Protestants who engage Roman Catholics often leave the discussion in frustration. It seems that Roman Catholic apologists have an answer for everything. At times, Roman Catholicism appears to lack falsifiability. The idea of falsifiability will be in the background of this article, but my primary purpose will be to show that, given its theological system, …
Continue reading “Roman Catholicism on Trial: Evidence and Assumptions”
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 …
The gang at Called to Communion are fond of telling us that Christ founded a visible church. This article is featured as the lead article at their Papacy Roundup. It’s all so clear to them now — the perspicuity of Roman dogma leaves no room for question. But at the end of the 19th century, …
Continue reading “Newman vs Leo. Or, “visible”, but in an “invisible” way. Or, “a new fiction”…”
I’ve been asked to comment on Jason Stellman’s series on “paradigms”. From a blog post dated November 11, 2012, he introduces the topic: On Paradigms Protestant and Catholic: Anyone who has followed Catholic/Protestant discussions recently has undoubtedly heard more about “interpretive paradigms” than they care to recall. By the time one is five or six …
In response to a comment asking “how do we know?” I wrote: Who wants their faith to be formed around a legend? I certainly don’t. But that is the legacy of hundreds of years-worth of papal “history”. This the right question to ask. We all want to rest our faith on something certain, that’s not …
Continue reading “How do we really know what God wants from us?”
“The Lazy Man’s Way” In asking the question “what is the church?” in the context of 2000 years of church history, we have to also ask the question “what was the church?” And in asking the question “what was the church?” we have to also further ask the question, “what was the church at different …
Continue reading “What is ‘the church’? What was ‘the church’?”
At the end of a recent posting, I noted that Irenaeus wrote that “the church at Rome was ‘founded and set up by the two most glorious apostles Peter and Paul.’ (Against Heresies, 3.3.2).” It is clear from 1 Corinthians that Peter and Paul crossed paths from time to time, and they did so, among …
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 …
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 …
I published the following information several months ago, but I wanted to bring this to the top for some of the folks who have been asking some questions about Newman and his theory of the development of doctrine. Dr. William Witt, an Anglican, wrote a bit about Newman and development, and here he defines here …
Reformation500 