Athanasius is best known for his defense of the divinity of Christ at the Council of Nicaea in 325. But Arianism was not his only target. Whenever he recognized a false, threatening teaching, contrary to the truth of Scripture, he engaged it with argument. In this passage from On the Incarnation of the Word, he countered the Epicureans, who claimed that everything was matter and that the universe was the result of blind natural forces. Though Athanasius wrote 15 centuries before Darwin, his challenge to materialism anticipated one of the arguments raised today against evolutionary theory—that natural selection is […]

  This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success. Joshua 1:8 (ESV)

   President Thomas Jefferson awoke on New Year’s Day 1802 and readied himself for a parade. The festivities, held in his honor, featured the presentation of a 1,235-pound cheese—an odd gift from the iconoclastic Baptist preacher John Leland and the citizens of Cheshire, Massachusetts. The cheese turned into a great media spectacle as it traveled down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the White House to be received by the commander in chief. Hailed as “The greatest cheese in America for the greatest man in America,” Leland explained that the massive dairy product was a symbolic “thank you” to Jefferson for his efforts […]

  The annual Pig Roast will be held Sunday, September 9. The church family will attend Sunday School and morning worship as usual. Then we proceed to the fellowship hall for a meal shared together. Men of the church roast the pig. The fellowship provides the meal.  Bring a dessert to share.

Pastor John Scripture Reference: Hebrews 12:18-24

First Baptist Church of Perryville will be sending a  Construction Mission Team to Joplin, MO on Aug 18-25, 2012 to assist in restoring homes lost or damaged in the wake of the EF5 tornado that struck on May 22, 2011. They will give their report on Sunday, September 2 at 6:30pm. First Baptist Church of Perryville is located one and a half miles east of Rt. 222.

Abigail Adams was wife of John Adams, the second president of the United States. Her mother was of the distinguished Quincy family, and her father was one of a line of prominent Congregational ministers. She bore John five children and raised them largely in his absence, since he was often away in service to their emerging nation. Their extraordinary correspondence sustained their love and common purposes. In this selection from a November 5, 1775, letter, Abigail addressed the importance of godliness in a public servant. Without it, he or she provides a damaging example and is easy prey for compromising […]

In trying to bring Christian teaching to bear on society, socialist-type ideals have long exerted a powerful attraction. In 1848 (the same year as the publication of Marx’s Communist Manifesto) two Church of England clergymen, F. D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley, launched the Christian Socialist Movement (CSM) which has continued in various forms to this present day, existing as a “critical friend”1 of the British Labour Party. Many Western Church denominations and ecumenical agencies like the World Council of Churches and the American National Council of Churches have spawned social action departments which consistently favor socialist-type solutions to economic problems. […]

  Like most of America’s historic private universities, Vanderbilt University was founded by Christian believers for the purpose of inculcating Christian beliefs in its students. Vanderbilt was founded in the 1870s by Methodists and later funded largely by New York’s Vanderbilt family. Within a remarkably short period of years, Vanderbilt had forfeited its conservative Methodist roots in order to identify with the emerging secular consensus in American higher education.

Glenn T. Stanton COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (BP) — U.S. Rep. Barney Frank infamously asked a question earlier this decade that has become one of the central questions surrounding the same-sex “marriage” debate: “How will my same-sex marriage harm your marriage?”