Tag Archives: Christmas in Europe

May 17, 2024

Christmas in Europe: Simon Gathercole in Cambridge

By Clarke Morledge

I am taking a break from listening to the cicadas singing this May to publish another post about our Christmas in Europe….Our last morning in Cambridge, England, during our “Christmas-in-Europe” trip in late 2023 and early 2024, was spent attending Eden Church.

Eden Church, a Baptist church in Cambridge, England.

 

One of the coolest surprises about visiting Eden Church was getting to meet a Christian scholar and author whom I have greatly respected over the years. My wife and I were sitting with our friends, Jon and Meredith Thompson, and their family (Jon is the executive director of the Cambridge House at the College of William and Mary).  Two rows ahead of us, I saw a man whose hair on the back of his head looked very, very familiar.  I asked Jon, “Is that Simon Gathercole two rows in front of us?”

“Why, yes, it is,” replied Jon. After the service, I made my way up to meet Simon Gathercole, a scholar of the New Testament and Early Christianity. Simon Gathercole is simply a great guy to meet, very friendly and not what one thinks of as a nerdy Bible scholar. Though confessionally an evangelical, Simon Gathercole’s research is highly respected across a wide theological spectrum, one of the tops in his field. We chatted about some of the books he has written and/or contributed to over the years.

 

Veracity blogger (me!!) with Simon J. Gathercole. United Kingdom New Testament scholar, Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity, and Director of Studies at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge.

 

My first encounter with Dr. Gathercole’s work was from a co-edited volume of the book, How God Became Jesus, a response to Bart Ehrman’s book of a similar title,  How Jesus Became God.  The book was reviewed here on Veracity back in 2014, ten years ago. Simon Gathercole wrote a chapter defending the idea that the Gospels really do make claims regarding the divinity of Jesus, in contrast to Ehrman’s claim that the theology of Jesus’ divinity emerged later in the history of the early church. Here is a sample of what Gathercole writes:

“Ehrman’s argument that the Jesus of Matthew, Mark, and Luke is a Jesus fundamentally different from the later preexistent, divine Jesus of the creeds is a flawed one. For one thing, preexistence is more deeply rooted in the Gospels than Ehrman recognizes (although, to be fair, most other commentators on the Gospels also underestimate its significance). More importantly, a divine identity is attributed to Jesus in the Gospels, and not merely a divine identity of a low-level kind” (p.102).

This is just a teaser, as the whole essay is remarkable. I highly recommend the book, and particularly Gathercole’s essay in it. I have a few other books written by Simon Gathercole on my “to-be-read” list, which I look forward to diving into at some point. It was such a pleasure to meet and converse with such as world-class Bible scholar!!

A final note…. if you like podcasts, and would like to hear Simon Gathercole speak, he was recently interviewed on John Dickson’s Undeceptions podcast, where he discusses the popular claim, advanced by skeptics like Bart Ehrman, that the four Gospels were completely anonymous, and so we have no idea who wrote them. Simon Gathercole takes a different view.  Check it out!

 

How God Became Jesus, by multiple authors, is a rebuttal to Bart Ehrman’s book, How Jesus Became God.

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April 27, 2024

Christmas in Europe: Ridley Hall and Tyndale House in Cambridge

By Clarke Morledge

Another travelog installment!! … One of the highlights of visiting Cambridge, England around Christmas this past year was the opportunity to visit places that I could really geek out about.  Readers of the Veracity blog will know that my two favorite topics to think about are church history and Christian apologetics. You have both topics in abundance to visit and consider in Cambridge, England.

Venturing across “the Backs” behind Queens College in Cambridge to find a few places in particular was an adventure. The rains had swollen the Cam River, but I was able to get a nice view of the “Mathematical Bridge” behind Queens College. It was a popular fable that Sir Isaac Newton had built this bridge, but actually it was a William Etheridge and a James Essex who originally built this unique structure, with lots of mathematical engineering involved, in 1749.

The Mathematical Bridge crossing the Cam River, behind Queens College in Cambridge, England. It was a dreary day in Cambridge when I took this photo, though the sun poked out a couple of times.

 

So, what is the church history connection with Queens College in Cambridge? Well, it was where Desiderius Erasmus lectured at Cambridge between 1511 and 1515.  While Erasmus was at Queens College, he was working on preparing his authoritative Greek edition of the New Testament, which Martin Luther read soon after it was published in 1516. It was Erasmus’ Greek edition of New Testament which convinced Luther that the Latin Vulgate had erred in certain places of Bible translation, thus sparking the Reformation in 1517.

