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”
What is “the church”? Roman Catholic dogma about “the Church” leads to a misunderstanding of what Christ’s “church” actually consists of. For Roman Catholicism, Dogma #1 frequently seems to be “The Roman Catholic Church is God’s Great Gift to Mankind” – see this first sentence in the “Dogmatic Constitution on the Church”, Lumen Gentium: Christ …
Continue reading “The Continuity of “the Church” Through the Reformation”
One of the complaints I have about the Roman Catholic Church in which I grew up is how “man-centered” its teachings are. After all, the sacerdotal system is all about “you” going to Mass; “you” going to confession; “you” blindly following the Magisterium. So it was with some little surprise that I saw this …
Continue reading “Therefore, Go Ye Into All the World and Tell Them About Yourselves….”
Brandon Addison’s “Called to Communion” article, “The Quest for the Historical Church: A Protestant Assessment”, is now posted here in .PDF format, for your convenience. In this article, Brandon addresses the notion that the Roman Catholic Church is “The Church that Christ Founded™”, which is espoused in quite a thick way over there. Brandon systematically …
Continue reading “Brandon Addison’s “Called to Communion” article, now in .PDF”
On the one hand, “Pope Francis” Bergoglio is “reluctant to call himself pope”, preferring to be called the more “humble” title, “Bishop of Rome”: He still goes by “Bergoglio” when speaking to friends, seems reluctant to call himself pope and has decided to live in the Vatican hotel rather than the grand papal apartment in …
Continue reading “Bergoglio’s Gig 2: On speaking out of both sides of your mouth”
Over at Green Baggins, a commenter named Rooney said: If a reformed person visits sedevacantist websites like MHFM [“Most Holy Family Seminary”], I think such a person would be hardened more against the current RCC and the chances of converting to the RCC will drop. Reading sedevacantist/traditionalist arguments was one thing that kept me from …
The Roman Catholic Church, at Vatican II, called itself “the universal sacrament of salvation”. Here is how they put it: In later usage the term sacramentum emphasizes the visible sign of the hidden reality of salvation which was indicated by the term mysterium. In this sense, Christ himself is the mystery of salvation: “For there …
Over the coming weeks, Lord willing, I hope to discuss a topic that’s come up in response to a work by Leonardo de Chirico, who argues that Evangelicals need “to engage with Roman Catholicism in a more theologically-integrative way”. Here is his contention: The author suggests that evangelicalism’s appraisal of Roman Catholicism has lacked systematic …
One of the ongoing contentions that I will make going forward, Lord willing, is that the Roman Catholic Church is not what it says it is. (Just as a housekeeping note, I prefer to say “Roman Catholic Church” because that is the term favored by Fr. Richard John Neuhaus in his work “The Catholic Moment”. …
Over at BeggarsAllReformation.blogspot.com, Jason Engwer and I became involved in a discussion about the early church fathers. Jason pointed me to a work by D.H. Williams on the topic of “Evangelicals and Tradition: The Formative Influence of the Early Church (Evangelical Ressourcement: Ancient Sources for the Church’s Future).” In those comments, I applauded Williams’s work, …
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