I bought Dominion following its mention in Evangelical Times (‘Atheists in praise of Christianity’, August 2020). Its objective is ambitious: ‘to explain how we in the West came to be what we are, and to think in the way that we do’ (p.12). According to Tom Holland, what we in the West are is,…
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What can we learn from the history of the church for our engagement with our own culture today? Let me begin with a caution: we should not read the stories of the great figures of church history to feed our fantasy of becoming them and reproducing their cultural context. Not only would that be…
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I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It comprises 33 short overviews of the lives of believers throughout history who were dedicated to serving God by spreading the gospel at home and abroad. For me it was a memory jogger, bringing back salient particulars of renowned servants of God. Beginning with the Apostle Paul, it then…
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Three NT scholars spoke at Westminster Chapel in June 2009 seeking to provide Christians with reliable scholarly evidence for the historical basis of the Christian faith. The hope was that Christians would be equipped to share their faith more confidently. The response was so good that the three spoke again this June at St…
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Shortly after arriving in London from my native west Cornwall 25 years ago, while working for a few months at the Evangelical Library, I was thrilled to discover Paul Cook’s Westminster Conference paper on ‘The forgotten revival’. The glimpses of God at work in the early 1800s in places I knew well fascinated and…
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As an Ulsterman I have read quite a lot about the 1859 revival in my beloved homeland. So it was good to be given the opportunity to review this book. It was first published in 1860 and carries firsthand accounts of what took place the previous year. It was written by John Weir, an…
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This is a stimulating book to read, particularly at a time when the church is finding it increasingly difficult to bring the gospel to a culture dominated by man, materialism and secularism. The relevance of this account is pressed home when one reads that, before the revival began, the influence of the clergy was…
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