On this episode of five minutes in church history we are looking at a minister a book and a

controversy actually we could say it's two books and two controversies but but just one minister. The minister is Thomas Boston.

He was born in 1676 and he died in 1732. He was born in Scotland to a covenanter family. He was educated at Edinburgh and

for a time was a schoolmaster and then in 1699 he became the pastor at a small parish church in

Simprin and now we can get into the two controversies.

One was a book that he wrote.

Now, he is a minister of a small congregation.

His most well-known book is a book called Human Nature

in its fourfold State.

It's a wonderful book that discusses who we are in Adam

and so much more importantly and happily who we are in Christ.

He also wrote his memoirs.

He had a number of sermons that were published.

One was called A Crook in the Lot. But he also wrote a very learned

and scholarly treatise on, of all things, Hebrew vow points. Now, if you know anything about the Hebrew language,

you have the consonants,

but then you have to have these literally little dots

that are sort of placed around and above the consonants and those are called the Hebrew

vowel points and Thomas Boston wrote a book called Tractatus Stigmologicus

Hebrewo biblicalus. Now it's interesting why he would do this it just didn't grow out of a private study of his own

it was actually an issue of controversy in his day and there were those who thought the

vow points were inspired by God and there were those who thought they were

...