Historians such as Michael Legaspi—in his 2011 book, The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies—have drawn attention to the changing nature of biblical studies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this period, the Bible came to be seen more as a historical object of study as opposed to a sacred book. … Read more
Ernest Gordon Rupp said of Thomas Monck’s Cure for the Cankering Error of the New Eutychians (1673), “No high churchman, no orthodox Anglican, not Daniel Waterland himself produced an abler defence of catholic doctrine” (Rupp, 1986). Monck’s Cure was a biblical and theological polemic against the rising tide of Antitrinitarianism in England and the emergence … Read more
Within a decade of his death, William Wilberforce became a victim of revisionist history at the hands of his own sons. In their classic five-volume biography, Robert and Samuel Wilberforce portrayed their father as something he was not: higher and more inflexibly Anglican than he truly was. After his ‘Great Change,’ however, Wilberforce was doggedly … Read more
The so-called “Kansas City Prophets” were a group of charismatic leaders associated with the “New Apostolic” movement, including Paul Cain (1929-2019), Bob Jones (1930-2014) and Mike Bickle. For a crucial period in the late 1980s and early 1990s they were brought within the Vineyard Movement by John Wimber, and via Wimber they gained access to … Read more
Anglican and Protestant traditions are recipients of the ecumenical achievements of the twentieth century. This has borne fruit in the interest in doctrines of theosis. Across denominational lines, doctrines of theosis are being constructed in ways that remain faithful to the central defining dogmas and practices of each tradition. These traditions utilize sophisticated methods of … Read more
Jonathan Edwards says that “love” is the main thing in justifying faith. In Charity and Its Fruits, Edwards writes, “love is an ingredient in true and living faith, and is what is most essential and distinguishing in it.” Again, Edwards says, “All saving faith and hope have love in them as ingredients, and as their … Read more
Jürgen Moltmann claimed some decades ago that “A. Schlatter, Jesu Gottheit und das Kreuz, 1913, deserves to be recalled from oblivion in the context of today’s Christological questions.” This presentation offers an introduction to Schlatter’s Jesus’ Divinity and the Cross (1901, 1913), in which he critically engages with Konrad Grass’ study, “On the Doctrine of … Read more
Since the founding of the Evangelical Alliance at London in 1846, global evangelicals have endorsed a kind of “small-e” ecumenism. What began initially as a united response to the threat posed by a militantly-expansionist Roman Catholicism (termed at the time, the ‘Papal Aggression’) and early Protestant liberalism eventually led to conferences in major cities and … Read more
The first narrative historians of the English Baptists, Thomas Crosby (1683–1751) and Joseph Ivimey (1773–1834), used Baptist assemblies and confessions in their histories to call Baptists of their own days to unity, but did so in different ways and with different goals. In order to minimize the theological and social differences between Particular and General … Read more