Monergists, i.e. Calvinists and some Lutherans, claim that man cannot cooperate with God in salvation, because that would detract from God’s glory. I think that by God’s glory they mean something like “God appearing very impressive to everyone.” They probably mean additional though related things, like God doing whatever he wants. But let’s stick with [...]
Okay, the penny finally dropped. I kept coming across the observation that the Catholic Church has not an infallible list of infallible doctrines. (This isn’t exactly the correct way to state the case. As Avery Dulles pointed out in Magisterium [Sapientia, 2007, p. 66]: “Strictly speaking, infallibility is a property of the Magisterium in its activity [...]
Catholics claim that Jesus Christ established a Magisterium as an essential part of his Church, which could, within certain limits, and under certain conditions, teach infallibly. Protestants deny this claim, appealing instead to the sole infallible authority of Sacred Scripture. Catholics respond to “sola scriptura” in a variety of ways, including the claim that we would [...]
The idea that the Church is a spiritual communion, identified and unified by sharing the same faith and sacraments, while excellent as an affirmation, is inadequate as a definition of the Church that Christ founded, since this idea fails to account for the governmental and hierarchical principle of the Church, as symbolized by the keys [...]
The title of this post refers to Pope St. Gregory the Great’s famous pun, made upon meeting children from England in the slave market at Rome– “not Angles, but Angels.”1 This encounter, according to the church historian Bede, prompted the Pope to initiate an Apostolic Mission to Britain, for to convert the Anglo-Saxons. St. Gregory [...]
Yesterday, John Henry Newman was formally beatified by Pope Benedict XVI. Newman is considered, by many, to be the (de facto) patron saint of converts. In what follows, I will share some of Newman’s insights on conversion.
This is the third in a three part series. Part One may be read here. (The first part deals with Memory. Part Two, which considers Matter, is still in the works. I am sticking to the order of conception, not the order of posting, in numbering this series.) In this post, I want to make [...]
This is not exactly a story, though it is partly autobiographical, and partly allegorical, or perhaps just highly allusive. Mostly, it is a farrago, which I must have written after reading something by Belloc. Anyway, I found it, finished it, and here it is. The whole thing is called “The Last Road.”
N. T. Wright’s Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision (Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009) is a somewhat polemical response to his Reformed critics, in which Wright summarizes and defends his understanding of St. Paul’s doctrine of justification. For me, the book has proven to be both illuminating and frustrating. This post began as a chronicle [...]
Call it self-defense. So it is. For I cannot allude to Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” without acknowledging that to do so, in almost any context, might be considered cliche. Speaking of well-explored terrain, one cannot google “Mending Wall” without soon discovering that it was first published in 1914. This coincidence is just begging for an [...]
