Why subscribe to Historia ecclesiastica?

The content of this newsletter is devoted to reflections on the history of the Christian Faith.

Foundational to these reflections are my study of church history since the autumn of 1974, when I first took an introductory course in the history of Christianity at Wycliffe College and the Toronto School of Theology (at U of T) as part of year I of my Master of Religion. Subsequent courses included a number of courses in Patristics and one on Francis of Assisi as well as two theses focused on Christianity in the world of late antiquity (one thesis was on Augustine’s theology of history and the other on the concept of the eighth day in Greek Patristic thought—my thesis supervisor for both was the Rev. Dr Reginald Stackhouse of Wycliffe College).

After graduating from this programme of study in 1977, I spent that summer studying the letters of Ignatius of Antioch and Gregory of Nazianzus at McMaster University and then I entered the doctoral programme at Wycliffe College. I took a year-long course in Bede, who has long been a favourite historian (his work on the history of the church among the Anglo-Saxons gave me the title for this newsletter). My doctoral thesis was on the defence of the deity of the Holy Spirit in the Pneumatomachian Controversy of the fourth century. My supervisor, John Egan, S.J., had done his doctorate on Gregory of Nazianzus at the Sorbonne under Charles Kannengiesser, S.J., who, in turn was the last doctoral student of Cardinal Jean-Guenolé-Marie Daniélou, S.J., the internationally-known patrologist and historian and member of the Académie Française.

Graduation in 1982 led to a teaching position in church history at Central Baptist Seminary. I taught there till its merger in 1993 with London Baptist Bible College and Seminary to become Heritage Seminary and College, which is now located in Cambridge. After a brief spell as the Director of Joshua Press, founded in 1999, I returned to full time teaching and served as Principal of Toronto Baptist Seminary and Bible College from 2002-2006. In 2007 I became Professor of Church History & Biblical Spirituality at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. By the time that I joined Southern as a full-time church historian, my area of specialization had largely shifted to eighteenth-century British Dissent, especially, Andrew Fuller and his circle of friends.

So this fall marks exactly forty years that I have been serving Christ and his church as an academic historian and as one of the “Lord’s Remembrancers.”