Strength to Strength welcomed Stephen Russell for this wrap-up talk on our Sacred Roots series. In the Sacred Roots series, we have surveyed the history and development of the Church of Jesus Christ from its founding through to the end of the Reformation. We will look at what happened during this 1600 years, both the good…
Strength to Strength welcomed a group of four panelists to answer your hardest questions on church history. This Q&A is not limited to specific topics discussed in our Sacred Roots series, but is limited to questions of church history in the first 1500 years. During this Talk, David Anderson was asked for recommended reading for non-scholars…
Strength to Strength welcomed Stephen Russell to discuss the events and background that led up to the Reformation. The Reformation was an earthquake preceded by a thousand tremors. In this Talk, we will now look at numerous factors which were significant in setting the stage for the Protestant Reformation (1517–1648). First we will look at a…
Strength to Strength welcomed Stephen Russell to discuss the church during the medieval period. Medieval Europe is often seen as the Dark Ages. It was a time of great changes and turmoil. G. K. Chesterton, referring to that period, wrote in Orthodoxy, The Church was the only thing that ever brought us out of [the Dark…
Strength to Strength welcomed Stephen Russell to discuss how the apostolic church's original stance towards their earthly nation shifted over time. The first 300 years of the Church’s existence were marked by distrust and persecution of the Church by the Roman Empire. The next twelve centuries reveal an ever-closer entanglement of Church and State in western…
Strength to Strength welcomed Stephen Russell to discuss Gnosticism and its effects. Today’s Gnostics are the secular materialists. At first it may seem strange to name them Gnostics since they do not reject the physical, indeed they only believe in the physical. However, like the early Gnostics they reject part of God’s good creation and try…
Strength to Strength welcomed Stephen Russell to discuss Gnosticism and its effects. God has told us in the first two chapters of Genesis about the world he has made. It has a spiritual and a physical aspect. And, it is all good. But in the early days of the church there were those who rejected the…
Strength to Strength welcomed Stephen Russell to discuss radical peacemaking. The early church and the first Anabaptists heard not only that God loves us and wants to save us, but they also heard, more clearly than many other Christians, that turning to Jesus has definite and clear implications, namely, that God’s people are to cooperate…
Strength to Strength welcomed Stephen Russell to explore a defense of Biblical authority against its critics. Stephen begins by giving a summary of what the Scriptures consist of and how they were formed. Following this, he speaks of all people's quest to understand their own lives and the world around them. In our desire to…