Helping you see Jesus as the Good, the True, and the Beautiful
In an English village, late in the eighteenth century, stood a humble workshop. Over its door, a sign announced, “Secondhand shoes bought and sold.” Inside, the shoemaker, William Carey, repaired a neighbor’s boot or, when time allowed, continued his study of Latin and Greek. Over the workbench was a crude…
The reading below comes from “Church History in Plain Language” by Bruce L. Shelley. At the opening of the Age of Progress, the greatest power in English religious life was the evangelical movement, sparked and spread by John Wesley and George Whitefield. The chief marks of the movement were its…
Watch the video below and comment on one of the excesses or errors that became evident in the Second Great Awakening and also one positive thing that came from this period.
How did we get from a Protestantism based upon theology and confession like traditional Lutheranism and Calvinism to the modern idea of Christianity with a focus on personal devotion and individual sanctification that we see in the preaching of Whitefield. This shift towards Pietism is the missing link. Watch the…
Please read Story of Christianity, “Eastern Orthodoxy in the Early Modern Period” pages 299-305. Answer the questions below that correspond with your reading. Important to Know: The Orthodox Church in the United States is relatively small in comparison with other religious groups perhaps numbering in the range of one million…
[responsivevoice_button] The Great Awakening also had a powerful political dimension, particularly in the southern colonies. The Anglican faith had long nurtured the old ties between the colonies and the Mother Country. Baptists and Methodists, however, felt no such connection. Moreover, as the new sects emphasized personal belief and action over…
[responsivevoice_button] The traditional religions of Great Britain’s North American colonies—Puritanism in New England and Anglicanism farther south—had difficulty maintaining their holds over the growing population. The main reason for this was that the frontier kept pushing further west, and the building of churches almost never kept up with this westward…
Please read Story of Christianity, “Deism, Enlightenment, and Revolution” pages 294-298. Answer the questions below that correspond with your reading. Important to Know: The words atheism and agnosticism are forms of Greek words and the prefix a, which means “no” or “none.” Theos is the Greek word for “God,” and…
<== Previous Lesson [responsivevoice_button] Many in the next generation, the first of the eighteenth century, felt fewer obligations to the Christian past, so instead of trying to harmonize nature and Scripture, they simply set aside revelation. Many intellectuals claimed that the parts of the Bible that agree with reason are…
<== Previous Lesson [responsivevoice_button] In the early American colonies from the earliest days of the Jamestown colony until 1700, colonists from Britain settled along the east coast in areas now known as Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Virginia. While we think of these colonists as coming to find religious freedom.…
<== Previous Lesson [responsivevoice_button] The ability to seek the truth about God and live according to our beliefs has been an essential part of American order from the beginning. No other nation has such robust protection of religious freedom. It didn’t start perfectly, nor is it perfect today, but James…
<== Previous Lesson [responsivevoice_button] I think the Puritans get a bad rap. In our modern times, which are marked with a quest for individual rights and sexual freedom, Puritan has come to mean a religious snob who does his best to keep people from having fun. H.L. Mencken was an…
<== Previous Lesson [responsivevoice_button] In Story of Christianity by David Bentley Hart, read the chapter “Colonies and Missions” on pages 281-287. Converted by Love or Force Columbus gave the island that he landed on a proper Spanish name as he claimed it for Ferdinand and Isabella. He called it San…
[responsivevoice_button voice=”US English Female” buttontext=”Listen to Post”] This was an ugly time in which the political head of the church was a bit of an embarrassment. However, Thomas Cranmer and other Archbishops of Canterbury were molding this new Anglicanism (Church of England) in a way that didn’t completely separate with…