The can of worms that Eramus opened while lecturing somewhere near this Mathematical Bridge in Cambridge some 500+ years ago is something that continues to impact how Christians read their Bibles today…. and most Christians know very little of the back story.

I had limited time during my excursion across Cambridge, with drips of cold rain fogging up my glasses. So I made my way to Ridley Hall, another Cambridge institution. Ridley Hall is a theological college associated with the Church of England, training persons for Christian ministry in the Anglican communion. Among Anglican schools, Ridley Hall is more on the conservative evangelical side of the church.

Ridley Hall, a theological college at Cambridge, England, hosts a number of well-known evangelical scholars.

More than a few Anglican/evangelical scholars have ties to Ridley Hall, but perhaps one my favorite scholars, currently lecturing there, is Richard Bauckham. Dr. Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses is on my “to-be-read” list, a favorite book of one of my former pastors, Doug Bunn (who now lives in Tennessee). Bauckham’s book is pretty “hot” in the scholarly world, as a number of skeptical scholars argue that none of our four Gospels contain eye-witness material, either by the author (as in the case of Matthew and John), or from those interviewed by the author (as in the case of Mark and Luke).

For fans of “The Chosen” film series, which features a nerdy former tax-collector, Matthew, constantly taking notes of what is happening, such critical scholars would argue that the film’s depiction of Matthew keeping an extensive diary is nothing but a fanciful idea that someone made up years after Jesus’ death. As an answer to those critical claims, Richard Bauckham is one of the few world class scholars who seeks to knock this scholarly skepticism down a few notches.

But there was still more to visit in Cambridge…. and since the Scott Polar Research Institute (the Polar Museum), where all sorts of artifacts related to North and South Pole exploration are kept, was closed that day (BUMMER!), I had to keep on going….

My final destination beyond Ridley Hall was to see where the Tyndale House was located.  The Tyndale House is kind of like an evangelical “think-tank” outfit, where scholars come to visit, do research, and write books that serve the church globally.  As the Tyndale House website states, it is “an international centre for research that specialises in the languages, history and cultural context of the Bible.”

The Tyndale House, in Cambridge, England.

 

It is a bit “Bible geeky,” to be sure, but Tyndale House publishes. a wonderful “Tyndale House Ink Magazine,” which dives into thoughtful articles about the language, history, and cultural context of the Bible, written from an historically orthodox, evangelical Christian perspective….. Stay tuned for more observations and notes from a “Christmas in Europe” in a few weeks.

The Tyndale House, in Cambridge, England.  Someone noted that I show up in a lot of my photos from our trip to Europe. I just wanted to prove to others (and myself) that I actually went to some of these places…. places that have fascinated me for years.  I had to pinch myself a few times to remind myself that I was actually walking the streets where Isaac Newton and James Clerk Maxwell were pondering the mysteries of the universe, and discovering truths which impact millions and millions of people on a daily basis.

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April 19, 2024

Christmas in Europe: Ypres and Dunkirk

By Clarke Morledge

Time for another installment of looking back at a trip my wife and I took this past Christmas to Europe…. I know we are now in mid-April and spring is here, but I still have Christmas on my mind.

Ah, Belgium! Waffles and fries! Unfortunately, both my wife and I got sick within a few days after arriving in Belgium. At first, I was still in better shape than she was, and I was pretty determined to make the most out of our Christmas adventure in Europe. So, while she rested up, I went with our friends Andrew and Shannon to take a “World War 1 & 2” tour day.

Clarke with friends Andrew and Shannon, in front of Cloth Hall, in Ypres, Belgium, which was restored after WWI. A fantastic museum in the Cloth Hall chronicles the story of the Western front in WWI, and the town of Ypres was right on the front lines of the action.

 

It was only about an hour’s drive from where our friends were living (a bit southwest of Brussels) to get to Ypres, a town that dates back to Roman times, which has seen more than its fair share of battles over the centuries. But the worst of it was in World War I, where Allied (French, British, Canadian, and eventually American) forces exchanged machine gun fire with German forces, in an exhausting effort to move the front line, one way or the other.  When Belgium was attacked by Germany in 1914, it triggered a series of alliance treaties which catapulted France and the British Empire into the war, and within weeks Ypres became a highly contested piece of real estate, a situation which lasted pretty much the entire war lasting four long years.

