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A Western Renaissance
Western Europe in the eighth century was dominated by what historians call the “Carolingian Renaissance.” Not to be confused with the later fifteenth and sixteenth-century Renaissance, the eighth-century variety got its name from the ruling dynasty of France, the Carolingians …Read More
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All Truth Is God’s Truth
During the nineteenth-century potato famine in Ireland, my great-grandfather, Charles Sproul, fled his native land to seek refuge in America. He left his thatched roof and mud floor cottage in a northern Ireland village and made his way barefoot to …Read More
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God’s Truth Abideth Still
One could perhaps make the argument that the history of the church consists of one division after another. Nevertheless, while history is replete with ecclesiastical divisions, there is a unity that transcends all the worldly clamor and devilish confusion surrounding …Read More
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War and Peace
We all certainly agree that all virtues are heavenly and that all sins are deadly. Nevertheless, certain virtues are more heavenly than others, and certain sins lead to death more quickly than other sins. While some sins are private and …Read More
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When Christianity Shaped the Arts
Christians today often talk about influencing the culture through the arts. This often means, in practice, Christians letting themselves be influenced by the culture through the arts. In the seventh century, though, we see Christianity as a powerful imaginative and …Read More
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The Lone Monk
The seventh century is something of a forgotten epoch for most Protestants. But it is well worth knowing. The creative heart of its theology lay in the East — the Byzantine Empire, centered on Constantinople. Here the Christological controversies of the …Read More
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The Rise of Islam
Two things unite most Muslims: their belief in the unity of God and their veneration of Muhammad as the channel through which God’s final revelation was given. Muslims claim that God revealed the Qur’an to Muhammad whom they …Read More
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Back to Barbarism
We Western Christians have been sending missionaries to spread the Gospel to cultures throughout the world. We sometimes forget that, unless we have a Jewish background, our cultures too were originally evangelized by missionaries. This is certainly true for those …Read More
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Bread and Circuses
Our strategies are often rather far from God’s strategies. Indeed, the simple fact that we sit down to strategize may be a sure sign that we are far from God’s chosen path. We are plotters and planners, who …Read More
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Columba: Missionary to Scotland
In reading the “lives of the saints” it is difficult to the point of impossibility to discover the unvarnished truth. That is certainly true in the case of Columba, or Columcille, the Irish missionary to the Scots and Picts in …Read More
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Boethius: The Philosopher Theologian
One of the least known but most significant Christian thinkers of antiquity was a sixth-century layman called Anicius Manlius Torquatus Severinus Boethius, or simply Boethius for short. The son of an old senatorial family, he lived between 480 and 524 …Read More
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The Benedictine Rule
Ever since the New Testament epistles were written, Christians have received advice on how to live the Christian life. How much should we pray? What progress can we expect to make in achieving biblical holiness in this life? Is perfection …Read More
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Gregory “the Great”
A candid review of the accomplishments of Gregory, known as “the Great,” gives pause to an evangelical Protestant about such an exalted attribution. That he was a conservator of orthodoxy, an effective missiologist, and a zealous and clever churchman cannot …Read More
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The Battle for Grace Alone
The early part of the fifth century witnessed a serious controversy in the church that is known as the Pelagian controversy. This debate took place principally between the British monk Pelagius and the great theologian of the first millennium, Augustine …Read More
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The Light of Glory
Humanistic historians and secular sociologists are eager to assign their carefully crafted, far-reaching labels to just about anything. Centuries-long periods of history and entire generations of people have been adorned with meaningless titles and simplistic definitions. From the so called …Read More
