Topic Archives: History & Biography

During my first seven years in the pastoral ministry (1980-1987), I felt very green — inexperienced, and in some ways unprepared. Before coming to Bethlehem Baptist Church at the age of 34, I had never been a pastor. I was in school full time till I was 28 and then taught college Bible courses until […]

After nearly three decades, John Bolt is approaching his impending retirement from Calvin Theological Seminary with admitted ambivalence, grateful to be liberated from long faculty meetings and other academic tedium but wistful about closing a long and lively chapter of engaging students with a bracing seminars on Reformed dogmatics. ‘I feel incredibly privileged when I […]

In John 10:17–18, Jesus teaches the relation between God’s eternal decree to save and Christ’s work on earth: ‘For this reason the Father loves Me, because I lay down My life that I may take it again. No one has taken it away from Me, but I lay it down on My own initiative. I have authority to lay […]

Around 245 years ago, something significant happened in Exeter, New Hampshire, USA. A large granite stone marks the spot where the event took place. Sad to say, people walk by this historical marker every day without knowing its significance. They do not know that God did something special in their town on September 29, 1770: […]

Among the ‘Notes’ in C. H. Spurgeon’s periodical, The Sword and the Trowel, for July 1890, is an item about the state of the Free Church of Scotland at that time. It looks back to the General Assembly of that year, when two divinity professors, Marcus Dods of New College, Edinburgh, and A. B. Bruce of […]

I returned to the countryside of Shropshire on Sunday, January 7. Just as a year earlier, I was to preach for the congregation at Lordshill Baptist Church near Minsterly, at Snailbeah, pastored by my friend Stephen Ford. We were hoping that we could use the old building but the heavy rain had turned the pathway […]

There was always my dear cousin Bobi. Being an only child, my cousins were important to me and none more so than Bobi who was nine years older than me. He would become my best man on my wedding day in 1964 and we would live more than five decades together in the same small […]

Many of us can recall the intense light and surprising warmth conveyed to our hearts when we first read the exemplary history of the Reformers and the Reformation Martyrs, along with their expositions of Scripture. Their brave and strong standing fast in the faith (1 Cor. 16:13) reached across the centuries and led us to new heights in serving […]

In the mid-twentieth century, those Christians who were willing to call themselves ‘Reformed’ or ‘Calvinistic’ were relatively few in number. Liberalism had done its work in the large  mainline denominations to discredit ‘Reformation’ doctrine. Evangelicalism had fallen so low that many dismissed theology altogether by saying that doctrine only divides. ‘Calvinist’ was a slur to denigrate a Christian and to advise […]

In 2012, a new five volume edition of the minutes and papers of the Westminster Assembly (1643-52) was published (Oxford University Press). This was the fruit of years of work by Rev. Chad Van Dixhoorn. This monumental work will probably form the basis for study o the Westminster Assembly for the remainder of this century […]

Robert Cecil Rayner, a beloved deacon and member at Salem Chapel, Braintree, Essex, for twenty-six years, passed peacefully away on February 9th, 2017, aged 73 years. After a severe illness he wrote the following, dated November 2014. The heading was this: ‘Toiling with Rowing on the Sea of Life’. * * * My first recollections […]

I finally paid my first visit to the new location of the London Evangelical Library. It used to be in Chiltern Street, above the original location of the Banner of Truth but now it is to be found on a little industrial estate in the north of the city, just off the north circular road. […]

This month marks 500 years since the day which is conventionally identified as the beginning of the Reformation. On 31 October 1517, Martin Luther, a monk and theological professor in Wittenberg University, nailed to the church door a set of 95 theses, statements intended for debate. They were provoked by the unscrupulous sale of indulgences […]

500 years ago, the Church in Western Europe was awash with influences calling for much-needed reform. Most of these influences flowed from the Renaissance, whose Christian scholars were weighing the contemporary Church against what they found in the Bible and the writings of the early Church fathers. Their greatest figure, Erasmus of Rotterdam, had in […]

Tomorrow, on the 31st October 2017, we commemorate what was the beginning of the Reformation under Martin Luther. One of the features of his life and work was the central place that the Scriptures played in the spiritual revival that brought about the Reformation. Luther did not think of himself as a Reformer; the reformation […]