Ypres was one of the first sites on “the Western front” where chemical weapons, such as chlorine and mustard gas, was first used as a weapon of war. April 22, 1915 marks the day when during the Second Battle of Ypres a war power (Germany, in this case) first successfully used chlorine gas to dislodge enemy troops.  While chemical weapons are technically outlawed by international law now, such was not the case during World War I.

Yet the most bloody battle was the Battle of Passchendaele, where Allied forces were able regain just a few miles of territory from the Germans, but at the cost of some half a million casualties.  Well over a million battle casualties happened among the Flanders Fields surrounding Ypres  during the course of the war, with dozens of cemeteries scattered across the area, where people still visit today. Ypres is once again a beautiful place now, but a little over a hundred years ago, it was devastation. The town was almost completely flattened, and the towering Cloth Hall, pictured above was almost all but obliterated (see below):

Cloth Hall Tower, Ypres, [ca. 1918], Photographer Unknown, Canadian Expeditionary Force albums, Reference Code: C 224-0-0-9-1, Archives of Ontario, I0004760

After touring the museum at the restored Cloth Hall in Ypres, we drove yet another hour west to the English Channel, at Dunkirk, a port and beach resort town in France, for a stop to think about World War II. The story of Dunkirk is most remembered as the last place the retreating British Expeditionary force stood on mainland Europe’s soil in 1940, in the face of encroaching and overwhelming German troops. The then new British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, insisted that remaining French troops be rescued, along with British troops, and this whole story is associated with the call for private shipping vessels to assist in the miraculously successful evacuation of thousands of military personnel across the English Channel.

The beaches of Dunkirk, France. Thousands of British, and eventually French troops waited on these beaches to be evacuated across the English Channel, as they faced a superior German fighting force, in 1940, in the early years of WW2.

 

Standing on the beaches of Dunkirk, which in the typical summer months is still a popular resort location, it was hard for me to imagine the helpless feeling many of those soldiers felt, pinned down on these beaches, as occasional German fighter planes sought to strafe the beaches, with RAF fighters in pursuit.

You would think that the horrors of the great world wars of the 20th century would have convinced humanity that guns and bombs do not solve social problems, but the human rebellion against the ways of Christ demonstrate that we are all in need of a Savior. Followers of Jesus do not all agree on how to respond to the dilemmas which wars present, but to make an end of them should be our ultimate goal. While chemical weapons are still a concern, the even more terrible threat comes with nuclear weapons, and there are credible rumors that such weapons might be developed to be used in space, to knock out satellites and cause electromagnetic surges, that can wipe out sensitive electronics here on earth, putting the lives of those who depend upon such sensitive electronics at tremendous risk. With two other major wars happening across the globe right now; namely, the Israeli/Gaza war and the Ukraine/Russia war, there is much that Christians can do to pray for peace. We live in difficult, difficult times.

One more reflection about Ypres is in order….

Ypres was also one of the sites where the “Christmas Truce” of 1914 was celebrated, a brief respite from the atrocities of war, as French, British, and Germany soldiers put down their rifles and played soccer in “No Man’s Land.”  Folk singer John McCutcheon wrote a song about the “Christmas Truce,” which is one of my favorites.

I will have a few more posts looking back on our trip to Europe this past Christmas later in the spring.

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February 9, 2024

Christmas in Europe: A Tour of Cambridge, England

By Clarke Morledge

My wife and I were able to tack on a few extra days, after our Christmas stay in Belgium, to go and visit friends staying in Cambridge, England.

Jon Thompson, the director of the Cambridge House at the College of William and Mary, had taken his family back to Cambridge, where he had previously studied philosophy, before eventually coming to Williamsburg, Virginia. A wide-ranging group of believers in Williamsburg had prayed for several years for the founding of a Christian Study Center at William and Mary, so it has been wonderful to see how God brought Jon Thompson and his family to Williamsburg less than two years ago, to oversee the work at the Cambridge House.

Our Christmas in Europe made it possible to meet up with Jon and his family in his old “stomping grounds” in Cambridge, England. Sickness made traveling quite difficult for us, but Jon was able to take me on a tour of the university town of Cambridge one afternoon.

Jon Thompson, director of the Cambridge House, at the College of William and Mary, took me on tour of the namesake for the Cambridge House, the university town of Cambridge, England, in January, 2024. We are standing in front of the residence the Thompsons’ had while in Cambridge for a few weeks.

