Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) was the foremost theologian of his day. Many regard him as the first great Christian philosopher. His father urged him to go into politics, but Anselm wanted to study in a monastery. It was before the age of...
Leaders of the Dutch Reformed Church of the Netherlands offered Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen (1691-1747) an intriguing proposal. They needed a young, enthusiastic minister to lead four small churches in Raritan. Theodorus assumed Raritan was an...
People say, “Seeing is believing.” Not according to poet George MacDonald. “Seeing is not believing,” he said, “it is only seeing.” John records in his gospel an account of a man born with congenital blindness (John 9). Jesus restores his physical...
We have turned the Good Samaritan parable into a mushy morality tale. You know, be like the Good Samaritan and show kindness to people. We have tamed this provocative short story and blunted its subversive impact. Make no mistake, when Jesus first...
British Parliament passed the Contagious Diseases Acts in 1869 to stop the spread of venereal diseases, especially among the Royal Navy. The law afforded police broad powers to arrest and detain any women suspected of prostitution and subject them...
He seemed ill-suited to pastor a church in a remote fishing village along the English coast inhabited by sailors earning their living from the sea. While sailors had minimal education, he was a first-rate scholar and accomplished poet. He brought...
He described himself as "timorous and averse to debate." You could have fooled me. I can't detect a trace of timidity in him when he was called on the carpet for refusing to comply with the Act of Conformity of 1662 (called the Glasgow Act in...
I came upon Sermons of the Great Ejection recently, nine sermons from well-known Puritan preachers delivered on the Sunday before the Act of Uniformity of 1662 became law. The Church of England had become the official state religion, and anyone who...
Gertrude entered a German monastery at five years old. It's a shockingly early age to take up residence in a convent, perhaps bordering on child abuse to our modern sensibilities. But if you wanted your daughter to receive an education in the...
Just for the record: Christians disagree with each other. Sometimes, we disagree in the strongest possible terms. John Wesley and Count Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700-1760) had much in common. John led a movement called Methodism to...
The Reformed tradition (think Calvinism) and the Lutherans weren’t getting along in seventeenth century Germany. The feud was long-standing, and their theological differences were hotly debated. Paul Gerhardt (1607-1676) came to Berlin to pastor a...
On paper, William of Orange (1650-1702) and Mary Stuart were the odd couple. He was twenty-six; she was barely fifteen. William was five inches shorter with a crooked nose and a hunchback, described by one eyewitness as "the plainest man in...
Why do we complain so much? Are we venting pent-up emotion? Are we seeking to connect with people who share our mutual dissatisfaction? Are we seeking an outlet to validate hurt feelings? Frequently, as I research prayers to inclusion in Prayers...
She was an elegant young woman living in an affluent section of London. She heard a missionary speak about the need for more workers to share the gospel in the hill country of southern India, nicknamed "the mountains of death" for diseases like...
We seek pleasure; we avoid pain. Our gravitation toward pleasure and avoidance of pain is universal to human experience. We run from pain and avoid it at all costs. We self-medicate at the slightest hint of discomfort. Here’s a counter-intuitive...
What prayer is appropriate for Halloween? I considered a line from a 1909 poem by Alfred Noyes, "From ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties and things that go bump in the night, Good Lord deliver us," but decided against it. October 31,...
Gustav Niebuhr immigrated from Germany to America in 1885 at eighteen. He worked as a farmhand until he answered the call of a sermon to enter the ordained ministry. He went to seminary, interned for an evangelist in San Francisco, and married the...
Marcion of Sinope was a second century church leader who was later censured for differentiating the Old Testament God from the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ in the New Testament. He dismissed the Old Testament God of wrath in favor of an edited...