Becoming Reformed after a six year sojourn in the evangelical world of Calvary Chapel, I was pleased to give up speculations about the end of the world via the notion of an imminent Rapture. There was a lack of historical support for thinking this way, and there was also a pleasing emphasis on Scripture as [...]

If you could travel in time and attend a Christian worship service in the first century, what would it be like? Would a Presbyterian feel at home? How about a Catholic? The following is a re-recording of a lecture I gave to a group in Charlotte, NC last year on the subject of “liturgy in [...]

The following essay is a guest contribution by Jeremy Tate. Jeremy is finishing a graduate degree at Reformed Theological Seminary in Washington D.C. this Spring. He was a member of the Presbyterian Church in America until he was received into full communion with the Catholic Church this past February.

When I was younger, I used to think that God actually could lie if He wanted to, but He simply chose not to because of His goodness. I didn’t realize, and I think many people still don’t, that He literally cannot lie. Some theological errors can be avoided by understanding that God cannot lie. For [...]

Here is a simple synopsis of God’s original plan for Adam by Saint Augustine. Notice how Augustine views humanity as “between the angelic and bestial,” since man consists of a immaterial, separable soul and a material body:

Several years ago when I was once a Calvinist, I remember reading this quote by John Calvin and being impressed by it: We must confess, then, that if the representation which God gives us in the Supper is true, the internal substance of the sacrament is conjoined with the visible signs; and as the bread [...]

Our contemporary use of the word “symbol” in theology is rather weak. My guess is that this goes back to the 11th century Eucharistic controversy between the erroneous “symbolic Eucharist” belief of Berengarius and the orthodox “substantial presence” articulation of Lanfranc of Canterbury. For the heretic Berengarius, the term “symbol” entailed “not real”. Berengarius’ usage [...]

Now the serpent was more subtle than any other wild creature that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, `You shall not eat of any tree of the garden’?” And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; but [...]

I’m prone to distrust doctrinal claims that would leave the majority of Christians throughout history as heretics. A strict Memorialism, the view that the Body & Blood are spoken of the Eucharistic species in a purely figurative way, does just that; for it makes Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Lutherans, Anglicans and Calvinists supremely wrong about the [...]

Calvin’s high view of the church doesn’t allow him to make the claim that the true Church of Christ ceased to exist between the time of the Apostles and the 16th century. However, I recently came across something in the Institutes that throws a wrench into Calvin’s consistency.