Aqueduct Project

  • "Jonathan's presence with us at Wycliffe Hall and within the wider University of Oxford was a great blessing. Our students very much valued his enthusiastic teaching of Greek language and his insights into biblical thought. His lectures combine a commitment to Scripture with a deep knowledge of the early church period—which always gives his teaching an added quality of historical depth." — Rev. Dr. Peter Walker, Associate Vice-Principal of Wycliffe Hall, University of Oxford
  • "Jonathan's teaching on A History of Christianity: The First Five Centuries was very helpful for our pastoral staff; it was eye-opening and well worth our time. I warmly recommend him to you." — Dr. James Samra, Senior Pastor, Calvary Church, Grand Rapids
  • "Jonathan's seminars are informative, well-packaged, and fascinating biblical presentations that are both academically excellent and spiritually enriching." — Joel Beeke, Ph.D., President of Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary, Grand Rapids
  • "Dr. Jonathan Armstrong's courses on the Interpretation of the Bible in the early church and the mission and expansion of the church in 30-180 AD have been excellent both in terms of their content and presentation. They contributed significantly to the quality of our programme and have enhanced the students' understanding of the importance of the early church's history and its relevance for understanding the Bible." — Tchavdar Hadjiev, D.Phil, IFES Associate Regional Secretary for Europe; Academic Dean of the United Theological Faculty of the Bulgarian Evangelical Theological Institute
  • "Studying Paul's Epistle to the Romans gives us the best understanding of the gospel message that Paul preached... Jonathan J. Armstrong's seminar at ETS in the fall of 2008 helped our students to realize the importance of this book for their lives and ministry." — Alexei Gorbachev, Ph.D., Academic Dean of Eurasian Theological Seminary, Moscow

Interactive Broadcasted Classes

I've dreamed of facilitating an interactive broadcasted class for over a year now, and this semester the dream has finally become a reality. I am pleased to announce that we are now broadcasting lectures in the "Christianity and Western Culture II" class at Moody Bible Institute‒Spokane. The broadcasted lectures are interactive, publicly accessible, and absolutely free!

You can view our most recent lecture on Princeton Theology and the Nineteenth-Century Revivalists at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCA87m8ntUE03XMLh2Rkf8KA?feature=

Via this same link, you can also subscribe to our YouTube channel and receive an email update and direct link for all of our future lectures.

For an information sheet containing step-by-step instructions on how to join these live lectures, please click here. Feel free to pass on this information sheet to anyone you know who might be interested!

The project grew out of an idea I had while watching a DVD of John Piper preaching at one of our morning chapel services at MBI. As John Piper delivered his sermon, I noted that he had four overhead screens on stage behind him. The screens were serving more or less as banners to decorate the stage. I leaned over to my wife who was sitting next to me and said, "I'd like to teach my church history class with four overhead screens."

It turns out that our small college campus only had two spare projectors on Tuesday mornings when I taught my church history class, and therefore I could have only a maximum of three overhead screens in class during the lecture. But the precise number of projectors in class was really beside the point, because I quickly discovered that I couldn't effectively manage even three screens alone! So, I recruited an assistant to run the PowerPoint presentations while I lectured.

Soon we learned that my assistant could also monitor an online chatroom during the lecture. Because I had over 100 students in the class that semester, and because it was simply impossible to stop the lecture every time a student had a question, the online feedback proved to be tremendously valuable. My assistant would answer the elementary questions (e.g., "how do you spell Bernard of Clairvaux?" or "what did Prof. Armstrong say happened in 1453AD?"), and he would post the more advanced questions on one of the three overhead screens. I could then discuss the more interesting questions with the class at a convenient moment in the lecture.

As the project grew, we realized that if we could broadcast the lectures live, we could create a geography-free, arbitrarily large, global classroom. This is a tremendously exciting project for me as it represents a significant step forward towards Aqueduct Project's goal of seeing quality theological education available at no or modest cost to every interested person on the planet.