The Scripture readings for today’s liturgy provide a biblical basis for the papacy, as John Bergsma explains. But as a Protestant, I was not able to see those verses as providing that basis, until I read Plato’s Republic. Of the various philosophical factors that helped me become Catholic, one was teaching through Plato’s Republic. I [...]
Today, August 15, is the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary into Heaven. On this day, the universal Church celebrates what took place at the end of our Blessed Mother’s earthly life. “The Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and [...]
Terry Johnson Terry Johnson, senior minister of Independent Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Savannah, Ga., wrote an article titled “Our Collapsing Ecclesiology” in the March issue of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church’s magazine New Horizons. The article is well worth reading, because it examines the recent trends in Evangelicalism away from attendance in Sunday morning services, even [...]
Leonardo De Chirico Leonardo De Chirico is a Protestant lecturer in theology at IFED (Istituto di Formazione Evangelica e Documentazione) in Padova, Italy. He edits the theological journal Studi di teologia. He also worked in Italy for twelve years as a Reformed Baptist church planter. Over the past few months Leonardo has posted a series [...]
Yesterday, June 29, was the Solemnity of Sts. Peter and Paul. In recent years it has become a custom for the Pope and the Patriarch of Constantinople to exchange official delegations on the patronal feasts of their respective sees. In this year likewise, the Orthodox sent a delegation to Rome for the feast of Sts. [...]
Recently Michael Horton reviewed Terrence Malick’s film The Tree of Life. Michael is the editor-in-chief of Modern Reformation, co-host of the White Horse Inn radio program, the J. Gresham Machen Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics at Westminster Seminary California, and one of the most well-known and well-respected Reformed figures today. For this reason, when [...]
June 4 is the feast of St. Optatus, a fourth-century bishop of Milevis, in Numidia, about ten miles from the Mediterranean Sea on the coast of northern Africa in what is now Algeria. He was a convert to the Catholic faith, and an African by birth, according to St. Jerome. He died around AD 385, [...]
Yesterday (May 24) was the feast day of St. Vincent of Lérins, a soldier who became a monk at the monastery in Lérins, and wrote his famous Commonitory in AD 434, three years after the third Ecumenical Council at Ephesus, and seventeen years before the Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon. Because Protestants generally accept both those [...]
In “Imputation, Infusion and Eternal Consequence: A Parable,” R.C. Sproul Jr. recently claimed that the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican (St. Luke 18: 9-14) not only supports the Reformed notion of imputation over the Catholic doctrine of infusion, but also shows that those holding the Reformed doctrine of imputation are justified, while those holding the [...]
Two days ago, Professor Lawrence Feingold of Ave Maria University’s Institute for Pastoral Theology and author of The Natural Desire to See God According to St. Thomas and his Interpreters gave a lecture titled “The Freedom of the Will” to the Association of Hebrew Catholics. The audio recordings of the lecture and of the following [...]
