On Faith, Freedom and Roman Catholic History

Dr. Darryl Hart has posted a thought provoking piece on the acquiescence of Roman Catholic ecclesiology to “Americanism” here.  He cites the work of the 19th century Presbyterian minister, Lyman Beecher who foretold that the intermingling of Roman Catholics with the then predominant Protestant culture of America would “wear away” the caste system of Romanism.  …

You will know them by their fruits.

Beggars All: Reformation And Apologetics: The Popes Against the Jews, Part 5: “You will recognize them by their fruits.”

Get out of Dodge

Over at BeggarsAllReformation.blogspot.com, Jason Engwer and I became involved in a discussion about the early church fathers. Jason pointed me to a work by D.H. Williams on the topic of “Evangelicals and Tradition: The Formative Influence of the Early Church (Evangelical Ressourcement: Ancient Sources for the Church’s Future).” In those comments, I applauded Williams’s work, …

The Spice Woman and the Symmachan Forgeries

The Called to Communion guys have an article out by this long title: The Primacy of Peter According to the New Testament: and the Principle of Historical Fulfillment The article, “a guest post written by R.E. Aguirre, General Editor of Paradoseis Journal,” defends the notion that Peter was an important apostle, and it seeks to …

Called to confusion

In his work, “Called to Communion,” Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger enthusiastically quoted Joachim Jeremias, the German Lutheran theologian and professor of New Testament studies, from his work “New Testament Theology”: “We must reduce the whole question quite sharply to a single point: the sole meaning of the entire activity of Jesus is the gathering of the …

Not Called to Communion: Dishonest about “Exegesis”

The Roman Catholic Church makes some astounding claims for its own authority. And if anyone could, in our day, be said to put forth the best argument for that authority, it would be hard to find a better person than Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith – the …

Looking at Ratzinger’s “Called to Communion”

I’ve accused Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) of being dishonest in his use of language and sources, and this is another example. I plan to do a more complete examination of Ratzinger’s defense of the papacy in his 1996 work “Called to Communion,” but I wanted to point out a particularly egregious example of …

The Official Roman Catholic Policy of Obstruction of Justice

I’ve already written about Rome’s Institutionally Sanctioned Lying. An institution as old as the Roman Church has obviously, over the centuries, adopted policies to deal with the reporting of sexual scandals in its ranks. It has learned how to lie about them: [One abuse victim] was particularly angered by the use by Church authorities of …

Rome’s Institutionally Sanctioned Lying

I’ve used the “L” word with respect to Roman Catholics, on more than one occasion. And generally speaking, these charges have been dismissed as baseless or uncharitable.    In our day, the history of that institution has been largely forgotten, or whitewashed. But the casuistry (argumentation that is specious or excessively subtle and intended to …