Today is the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception. Last year, immediately preceding this Solemnity, Taylor posted “Mary Without Sin (Scripture and Tradition),” and on the Feast I posted “Mary’s Immaculate Conception, in which I included podcasts of Prof. Lawrence Feingold’s lecture and Q&A on this dogma. Those two posts provide evidence for the Catholic dogma, [...]

This is a guest post by Jason Kettinger. For the past ten years Jason Kettinger was a member of the Presbyterian Church in America. He received baptism in 2001, and spent his college days as a fruitful member of Reformed University Fellowship, before graduating from the University of Missouri-Columbia with a degree in political science [...]

Mark Galli is the senior managing editor of Christianity Today. Two days ago he published an article titled “The Confidence of the Evangelical: Why the Spirit, not the magisterium, will lead us into all truth.” Galli notes that a number of well-known Evangelicals have become Catholic, and acknowledges the attraction of the Catholic magisterium for [...]

Imagine that the Occupy Wall Street protest continued for years, during which time the community of protesters divided into different factions, each with different beliefs, different demands, and different leaders. But the protests continued for so long that the protesters eventually built makeshift shanties and lived in them, and had children. These children grew up [...]

I. The Reformed Position: The claim in the Westminster Confession of Faith that all controversies of religion ultimately are to be determined by the Holy Spirit speaking in Sacred Scripture contradicts the testimony of the Church Fathers, who repeatedly teach the necessity of judging such controversies by way of the Church and Sacred Scripture. The [...]

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 [...]

Did Jesus provide for the continuing transmission of the Christian faith? What a simple and foundational question! And yet, oddly, it is one that Protestant apologists rarely ask. In the history of Protestant apologetics, great emphasis is placed on how we recognize the inspiration of Scripture (Church authority vs. internal witness of the Spirit), the [...]

Today in the liturgical calendar we celebrate the Feast of the Chair of St. Peter the Apostle. According to an ancient tradition, February 22 was the day Jesus changed Simon’s name to Peter, and gave to him the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven. (Matt. 16:19) The Catholic Encyclopedia article on the chair of St. [...]

This article is intended to be a resource showing the support for the doctrine of Transubstantiation in the Church fathers, and not a robust defense of the doctrine as defined by the Council of Trent.1 The Church fathers did not believe in a mere spiritual presence of Christ alongside or in the elements (bread and [...]