Irenaeus was NOT a historian

Roman Catholic apologists frequently will trot out a passage from Irenaeus’s “Against Heresies” to prove that there was a “papal succession”. That passage has many difficulties, and I’ve pointed them out here.

Bluster without truth or substance

Responding to Andrew McCallum in comments below, Joseph Richardson not only misrepresented what “tradition” really meant in the New Testament, but he went further and congratulated himself for doing a fine job of things, and related it in a standalone blog post. Nevertheless, he showed himself to be making several crucial errors, and demonstrating a …

‘What is the church?’ Ask first ‘What does God intend for man?’

What is God’s intention with respect to man? That’s a key component in answering the question “what is the church?” While keeping the Reformed confessions in mind, G.K. Beale, in his A New Testament Biblical Theology: The Unfolding of the Old Testament in the New, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic ©2011) says this: My thesis …

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 …

Bryan Cross and Apostolic Succession

I’ve been asked to comment on this thread about “Apostolic Succession”: http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/03/doug-wilsons-authority-and-apostolic-succession/ I don’t have much time to spend on this, but I do want to suggest that any Protestants who are thinking of “crossing the tiber” over this issue — and even those who have — ought to give some serious consideration to the …

Paul ordained the second “pope”

Here is a primary source that will provide further illustration that the early church had no knowledge of any kind of “petrine primacy.” The “Apostolic Constitutions” was unknown in the West until the Middle Ages. Daniel O’Connor (“Peter in Rome”) dates the earliest form of the document in the early third century (that’s in the …

The Catholic Historical Method

It’s important to understand, when Catholics and Protestants approach a given topic, they approach things in different ways. In comments to a recent posting on the question of the origin of the Bible, one Catholic writer prefaced his statement this way: “Both sides, yours and mine both can be accused of question begging.” The dishonesty …