Essay / On This Day
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose birthday is today (October 21, in 1772), is remembered today as the poet who left us the Rime of the Ancient Mariner and the strange fragment Kubla Khan. But in his own time he made waves as an amateur theologian. And
Essay / On This Day
Today (October 20) is the birthday of Stuart Hamblen (1908-1989), the cowboy singer. His story is a little bit larger than life. The public conversion of this radio star at Billy Graham’s 1949 Los Angeles crusade was a major media event. Hamblen had lived a
Essay / On This Day
Today (October 18) is the day Matthew Henry (1662-1714) was born. The right way to celebrate his birthday is to read the Bible and pray. Henry left a literary legacy that helps you do both. His commentary on the Bible is a remarkable achievement: a
Essay / On This Day
Today (October 12) is the birthday of Frederick Fyvie Bruce (1910-1990), a great Bible scholar who described himself as an “unhyphenated evangelical.” A collection of Bruce’s shorter writings bears the title A Mind for What Matters, and the phrase fits him well. In fact, it
Essay / On This Day
Today (October 10) is the birthday of Jacobus Arminius (1560-1609), the Dutch theologian whose given name was Jakob Harmenszoon. If he had been American, we’d have called him Jimmy Harmenson. But he wrote theology in Latin, and for some reason it has been the latinized
Essay / On This Day
Today (October 8 ) is the day that the Fourth Ecumenical Council, the Council of Chalcedon, began in 451. In a 2007 blog post about Chalcedon, I said Chalcedon means classic christology. Of course Chalcedon was a city near Constantinople, but the theological meeting held
Essay / On This Day
Today (October 6) is the day the martyrdom of William Tyndale in 1536 is commemorated. Tyndale changed the world with a revolutionary Bible translation that moved straight from the original languages into English with no Latin middle-man. The very words of Scripture were thus unleashed
Essay / On This Day
Today (September 8) is the birthday of Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499-1562), a Protestant Reformer born and trained in Italy, later active in England and Switzerland. Though he was forced to move from city to city and was sometimes in danger, Peter did not in fact
Essay / On This Day
Today (September 1) is the day Henry More (1614 – 1687), one of the Cambridge Platonists, died. More wrote a lot of very difficult theology, some of it in extended poetic form. He was a strange mix of rationalist and mystic. He was an important
Essay / On This Day
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
Essay / On This Day
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
Essay / On This Day
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