God’s Living Word

I’m following up on this comment, and Joseph’s response to it. * * * Hi Joseph – no, I didn’t read your entire post – I’m very busy these days, preparing to do some business travel, and I have to skim more than read carefully. I saw that my name was mentioned and I wanted …

The One True Church

Down below, in comments following Stephen Wolfe’s article “Two Roman Catholic claims that cannot both be true”, I responded to a comment by the Roman Catholic blogger Joseph Richardson, in which I put together a brief summary of what I believe the one true church is, a positive accounting of the traditions that emerged from …

The Continuity of “the Church” Through the Reformation

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 …

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 …

The Real Body of Christ

In my ongoing look at Ratzinger’s “Called to Communion,” I’m going to get a bit ahead of myself, thanks to some comments at James Swan’s blog. There, one commenter, Ben, has tried to suggest that “the Church IS Christ” (and given Rome’s self-infatuation, when you see the word “Church” with a capital “C”, you should …