 

Part of Jon’s interest in coming to Williamsburg to serve as the director of the Cambridge House at the College of William and Mary stems from his experience as an intern at the Round Church, a medieval church building in the very center of Cambridge, which now serves as a Christian Study Center for the academic community of Cambridge. This was also where we began our tour of the town of Cambridge, England.

William and Mary Cambridge House director, Jon Thompson, in front of the Round Church, now a Christian Study Center, in Cambridge, England.

 

Cambridge, England is an interesting college town, as it is actually a network of loosely affiliated colleges, all part of the Cambridge academic community. The famous Christian apologist and Oxford scholar, C.S. Lewis, spent the last nine years of his life as the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English for Magdalene College, one of the many colleges that are part of Cambridge. Our official tour guide for a “Christian Heritage” tour of Cambridge, was a wonderful young lady who told us about Lewis’ teaching career at Magdalene, as we gazed across the river Cam, looking at the Bridge that crosses the river, hence the name of the city: “Cam-Bridge.”

 

Visitors to Cambridge often will go “punting” along the River Cam to view colleges that dot its shoreline. However, the river was running quite high while we were in Cambridge, and the cold weather discouraged us from any “punting” experience.

 

The neat thing about this “Christian Heritage” tour is that we got the opportunity to visit inside some of the various colleges, where several of the colleges typically charge separate fees to visit. Some of greatest names in church history are tied to the Cambridge community, not just C.S. Lewis. For example, William Wilberforce, the 19th century evangelical Christian leader and outspoken advocate for getting rid of the British slave trade, attended St. John’s College. We were able to walk the grounds of St. John’s College and even take a few minutes to visit inside of the beautiful Chapel at St. John’s:

The courtyard of St. John’s College in Cambridge, England. Several Christian leaders in the early 19th century attended college at St. John’s, including William Wilberforce.

 

St. John’s Chapel at St. John’s College, in Cambridge, England.

 

We even had the opportunity poke our heads in and glance at the Cavendish Laboratory, led in its early years by James Clerk Maxwell, a leading Scottish scientist of the late 19th century and devout evangelical Christian, whose meditation on the doctrine of the Trinity helped to inspired him to develop his field theory of electricity and magnetism.  His work on “Maxwell’s equations” directly influenced Albert Einstein to develop his theories of relativity. Einstein described Maxwell’s work as the “most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton.” It was at Cavendish Laboratory that the existence of the electron was first discovered:

Entrance to the Cavendish Laboratory, historically one of premier physics labs in the world.

 

What a treat it was walk along the same streets that some of the greatest names in intellectual history have walked: from Isaac Newton to William Wilberforce to James Clerk Maxwell to Clives Staples Lewis.

I will have more photos from our Christmas in Europe trip in future Veracity blog posts.

Emmanuel College, in Cambridge, England. The school was founded by Puritans, with one of its pupils being Thomas Harvard, who would later travel to New England and establish the first English-speaking college in the Americas, which still bears his name.

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January 27, 2024

Christmas in Europe: Bruges and Ghent, Belgium

By Clarke Morledge

My wife and I were able to spend the Christmas season in Europe in late 2023 and early 2024. The details only came together at the last minute, but we ended up staying with friends near Brussels, Belgium for Christmas for almost two weeks. Then just after New Years, we took the Eurostar train underneath the English Channel to eventually meet up with other friends in Cambridge, England for a few days.

Throughout 2024, I plan on posting a few photos and stories of our trip to Belgium and England for Christmas 2023. We did not cover as much territory as we did with our 2022 trip along the Danube, but we did get to experience what Christmas was like in Europe.

It was quite a crazy trip getting to Belgium: missed flights, lost luggage, you name it, all on Christmas Eve. The stress made us susceptible to getting sick while we were in Belgium, which made it difficult to enjoy everything, but we tried to make the best of it. We even flew through Iceland in between volcanic eruptions, only about 12 miles from the airport, which eventually damaged part of the fishing village, Grindavik. We also had to find a way to dodge the threat of a labor strike on the London Tube, which would have interfered with our return trip out of Gatwick Airport back to the United States. The whole trip seriously made me have second thoughts about ever traveling by air again!

Christmas markets in the central city square of Bruges, Belgium, around dusk. Belfort bell tower in the background.

