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The Gospel-Driven Life: An Interview with Michael Horton
Tabletalk: Please tell us how you became a Christian. Michael Horton: My parents were faithful Baptist believers, although my mom was really the spiritual leader in the home when it came to daily devotions together and encouraging me to pursue the faith for myself. I’m grateful to them and to those churches that fostered Bible memorization and taught me some of the basics of the gospel, even though it was more Arminian by default. When I began wrestling with the doctrines of grace, my mom was my main conversation (or argument) partner, and eventually both of my parents embraced … View Resource
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Revival & Repentance: From Cluny to Simeon
In the ninth century, Christian civilization had almost been destroyed in western Europe by the Norse invasions. Unlike today’s benign neo-pagans, Vikings were ferocious, skull-cracking warriors who burnt down churches, slaughtered clergy and monks, and raped nuns. The tenth century, however, saw a remarkable turnaround. One by one, the Norse kingdoms embraced Christianity. The process had actually begun toward the end of the ninth century in England, when the Danish Norsemen submitted to Christian baptism as part of a peace treaty with Alfred the Great. In the tenth century, the Norsemen of France, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Iceland followed suit. View Resource
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Setting the Stage: The First Millennium
Volumes have been written giving detailed analyses of the extraordinary things that occurred in the first thousand years of church history, events that influenced everything that came after them. In this brief overview, I’m going to look at five dimensions of activity that had monumental impact for the future history of Christianity. View Resource
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The Church in Asia
William Carey and Hudson Taylor are among the many household names connected with Christian missions in Asia. Before them, Francis Xavier, Matteo Ricci, and others left indelible marks on world-wide Christian history. However, such colorful figures are only part of the picture of missions in Asia. An adequate overview requires focusing on the central character involved — God Himself. We also need to expand our time frame for God’s dealings with the vast array of people throughout Asia. The Bible reports God’s special redemptive acts that took place long ago in western Asia. After calling Abram from Ur (present-day Iraq) … View Resource
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Ecclesiastical Myopia
Perhaps the most remarkable statement I ever heard a man utter from the pulpit was: “He has a penurious epistemology, which tends to be myopic.” I was seated in the balcony of the church when that statement was made, and I could not restrain myself from laughing aloud. I nudged my wife Vesta and said, “I just might be the only person in the church who understood what that man said.” What is a penurious epistemology? A penurious epistemology is a theory of knowledge that is poverty-stricken or on the verge of bankruptcy. Such a view of knowledge, if it tends … View Resource
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The Old Mission Field
Missionaries from Europe and America took Christianity to the ends of the earth and evangelized Africa and Asia. Now, as Christianity declines in the West, churches from the old mission field are the ones defending historic Christianity and are evangelizing Europe and America. Now that the American Episcopal church is embracing homosexuality and rejecting historic Christianity, many conservative congregations from that body are breaking away and affiliating instead with a North American mission from the Anglican churches of Nigeria and Rwanda. When the liberal state church of Sweden refused to ordain pastors who would not accept the ordination of women, the … View Resource
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What if the Muslims Won?
On October 10, 732 a.d., some 80,000 Muslim cavalrymen attacked 30,000 Frankish infantrymen near Tours in present-day France. Those Muslims had already conquered Northern Africa and Spain, and they were poised to sweep over the rest of Europe. Normally, foot soldiers are no match for horsemen with lances, especially when outnumbered. So the Frankish king, Charles “The Hammer” Martel, arrayed his men at the top of a steep wooded hill, hoping that having to charge uphill and avoid trees would at least slow down the Muslim cavalry. Most importantly, he had his men huddle together to form a large square, … View Resource
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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 Dublin — to the wharf from which he sailed to New York. After registering as an immigrant at Ellis Island, he made his way west to Pittsburgh, where a large colony of Scots-Irish people had settled. They were drawn to that site by the industrial steel mills led by the Scot, Andrew Carnegie. My great-grandfather died in Pittsburgh in 1910, but … View Resource
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The Key to C.S. Lewis
C.S. Lewis was not only a Christian apologist and lay theologian. He was also an unusually imaginative and creative novelist. And in his day job at Oxford and then Cambridge he was an astonishingly perceptive and influential literary scholar. At a time when the modernist literary establishment was obsessed with depressingly bleak realistic fiction, Lewis sent readers’ imaginations soaring in his Chronicles of Narnia. While the modernists were looking down their noses at popular genre fiction, Lewis was writing the provocative science fiction of his Space Trilogy. In his apologetic and theological writing, Lewis was surprising both non-believers and emotional … View Resource
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Cultural Evangelism, Seventh-Century Style
Christians today often talk about evangelizing the culture, transforming the culture, and finding ways to communicate with people of another culture. What that looks like can be seen in seventh-century English literature. J.R.R. Tolkien was as great a literary scholar as he was a writer of heroic fantasy. In his article “Beowulf: The Monster and the Critics,” Tolkien described the worldview of Germanic paganism as held by the early Angles and Saxons who seized Britain from the Celts. Whereas the Greek religion with its philandering gods had little moral content, he said, the Germanic religion featured a strong moral dualism. … View Resource
