Basic to religious belief is the question of what constitutes the authority for belief. Historically there have been three main views of what constitutes the ultimate authority: the Bible, church tradition, and human reason, either alone or in combination. The Puritans, following the lead of the Continental Reformers, claimed Scripture alone as the final authority for religious belief. "The rule according to which conscience is to proceed, " wrote Cotton Mather, is "what God has revealed in the Sacred Scriptures." "This is the glory and sure friend of a church," added John Lightfoot, "to be built upon the Holy Scriptures...The foundation of the true church of God is Scripture."
One of the problems with most church history books is that they tend to overwhelm rather than inform. This is largely due to the fact that church history is taught like every other type of history: a long and boring series of names, dates, and events. While this approach is a defeating way to teach any kind of history, it is especially detrimental to church history. Why? Because church history is not primarily the story of individuals, it is the story of Christ building His church on earth. Although individuals are certainly a key (and necessary) component to the church-building effort, they are not the end of the story, they are merely the beginning. A book on church history that fails to ask the question "What was God doing here?" will also fail to teach its readers anything of lasting value. It matters little if modern Christians can rattle off the fact that the East and West divide between the Greek and Latin churches happened in 1054, if they are unaware of why this "great schism" happened in the first place. The "happening" is mostly meaningless without the context of what led up to it.
This poem invokes God's protection on a journey (either literal or the
metaphorical "journey of life") against all manner of evils, including
"the spells of women and smiths and druids". It dates from the 8th
century and is traditionally attributed to St. Patrick. It is composed
in the same style as pagan protection charms from Ireland, but with
clearly Christian content. It was translated into English by Cecil
Frances Alexander as the popular Victorian hymn "I bind unto myself
to-day."
The human agency, both in the histories out of which
the Scriptures sprang, and in their immediate composition and
inscription, is everywhere apparent, and gives substance and form to
the entire collection of writings. It is not merely in the matter of
verbal expression or literary composition that the personal
idiosyncrasies of each author are freely manifested by the untrammelled
play of all his faculties, but the very substance of what they write is
evidently for the most part the product of their own mental and
spiritual activities. This is true except in that comparatively small
element of the whole body of sacred writing, in which the human authors
simply report the word of God objectively communicated, or as in some
of the prophecies they wrote by Divine dictation.
The history of Christianity in the United States is a controversial topic in our modern day and age. Secularists and humanists want to claim that Christianity had little influence on the formation of this country, and that the influence that it did have was detrimental at best, tyrannical at worst. On the opposite side are Christian historians and scholars that want to find Christianity behind every event and decision that was made in the more than 400 years that have elapsed since the Mayflower crossed the Atlantic. While it is true that the secularists generally understate the case, it is also true that many Christians tend to overstate it. The real story, as it so often does, lies somewhere between these two extremes.
Since Christian Reader is a division of Tolle Lege Press and the 1599 Geneva Bible is the flagship product of Tolle Lege, it seemed proper to write a review of this product for those of you who aren't familiar with it. Although it seems a bit strange to write a review of the Bible, this edition of the Scriptures is important for so many reasons that it does warrant an article to highlight some of its key features and its historical place in Christian history. Although most Christians are familiar with the King James Bible, very few are aware of the Geneva Bible. In fact, it was this historical ignorance, coupled with the frustrating lack of a usable facsimile version, that led to the founding of Tolle Lege Press in 2004. With that said, let's take a closer look at this unique Bible.
I have something of a love/hate relationship with "daily devotional" books: I love the idea of them, but hate the reality of them. Creating a book filled with daily inspirational and motivational readings is a great concept, but more often than not the final product ends up being an emotional mess of a book, filled with page after page of "Christianity Lite." It has gotten so bad that a particular series of books, sadly one of the best-selling ones, admits that it is nothing more "chicken soup for the soul." Chicken soup doesn't actually do much for you when you have an illness, but it does make you feel better. Such is the state of nearly all of the devotional books available for the "Christian soul."
"The destruction of Jerusalem was more terrible than anything that the world has ever witnessed, either before or since. Even Titus seemed to see in his cruel work the hand of an avenging God."—Charles Spurgeon
The Early Church and the End of the World by Gary DeMar and Francis Gumerlock asks this fundamental question: "What did the earliest of the early Christian writers actually believe about prophetic events?" We can only answer this question by studying what they wrote. Unfortunately, we do not have a complete record of the period. Many of their surviving works are only fragments of larger works no longer available to us. To make an historical investigation even more difficult, there are translation issues. Many of the works of those who wrote just before the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 and beyond have not been translated into English.
In The Fabulous First Centuries of Christianity, Vance Ferrell writes this:
Cumont, Olcott, and others clearly show that December 25 was the yearly date of the annual birth of Mithra, the Sun god—the leading heathen deity of the Empire. On this date, his followers celebrated the fact that the visible orb of the sun was again rising higher in the sky, following the winter solstice. (On December 21, the sun is actually at its lowest; but its rise is not visibly perceptible until four days later.) Emperor Aurelian made Mithra's December 25 birthday an official holiday throughout the Empire about A.D. 273...This midwinter pagan holiday was eventually declared to be the solemn anniversary of the birth of Christ—and called "the mass of Christ." [1]
Every year around Christmas time, we are treated to yet another (often just a repeat of previous “findings”) naturalistic explanation of the biblical “star of Bethlehem.” It seems to be a foregone conclusion of these types of writings that if an astronomical explanation for the star was to be found, the entire birth narrative—and ultimately the Gospel itself—could be finally dismissed as a myth. The writers of these articles never seem to catch the irony of using modern scientific methods to rescue a certain historical fact (like the appearance of the star) reported in the Gospels in order to prove another part wrong (like the virgin birth). One would think it would be more consistent to dismiss the whole thing as myth and be done with it. But rationalists are seldom so rational.
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