The Calvinist International
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 Church was founded […]
The Protestant argument for church polity has consistently argued that rule by presbyters was the earlier form of church government and that mono-episcopacy was a later practical development in the early church. This may have been legitimate and beneficial but was by no means universally binding on all future churches in all other locations. The […]
A few months ago David Bentley Hart kicked up quite the online controversy over in the comments of this blog. The original topic was universalism, but then it turned into a discussion of the status of Origen of Alexandria within Eastern Orthodoxy, and that in turn became a discussion about the authority of church tradition […]
Dominic Foo has a very good essay on the way “high church” ecclesiologies always fall back into a sort of “invisible church” theology when forced to reckon with the actual historical record. Here’s a sample: The point is that in the end nobody, at least nobody with a proper command of church history, believes that […]
Nearly the entire collection of The Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review is online here, and if you need other formats, then google books has most of the editions. In Volume 38, Number 1, from 1866, the great Philip Schaff has an essay titled, “The Patristic Doctrine of the Eucharist.” It exhibits Schaff’s usual careful scholarship, and while […]
Christopher Jones, a PhD student in ANE history at Columbia University, has written a learned critique of the pacifist narrative of the early church. Readers are commended to see it for themselves. For a complementary approach to the biblical texts, see my series on pacifism.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the History of Religions/Comparative Religion/Comparative Mythology schools were often taken to have discredited the Christian faith by showing similarities between Christian narratives (such as that of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus) and various pagan mythologies—most famous here perhaps is the treatment of the dying and rising god […]
In a previous post, I tried, through a reading of part of Letter 10.96 of Pliny the Younger to Trajan, to sketch a way of formulating the spectrum of possible answers to this question as it relates to “politics” in the narrow sense of government self-definition and legal policy. There is a broader aspect to “politics” […]
In his book Daily Prayer in the Early Church, Paul F. Bradshaw lays out his landmark thesis about the historical interaction between the “cathedral office” and the “monastic office.” Perhaps more important than that, however, is the more basic observation he makes demonstrating that the role and nature of prayer itself dramatically changed in the 4th […]
A little over a year ago, I pointed out a summary of Thomas Buchan’s lecture on Nicaea at the Ancient Evangelical Future Conference. A reader has just written in to direct me to the audio of that conference which is available here. I’ve only listened to Dr. Buchan’s presentation, a response actually, and it is […]