history
Do we value heroes?
Michael Haykin
Real-life heroes are not in style in contemporary Western culture.
Ours has become a culture of cynicism and shaming, one in which heroes have no place. Even the traditional comic-book heroes like Batman and Captain America (two of my personal favourites when I was a young teenager!) have become troubled, deeply-flawed individuals.
history
A Mohawk called Molly
Michael Haykin
When Jonathan Edwards was ministering at Stockbridge, he encouraged his son, the future theologian-pastor Jonathan Edwards, Jr., to spend time learning the culture and language of the Oneida.
The boy went with a missionary, Gideon Hawley, to an Oneida village at the head of the Susquehanna, about 200 miles away from his family. The young boy was here from April 1755 to mid-January 1756. What amazing confidence the senior Edwards and his wife Sarah must have had in a sovereign God to send their son into such a potentially dangerous place!
history
Those who ‘rest in unvisited tombs’
Michael Haykin
In a recent statement regarding some of the cultural turmoil in North America, historian Owen Strachan, the Provost and Research Professor of Theology at Grace Bible Theological Seminary in Conway, Arkansas, made an observation about church history that I found quite surprising. He noted that ‘epic stands for truth … are usually taken alone, so high is their cost’.
I found it quite surprising because my own study of church history has given me a fundamentally different perspective. It is a perspective that I have learned inductively from church history (be it the Apostolic era with the Pauline circle, or the Cappadocian Fathers, or the Celtic Church, or the Reformers, or the Puritan brotherhood, or the Evangelical revivals of the 18th century), and it is namely this: God never does a great work in the history of the church except through a band of brothers and sisters.