 

Bruges, Belgium

The city of Bruges, Belgium is enjoyable to walk through as everything is mostly compact. We visited a few days after Christmas, and the streets were really crowded, which was not our type of thing. But it did give us a chance to see what it was like with Europe’s fabled Christmas markets, where vendors were out selling Christmas foods, and in Belgium, particularly waffles, fries, and especially chocolate!

As my contribution to the Veracity blog is mostly about church history and Christian apologetics, I can not resist saying something about those subjects here. A country like Belgium has become increasingly secularized during the modern period, but its church history is largely well preserved, so its Christian heritage is unavoidable. There are several beautiful churches to visit in Bruges, one of them being Saint Salvator’s Cathedral, which dates back to the 13th century.

Interior of Saint Salvator Cathedral in Bruges, Belgium. The church was greatly expanded after a roof collapse in the 19th century. Yet aside from that, Saint Salvator’s Cathedral largely escaped centuries of strife, particularly the destruction inflicted by the devastating wars of the 20th century in Belgium.

More so than in many other cities throughout Europe, Bruges has sustained its medieval character, and a walk through Saint Salvator’s Cathedral serves as a great reminder of the historical influence of Christianity that pervades Europe, with so many works of art displaying stories from the Bible and instances of conversion of various Christian persons during Europe’s long history.

On a trip like this, I like take along with me an audiobook that gives insights into the history. Tim Blanning’s massive and learned The Pursuit of Glory: The Five Revolutions That Made Modern Europe: 1648-1815, part of the Penguin History of Europe series was the perfect guide. It was during this period between the Thirty Years War and the end of the Napoleonic wars when Europe made the transition from being the locus of Western Christendom to the emergence of nationalism as the guiding ideology. Belgium was right in the center of this story, with Napoleon’s famous defeat at Waterloo chronicled at the ending chapter of Blanning’s book, and the site of the battle less than a hour’s drive from where we stayed with friends.

The emergence of a post-Christian Europe has had a long history behind it, as nations like Belgium and the United Kingdom continue to wrestle with this significant spiritual shift. Consider the British monarchy, where the late Queen Elizabeth was perhaps the last of the firmly evangelical, historically orthodox Christians to lead a European country. Her son, King Charles III, has a more progressive take on Christianity, who considers himself a “defender of faith” as opposed to being a “defender of the faith,” as his mother was. Now Charles’ son, William, the heir apparent, wants very little to do with the Church of England. A recent news story suggests that William would like to sever ties with the Church of England, but that is not quite as easy as it sounds. Pray for spiritual revival in Europe!!

Ghent, Belgium, and Its Famous Altarpiece

The same day we traveled by train to visit Bruges, we also stopped over in Ghent, a much bigger city than Bruges, where riding a bicycle is really the most efficient way of getting around. The highlight of Ghent was seeing the Mystic Adoration of the Lamb, at Saint Bavo’s Cathedral.

This altarpiece has been popularized the most in recent times by George Clooney’s 2014 movie, The Monuments Men. The Nazis during the World War II occupation of Belgium had stolen the Mystic Adoration of the Lamb, with the intent of installing this great work of art in one of Hitler’s planned museums after the war. But with the impending defeat of Germany, there was concern that great works of art might be destroyed by Hitler, so the Allies formed a special military unit that sought to safely recover the art works stolen by the Nazis. The Mystic Adoration of the Lamb was one of those pieces restored to its rightful place.

The Mystic Adoration of the Lamb dates back to the 15th century, a product of the Dutch painters, brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck. Each panel stunningly displays a story or person from the Bible. If you ever go visit this yourself, I would recommend booking a time slot in advance, as this will help to avoid long lines of the many visitors who come to gaze at the altarpiece. My photo in no way captures its brilliance (but clicking on the photo to expand it might help). My only regret was in not seeing the altarpiece opening and closing, but there are some good videos out there that suffice.

Speaking of Waterloo and Napoleon above, the Ghent Altarpiece was captured by French Revolutionary troops in 1794, but the painting was returned to Saint Bavo’s Cathedral after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815. The thefts by Hitler and Napoleon only account for two of the thirteen times the Mystic Adoration of the Lamb has been stolen across the centuries.

The Mystic Adoration of the Lamb, in Saint Bavo’s Cathedral, in Ghent, Belgium. Stolen by the Nazis and recovered by “the Monuments Men.”

Look for more highlights of our Christmas in Europe trip in the coming weeks and months on the Veracity blog.

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