13 Sep 2018
Posted by Steven Wedgeworth 
We are continuing our look at the way the early church organized itself. You can see the earlier posts here: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. This post will highlight some of the more important development that would eventually lead to the Roman Catholic claims about the relationship between Peter and Rome's...
Read more → 06 Sep 2018
Posted by Steven Wedgeworth 
We are continuing our series on the identity and government of the Christian Church and how it relates to the claims of the Roman Catholic Church. My first post explained why this question is freshly relevant and urgent for Roman Catholics, and it laid out the Roman Catholic claims about how the Christian...
Read more → 06 Sep 2018
Posted by Steven Wedgeworth 
In a previous post, we discussed what the Roman Catholic Church claims about the founding of the church and the implications of that founding upon the identity and leadership of the church. It is important to pay attention to the details of the claim. Rome does not merely state that churches must have...
Read more → 05 Sep 2018
Posted by Steven Wedgeworth 
In the wake of the latest round of sexual abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church, I would like to invite all Christians and serious moral thinkers to leave that ecclesiastical institution. Many sincere members of that church have confessed that they no longer trust their pastors and their bishops....
Read more → 16 Jul 2018
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
It is well known that C.S. Lewis borrowed the phrase "mere Christianity" from the seventeenth-century Puritan Richard Baxter; Lewis says as much in his book called--wait for it--Mere Christianity. Lewis also uses the phrase with some regularity in other writings, as indicated here. For instance, in his famous...
Read more → 11 May 2018
Posted by Steven Wedgeworth 
Peter Hitchens has written a rather remarkable essay on the difference between the religious persecution carried out by Queen Elizabeth I and that done by Bloody Mary. What's more remarkable is that it was published by First Things. Mr. Hitchens' essay attempts a number of things, but its most important...
Read more → 07 May 2018
Posted by Joseph Minich 
Matthew 16:13-20 has been the subject of enormous controversy in the history of the Christian church. This is particularly the case with respect to the interpretation of its famous “rock” and “keys of the kingdom of heaven” clauses.[1] It is safe to say, in fact, that the church has never quite...
Read more → 05 Dec 2017
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
One of the most important arguments that Richard Hooker makes in the preface to his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, now available in a modernized version from the Davenant Institute, is that church order (or polity) and discipline are adiaphora: neither Episcopacy nor Presbyterianism (roughly, the Genevan...
Read more → 31 Oct 2017
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
In a truly bizarre thread on Twitter yesterday--the eve of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation--started by our own Steven Wedgeworth, a number of traditionalist Roman Catholics speculated as to whether it would be a good thing for the church to take up the cause of burning heretics at the stake...
Read more → 25 Oct 2017
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
In the 1950 encyclical Humani Generis, Pius XII, relying on Pius IX, makes a rather startling claim about the duty of theologians in the church: It is also true that theologians must always return to the sources of divine revelation: for it belongs to them to point out how the doctrine of the living...
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