Resources by Charmley, Gervase N.

We have made these studies of the so-called Great Heresies because they represent significant false steps in the history of Christian teaching; in each of them a true teaching is distorted, and so becomes false. Each precipitated a crisis that forced the Church to look deeper into the Scriptures and consider the fullness of God’s […]

The Great Heresies – 4 Introduction The study of what historians refer to as ‘the Great Heresies’ is no mere intellectual or antiquarian exercise, but shows the main lines of error that have affected the Church over the centuries. In Gnosticism we are confronted with the lure of claimed secret knowledge, and of a matter-spirit […]

The so-called great heresies are worthy of examination for a number of reasons, one of which is that they represent the main lines of attack against Biblical Christianity. With the exception of Gnosticism, which begins with the claim to secret knowledge apart from the Bible, they depend on a distortion of the Biblical witness. Modalism […]

Calvin’s sermons on Paul’s epistle to Titus have been available in the form of a facsimile of the 1579 edition of Calvin’s sermons on the letters to Timothy and Titus. This new translation by Robert White, however, has the pleasing effect of making them more accessible to the modern reader, as well as more portable. […]

Introduction In addressing what are called ‘the Great Heresies,’ it is important for us to recall that heresies usually represent what Alister McGrath has called ‘a failed attempt at orthodoxy,’ (Heresy [London, SPCK, 2009] p. 13) an attempt to make sense of the Bible that fails to take into account the full richness of the […]

Introduction When Jude writes in his Epistle, ‘Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints’ (Jude 3), he expresses a need that […]

A review by Gervase N. Charmley of John Knox, by Jane Dawson (Yale University Press, 2015), 384 pages, clothbound, ISBN 978-0-30011-473-7, £25/$45. John Knox was born in either 1514 or 1515, and so this period has called forth a welcome variety of works celebrating, or at least commemorating, the Scottish Reformer. This handsome volume, standing […]

Of all the major Reformers, John Knox is the one about whose early life we know the least – a fact that may come as a surprise since he wrote a History of the Reformation in Scotland.1 We cannot even be certain of the year in which he was born; it was either 1514 or […]

Augustine of Hippo is without doubt one of the most significant figures of the early Church, and perhaps the most important of all those to write in Latin. It has been said that, ‘Apart from the Scriptural authors, no other figure had a greater impact on Christian life and thought up to the time of […]

A review article by Gervase Charmley of Kevin DeYoung’s What Does the Bible Really Teach about Homosexuality?1 and Ed Shaw’s The Plausibility Problem.2 Homosexuality is the hot topic of the day and age in which we live. After the recent Irish referendum on so-called same-sex marriage, the Roman Catholic church in that nation spoke about […]

Eugene Peterson published The Message: The New Testament in Contemporary English in 1993. A whole Bible version was finally completed in 2002. The casual shopper in the average Christian book shop today could be forgiven for thinking that it is yet another of the veritable flood of English translations of the Bible that have been […]