Earliest churches in Rome (2)

Acts 2: Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard them speaking in his own language. Utterly amazed, they asked: “Are not all these men who are speaking Galileans? Then how is it that each …

Earliest churches in Rome (1)

The right way to understand history is to start from the beginning. What was it like to be a Christian in the earliest church in Rome? We have a marvellous picture of this earliest church, provided by the New Testament scholar Peter Lampe, author of the work “From Paul to Valentinus: Christians in Rome in …

Irenaeus: Scripture Interprets Scripture

According to Avery Cardinal Dulles, “At the beginning of the twentieth century, Maurice Blondel sought to carve out a middle path between post-Tridentine and Modernist theories of tradition….To his lasting credit, he rediscovered the capacity of tradition to transmit what was already known in an implicit way but not yet formulated in conceptual terms.” (From …

Thumbs up or thumbs down on Rome?

One commenter said: The way you write, I guess, seems to me to reveal a near certainty concerning the falsity of Catholic Doctrine. It seems as though you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Catholicism simply couldn’t be true. And you’re willing to hang everything on that confidence. Too often, an argument is …

A Positive View of Christian Foundations

Jesus said, “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the …

A. G. Dickens on Luther’s Success

A.G. Dickens was Professor of History at the University of London; he wrote several works that I have, including “The English Reformation,” The Counter-Reformation,” and “The Reformation in Historical Thought.” I’m pretty fascinated by all of these, and hope to quote from them in the coming weeks and months. According to the A.G. Dickens Wiki, …