Reclaiming the “Golden Age” of the Church?

By the year 1500, things were really bad in the church. But there were opportunities to hope: Many looked back with nostalgia to the simplicity and excitement of the apostolic Christianity of the first century. Could not this Golden Age of the Christian faith be regained, perhaps by pondering anew the New Testament documents? This …

Tracing the Origins of the Reformation

My hope, over the coming year, will be to try to fulfill the promise of this blog – to discuss the Reformation, from the point of view of the need for Reformation. … And in the process, I’ll hope to put some meat onto the bones of the skeletal history of the Reformation.

Anglicanism: It’s not what you think it is

The Gospel Coalition has a very good overview article. Here are some things you may not know about Anglicanism: 1. Since the arrival of Christianity in Britain in the 3rd century, British Christianity has had a distinct flavor and independence of spirit, and was frequently in tension with Roman Catholicism. 2. The break with Rome …

John Bugay speaks about the history of Roman Catholicism

Here’s a link to the Agora Forum talk I did Friday night (November 21, 2014). There were about a dozen people in attendance, and the discussion lasted a good while. My thanks to Dr. David Snoke for the invitation, and to all who attended and took part in the discussions. I had a great time. …

Getting the Starting Points Right

Richard Muller has provocatively titled his section on “the beginnings of prolegomena” as “Setting the Stage after the Production—on the Construction of Prolegomena”. We exist in our own time (just as the post-Reformation writers existed in their own time). The challenge for Christians today (as was the challenge for them, in their day) was, “what …

The Development of Theological Prolegomena

I’ve been posting selections from Richard Muller’s “Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics” series here for about six months now. What Muller has reported in earlier chapters is mere overview – in terms of the history and development of Reformed Orthodoxy – have been the continuities and discontinuities between the Medieval period of theology, and the Post-Reformation (especially …

“Dismantle the Papacy”? “Pope Francis” may be an ally in this effort.

I would see this as a positive, though incomplete, “development”. But they could not “dismantle” enough for my liking. And there is no papal repentance in this model. “The leaders of the “school of Bologna” have a very ambitious new project in the works: a history of the movement for Christian unity aimed at a …

Aquinas was the Problem; the Reformation was the Solution

As a former long-time Roman Catholic (from birth to about 18 and then from ages 23 to 38), I devoutly sought to understand and live according to the Roman Catholic faith. When I read through the New Testament at age 18, I didn’t find Roman Catholicism there; what I found changed the course of my …

The Jacob Aitken Reading List: “the ePistemologian’s Progress”

A portion of it, anyway. I found this list on Facebook – it appears to be a list of “things to read” before the year 2020. He says: This list was taken from Craig and Moreland (2003): 627-639 [Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview]. It’s a specialized list of technical works in philosophy and theology. …

The End of High Orthodoxy

High orthodoxy, then, is the era of the full and final development of Protestant system prior to the great changes in philosophical and scientific perspective that would, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, utterly recast theological system into new forms. There is perhaps some justification in dividing seventeenth-century orthodoxy into two phases. The first is …