.H. Henry and Kenneth Kantzer about 20th Century Evangelicalism

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In the spring of 1991, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and InterVarsity Christian Fellowship co-sponsored a two-day conference on the Deerfield campus entitled “Know Your Roots: Evangelicalism Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow.”

The hosts were two Trinity colleagues: 44-year-old New Testament professor Don Carson and 49-year-old church history professor John Woodbridge. The guests were two influential theologians of the twentieth century, 74-year-old Kenneth Kantzer (1917-2002) and 78-year-old..

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