Category: Theology

Today is the birthday of Moses Maimonides (born March 30, 1135, died 1204), the twelfth-century Sephardic Jewish intellectual who wrote The Guide for the Perplexed, which was a very influential book for international philosophical theology in the late middle ages and beyond. In the history of Jewish thought, Maimonides is often referred to as the…

Charles Wesley (born 1707, died March 29, 1788) lived a long and fruitful life, died peacefully at home, and was buried in the yard of his parish church. His family was gathered around him and some of them wrote descriptions of how he died. His death was not really remarkable except that it was such…

Donald Grey Barnhouse (March 28, 1895, died 1960) is best remembered as the pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, and his most far-reaching ministry was through the radio show “The Bible Study Hour” (later re-named Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible). Among his many books, the most important is probably his four-volume homiletic commentary on…

Francis Nathan Peloubet (1831-March 27, 1920) decided the most strategic thing he could do as a pastor was to train Sunday School teachers how to teach the Bible to their students well. So he travelled and lectured, wrote books and articles about it, and networked inter-denominationally to support the Sunday School movement any way he…

Dawson Trotman (born March 25, 1906, died 1956) was the founder of the Navigators, a Christian ministry that is famous for Scripture memorization and one-on-one discipleship. Both of those emphases seem to have flowed directly from the personal charisma of Daws, as his friends called him and as his biography is entitled. Converted as a…

Fanny J. Crosby (born March 24, 1820, died 1915) was the prolific blind hymn-writer who captured the ethos of late nineteenth-century evangelicalism and set it to music. We had to wait until just a few years ago for a substantive critical biography of Crosby: In 2005, Edith L. Blumhofer published Her Heart Can See: The…

Gregory the Illuminator is the man who persuaded the king of Armenia to renounce idolatry and accept Christianity. That was in the year 301, making Armenia the first nation to become officially Christian. According to Armenian legends, the gospel had come to them long before that official conversion, though. Supposedly, Thaddeus, one of the 70…

On March 22, 1758, Jonathan Edwards died in Princeton, New Jersey, from complications that set in after a smallpox vaccination. It was a surprising turn of events, right when Edwards thought he was starting an exciting new phase of his life’s work. He had moved to Princeton just a few months before, to assume the…

March 21, 1748 is the day that John Newton (1725-1807) would look back on and commemorate for the rest of his life as the beginning of his conversion. But it wasn’t much of a conversion, in some ways: He was pumping water out of a storm-damaged ship somewhere in the Atlantic and expecting to die…