church history on Authentic Faith

The Grand Prince of Kiev (now called Russia), Vladimir the Great, was under intense pressure to choose a national religion. The year was 987 AD, and paganism was quickly going out of fashion. More and...

One common mistake is assuming that everyone else finds faith easy, while we alone struggle. Yet there is comfort in recognizing that we are not alone in our pursuit of Christ in the midst of a broken...

I cannot submit my faith either to the pope or to the council, because it is as clear as noonday that they have fallen into error and even into glaring inconsistency with themselves. If, then, I am no...

Brother Lawrence, a 16th-century Carmelite monk, spent his days scrubbing pots and mending shoes. Largely uneducated, he filled his free time writing letters and notes that, after his death, friends g...

A Story from the Philokalia A story is told in  The Philokalia  about a young monk who went to an older monk to confess a struggle. The older monk was appalled, telling the young monk that his strugg...

How many modern Christians consider dying to be the worst thing that can happen to them? We pray for safety, healing, and protection, and rightly so. However, do we live in the truth that death has tr...

Every person in Scripture lived out a personal story incarnated by an even greater story about God, life, and the world. That story came from the politics, theology, and culture ingrained in their mem...

The Creed was the focused, worshipful expression of people whose lives had been totally transformed by the Bible and by the risen Jesus Christ. The Creed’s words are not windows with the shutters pull...

Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.

Love Loving the Word of God is a great pursuit, but it’s not always easy. Like most love relationships, there are inevitable highs and lows. And as teachers of the Bible, many of us walk a delicate...

Imagine you are an alien who earned your interstellar passport and decided to spend a day on planet Earth. Suppose you picked a small town somewhere in the United States. Maybe you wouldn’t be surpris...

When Johann Sebastian Bach sought to convey the heart of Christian truth through music, he chose the Mass as his foundation. His B Minor Mass begins with a heartfelt plea from the full chorus and orch...

Tradition is not the worship of ashes but the preservation of fire.

Luther's stand at the Diet of Worms is legendary. Having written blistering indictments of the abuses of the Catholic church and theological treatises which challenged its teachings, Luther was su...

In Book Eight of Confessions , St. Augustine recounts how, in a state of deep inner turmoil, he “heard from a nearby house a voice, as of a boy or girl, I know not which, chanting repeatedly, ‘Ta...

Indeed, those who become disciples of Christ, instead of fighting each other, stand arrayed against the demons by their lives and deeds of virtue, putting them to flight and mocking their prince, the ...

In a way, the Reformation began in one monk's overwhelming guilt. Martin Luther was riddled with guilt and filled with anxiety because he could see that he could not live up to God's standard ...

Amy Carmichael was a passionate missionary to India. She gave her life for the sake of those who had suffered the consequences of an unyielding caste system. She also had her suffering, due to physica...

Have you heard the acronym “K. I. S. S”? It stands for “Keep It Simple, Stupid.” Paul doesn’t exactly call the Corinthians stupid (in 1 Cor. 15), though elsewhere Paul sounds tempted to do so, when ...

Jesus, You name us Beloved, Blessed Son, Daughter Sibling, Heir Help us remember You name us Child of the King Redeemed, Forgiven Saved by grace through faith Help us remember You name us Ligh...

Martin of Tours was a 4th century Frankish soldier who, after a personal encounter with Jesus, left the Roman army and became a hermetic monk and later a bishop. Dozens of stories of his life have cir...

In George Bernard Shaw’s play about Joan of Arc , as Joan faces her execution by burning, she addresses those in power who have condemned her: “I will now go to the common people and find comfort in ...

When we reach the point where the Creed no longer looks or sounds to Christian people like a declaration of the gospel, there is need, I believe, for some whistle-blowing and reassessment of what goes...

Prayer should be brief, frequent, and intense.

The church is the bearer of a message to all nations: that in Jesus Christ God has acted decisively for the salvation of the world.

We taste Thee, O Thou Living bread, And long to feast upon Thee still: We drink of Thee, the Fountainhead And thirst our souls from Thee to fill.

The Cave One of the most famous passages in Plato's Republic is his "Allegory of the Cave," which is found at the beginning of book seven . Socrates imagines the human condition al...

The early Christian writers used some stunning expressions of delight and gratitude when they mentioned Jesus’s death. Think of Paul saying, “He loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20), or “The ...

The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.

It is quite enough that you have sinned. Now let go of it. Don’t let your despondency lead to an even greater offence. The Lord says, ‘I do not wish the death of the sinner, but rather that he repent ...