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 …

“Divine Revelation” Part 3: Methodological Considerations When Discussing “the Church” and “the mind of the Church”

Andrew, I wanted to get back to your comment from February 7, 2014 at 2:06 pm. You were kind enough to put some thought into summarizing a response there to questions I had asked, and I believe here that we are really close to being able to identify the heart of the issues between Roman …

Blue Men on Mars

I am addressing Michael Liccione, and in what follows, I’ll be responding to comment 231 here, but I’ll likely be ranging to other places to take into account some of the other things you’ve said, such as when you refer me to Sections IV and V in the main article which this comment follows. I’m …

The ‘people of God’: Old Testament expectations

In considering the question, “what is the church?” I noted that we have to go back a ways and ask “what was the church?” That is, we have to ask, and understand, what was the church in the New Testament? What was the Old Testament expectation? In understanding what “the church” is Edmund Clowney in …

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: “The Church”-1

I want to take a minute here and talk about my hopes to continue to look at “Called to Communion.” After Ratzinger outlines his rules for “the base memory of the church” as his standard to judge both what the text says and what is “historically and objectively accurate” – as opposed to “a patient …