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John Chamberlain: And His Exemplary Missionary Success In India
Baptist missionary John Chamberlain (1777-1821) and his wife were called to India before the Baptist Mission Society (BMS) there had been able to organise itself for practical missionary work. There had thus been very few converts prior to their arrival, especially compared with the work of former and contemporary missionaries in India which very quickly gained true converts in large numbers. Only Dr John Thomas, one of the first Baptists, appeared to be pulling his weight in the early days of the mission but that often proved disastrous as Thomas could not handle money though his preaching gained the first mission converts amongst the Portuguese and Indians. A good number of thriving churches had already been planted in India, including several in the trading towns…
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John Howard: The Prisoner’s Friend
Baron Donald Soper is remembered for his London Hyde Park and Tower Hill soap-box campaign for a social gospel and his claim that Christians neglected the poor and needy. Whether this claim was just or not, Christians always need to be reminded that social responsibilities go hand in hand with practical religion. As James says (1:27), spotless saints are social workers. Seen from a brighter point of view, since the days of Ulrich Zwingli and Henry Bullinger, whose preaching served to ban poverty in their cantons, Reformed Christians have emphasised their social responsibilities to a high, but not over-balanced, degree. Indeed. from the sixteenth century to our present day evangelical Christians have shown what true religion is according to James, producing such social reformers as…
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Matthew Parker (1504-1575): Cleaning Up After Mary
Matthew Parker was the first Reformed Archbishop of Canterbury after the Marian persecutions ended. His task was far from easy as Mary’s tyranny and popish superstitions had left a dirty stain on the entire country. Parker’s person, work, testimony and deep learning, under Providence, enabled England to sweep away the past and embark on a veritable Golden Age for the Church which lasted throughout Elizabeth’s and James’ reigns until brought to a halt in the middle of the following century. I have chosen the term ‘Golden Age’ carefully, not so as to deny the many problems both theological and political that faced England throughout this period but to affirm that hardly any other age since then, including even the Great Awakenings of the 18th century,…
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Anne Bradstreet: Poet of Purity
It is an ancient maxim in literary criticism that all poets are liars and poetry provides an escape from the humdrum reality of life into the fantasies of Never-Never Land. Such critics have obviously not studied Anne Bradstreet who ranks with Milton, Herbert and Cowper as a poet of pure joy in contemplating God’s amazing grace vouchsafed to believers in order to combat the lies and errors of fallen mankind. Few poets are as uplifting as Anne Bradstreet because few poets have encountered and shared in spiritual truths as much as she. Thus Puritan John Norton is not exaggerating in the least when he says that if Virgil had been privileged to read the seraphic poems of Anne Bradstreet, he would have committed his own…
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Henry Bullinger (1504-1575): Shepherd Of The Churches
It has long been my conviction that not half of the story of the Reformation has yet been told. Happily, great men and women of God who were true pioneers and upholders of reform are now being rediscovered causing a radical alteration in our knowledge and even convictions concerning how the true faith was revived after centuries of papal superstition. I have previously striven in these pages to rehabilitate forgotten English Reformers and introduced the great reforming work of Continentals such as Martin Bucer. Perhaps no Reformer, however, has been neglected in modern times as much as Swiss-born Henry Bullinger, once called, not inappropriately, ‘the common shepherd of all Christian churches’. Today, few seem to know that Bullinger produced far more sound Christian writings than…
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Anne Hutchinson (1591-1643): The Failure Of The New England Experiment
Although it might be said that civil and ecclesiastical law were one in the Old Testament Dispensation, the New Testament clearly teaches that both non-Christians and Christians have civil rights and responsibilities and the powers that be, whether Christian or not, have an ordained duty to command obedience from the populace and maintain the right. Where New Testament Churches have usurped civil and secular authority by exercising Jewish case law and the authority of a Sanhedrin, they have failed in their calling as Christian leaders and reverted to un-Christian, and therefore worldly, means. Nowhere is this abuse of New Testament principles more crassly illustrated as in the so-called New England Experiment in general and the mocked-up trial of Anne Hutchinson in particular. Here we have…
