Justin Martyr before the prefect of Rome

Through reading Litfin’s Getting to Know the Church Fathers, I found out that the short narrative of Justin’s martyrdom is online at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, maintained by Calvin College.  Justin and others were arrested in Rome about AD 165.  The prefect (chief magistrate) of Rome first ordered Justin to sacrifice to the gods [...]

The Image-Bearer’s farewell: The letters of Ignatius of Antioch

Ignatius, bishop of Antich, wrote 7 letters on his way to be martyred in Rome, addressed to his friend Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, and to the churches in Rome, Ephesus, Tralles, Smyrna, Philadelphia, and Magnesia.  He appears to have died as a martyr around AD 110.  In each letter, he refers to himself as “Theophorus,” [...]

The European Heritage of Zionism

I’ve been episodically reading David Engel’s Zionism in Pearson’s “Short Histories of Big Ideas” series.  It seems like a good, fair, and readable introduction to the topic.
He distinguishes Zionism from “activist messianism.”  The latter, a religious movement,  grew in the 16th and 17th centuries and resulted in migration to Palestine in the 18th and 19th [...]

Happy 250th Birthday Charles!!!

That would be Charles Simeon, the great Anglican is who is perhaps unknown to many. John Piper had some great comments about Simeon (link).
Having just read through a biography of Simeon, I find him one that I aspire to model my own life and ministry after (less the celibacy).
For more info about Simeon, visit this [...]

Book Review: Mark Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln

My first response to Noll’s work is to express my appreciation and respect for the amount of research and expertise that went into writing America’s God.  Noll has a tremendous grasp of the different theological traditions of 18th- and 19th-century America, and displays impressive familiarity with the broader history of the United States in the [...]

Lincoln Bests the Theologians

The last major chapter of America’s God compares the subtlety and humility of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address in March 1865 with the way that theologians talked about the Civil War, which Noll finds predictable and self-righteous.  Noll writes that while American theologians in the mid-19th century often believed that they could interpret God’s sovereign will [...]

The free market and American Christianity

In my last post, I summarized Mark Noll’s (America’s God) belief that American evangelicals in the early 19th century generally accepted the developing free market, which brought great economic and social change to the new U.S.  I thought that Noll’s fuller explanation deserved an extended quote:
European Protestants, who for the most part maintained the ideal [...]

Influences on American theology: republicanism, commonsense morality, and the market

Noll now explores the changes in American theology that came after independence.  Noll believes that the new, republican order that overturned the religious and social establishments of the colonial period needed new institutions, and the expanding evangelical churches provided just that.  See this post for my summary of his explanation.
Chapter 11 of America’s God shows [...]

American hermeneutics and slavery

After chronicling the Americanization of Calvinist and Methodist theology, Mark Noll in America’s God turns to American biblical hermeneutics, the way that Americans read the Bible, in Chapters 18-20.  Noll argues that the American approach to Scripture in this period also came from both their Protestant heritage and their revolutionary/early national circumstances.  Noll has argued [...]

Calvinism and Methodism get Americanized

Chapters 13-17 of America’s God consider the process by which the two major theological traditions in early America became Americanized; in other words, each began using the language and assumptions that fit with the broader culture’s republican and commonsense philosophies.  This meant the softening of beliefs about man’s inherent and inherited depravity into a more [...]

Theological innovations in the American republic

Chapter 12 of America’s God explains the tenets of what Noll calls “American theology.”  He believes that as American evangelicals built a new culture, they also absorbed its assumptions; having torn down traditional authorities, they instead defended Christianity or their denominations with the language of republicanism and commonsense moral ideas rather than relying solely on [...]

Christ’s Triumph over Earthly Powers

Scholars have begun to think about the way that Jesus and Paul called the Roman Empire into question.  I think that it was this Christian Century article from 2005 that turned me on to the trend.  Peter Leithart’s article in First Things also explored the idea of Paul’s assertion of Christ’s triumph over earthly powers:
Paul [...]

Book Review of Mark Noll’s “America’s God” (Chp. 10)

Chapter 10 of America’s God discusses the cultural consequences of the rapid expansion of evangelicalism.  How, he asks, did evangelicalism come to play such an important role in the culture?
While crediting the interpretations of Gordon Wood, Robert Wiebe, and Nathan Hatch that stress the importance of the destruction of hierarchies by the American Revolution, he [...]

Book Review of Mark Noll’s “America’s God” (Chapter 7-9)

In Chapters 7-8 of America’s God, Mark Noll shows himself to be a careful historian as he documents how traditional and “innovative” theologies did not become “American” theologies during the period of the American Revolution.  In other words, even as “commonsense” moral philosophy and republican political theory became more accepted by evangelical Christians, they did [...]

America’s God, Chapter 6: “Theistic Common Sense”

In Chapter 6 of America’s God, Noll continues in his exploration of how American Christianity became so connected with two streams of thought that were often associated with heresy or liberal theology in Europe: republican political thought and common sense moral philosophy.
Protestants, and especially Reformed (Calvinist) Protestants, had usually embraced an Augustinian view of man: [...]

The marriage of Christianity and republican political theory in America

Noll’s fifth chapter analyzes the American combination of Christianity and republican political ideas, which was a rare combination in the 18th and 19th centuries.  You can see my notes on his previous chapter, where he explained more about this, here.
Noll argues that the most powerful influence in combining Christian beliefs and republican political principles was [...]

Christian orthodoxy and republican ideas: the American puzzle

Noll’s fifth fourth chapter in America’s God describes the unusual agreement between traditional Christians and republican political ideas in late 18-century America.  First, we have to define republican ideology.  Here’s how Noll does it:
American republican language returned constantly to two main themes: fear of abuses from illegitimate power and a nearly messianic belief in the [...]

Jonathan Edwards and the Decline of the Puritan Covenant

In Chapter 3 of America’s God, Noll writes that while Jonathan Edwards ably defended the doctrines of Calvinism in a way that understood the Enlightenment, his conception of the church represented a break with the Puritan ideal.
The Puritan covenant bound society and church under a covenant with God, using biblical Israel as the model.  In [...]

The Roots of American Theology

I’ve finally gotten a chance to begin, for at least the second time, Mark Noll’s America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln.  He’s set out an interesting task for himself: answering the question of how theological ideas in America became so thoroughly integrated with American cultural ideas.  Specifically, he is exploring how evangelical religious [...]

A Great American Document: Letter from Birmingham Jail

If you’ve never read Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” do two things.  First, ask yourself, “Why not?”  Then, check it out.  And if you have, it never hurts to look at it again.
King’s letter is a long response to Birmingham ministers who had criticized the demonstrations in Birmingham.  The Birmingham movement in the [...]