The Calvinist International
It’s time to bring our series on the identity and government of the church to a conclusion. You can find the previous installments here: Part 1: The Crisis of Rome and Its Claims of Ultimate Authority Part 2: Church Origins and Officers in the New Testament Part 3: Bishop-Elders and Bishops in the Late First […]
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 authority over […]
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 […]
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 bishops, nor […]
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 again, even if the […]
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 Teaching […]
The question of whether Protestants should regard Roman Catholic churches as “true churches” is very important to all ecumenical endeavors. Usually in reaction to those hardened Protestants who simply say that Rome is apostate and thus “no church at all,” the ecumenically-minded Protestants, who usually call themselves “catholic” in one degree or another, want to […]
A little over a week ago, we began the argument that the disruption currently occurring within the Roman Catholic Church is an inevitable reverberation of the 20th century. A fundamental transformation then occurred, and the classic position on religious liberty and the rights of the human conscience was been replaced by a new teaching. We […]
This is part 2 of a two-part reply. The first part is here. In my previous post I indicated that it would be helpful to provide a model for how the Jews could know the OT canon without an infallible magisterium, and in the following I will suggest how this process occurred. Any explanation for how […]
My friend and fellow pastor in the CREC, Toby Sumpter, has been posting some clear-thinking reflections on what is practically involved when Reformed Christians convert to Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy. I thought this post was especially accurate, particularly this paragraph: A convert must leave the unity of the church that he/she is currently enjoying. […]