Quotes on Social Inequality from the Protestant Tradition

I’ve posted a few articles on Christianity and inequality (see here, here, here, and here).  I list more quotes here, especially more from Calvin. I have also included quotes from Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, non-theologians and philosophers on inequality. Augustine (354 – 430) Peace between man and man is well-ordered concord. Domestic peace is the well-ordered concord between those …

Social Hierarchy and Protestant Resourcement

Simon Kennedy at the The Calvinist International has written a piece explaining the primary aim of the website. He writes, One of the aims of the The Calvinist International is the ‘renewal of Christian wisdom’ to re-invigorate the Church. The method for this renewal is a principled retrieval of classical Protestant Christianity. The retrieval is …

Social Hierarchy in the Christian Tradition

Reformed Christian ethics has taken a social egalitarian turn. Recently, a few Reformed bloggers have criticized Christians for failing to support the “radical and inclusive social ethics” of the New Testament. Matthew Tuininga, in a couple interesting and well-written posts on the Presbyterian role in racial segregation (see here and here),[1] has condemned the southern …

Catholics to Beatify Sola Scriptura

For the first time “on American soil” a saint is to be declared.  Apparently a 26 year old nun who died in 1927 was “holy” enough to merit this award. But how utterly ironic that – contrary to the teachings of Rome during her lifetime – she discovered that the Word of God is “THE wellspring of …

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 …

Tradition in the church at the time of the Reformation

This is from a blog post I did a while ago that described the major differences among the earliest churches of the Reformation as if “church tradition” were a “junk drawer”. It went like this: We all have a “top dresser drawer” into which we throw everything that there’s no other place for. Over time, …

The Roots of the Reformation: Indulgences

Everyone knows the role that Indulgences played during the Reformation. But does anyone know where they come from? A relatively recent work, The Roots of the Reformation: Tradition, Emergence and Rupture (by G.R. Evans, Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, ©2012), looks at the issues that were prominent in the Reformation, and traces them back to …

What if Matthew 16 had not a thing to do with Rome?

These past two weeks have witnessed the resignation of one pope and the election of another.  The former event is notable because of its rarity and the second because it is a first – the first pope to be elected from the Americas. And one cannot surf the web or watch the news without hearing …

Paradigms, Tradition, and the Lexicon, Part 2

Or, Jason Stellman’s “already-existing apostolic tradition” In his article The Tradition and the Lexicon, Bryan Cross says: In general, Protestants think differently about how to go about interpreting Scripture than do Catholics. When trying to understand the meaning of a passage in Scripture, Catholics have always looked to the Tradition; we seek to determine how …

Putting “Lent” and “Ash Wednesday” into perspective

I wrote about Lent several years ago. It’s worth bringing this up every year, I think: For all you Catholics out there, [yesterday was] “Ash Wednesday”. It’s the beginning of the Lent season – the 40 days prior to Easter, a very old tradition of the early church. For all you Protestants, you should know …