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 […]

If the Catholic view of the efficacy of grace is correct, why are “bad Catholics” so prevalent (and so bad)? As I considered conversion from the Reformed faith, this was a question to which I returned regularly. But since being received into full communion with the Catholic Church, and viewing things from a Catholic frame, […]

Just a few months before I was certain I needed to enter the Catholic Church, I wrote the following post on a blog I had been using to write out my thoughts about discerning the Church. I re-post it here, with some edits that seem appropriate now that I am Catholic, to reach Called to […]

As a Reformed Christian, my lips pursed at the very idea of 7th graders beginning “seminary.” Only the Catholics could come up with such a bizarre scheme, I thought. It made as much sense to me as gifted monks spending all of their earthly days milling about in silence. I didn’t get it. But two […]

The late Trappist Father Louis, born Thomas Merton, while living a lifestyle reserved and removed from the world, was a prolific writer.  His autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, became a bestseller shortly after its publication in 1948, and is still widely in print today.  In it Merton describes his spiritual coming of age, his movement […]

Here I come around the final bend of my long journey into the Catholic Church. I could not have imagined it ten years ago. Six years ago I would have found the proposition that my wife and I would become Catholic at the Easter Vigil mass of 2010 to be incredibly absurd. But God never […]

Tom Riello interviews Tom Brown on his recent article on the issue of the canon of scripture.   How do we know which books belong in the Bible?  Who has the authority to answer such a question?  These issues are addressed in this podcast episode. [podcast]https://www.calledtocommunion.com/media/Called%20to%20Communion%20-%20Episode%2011%20-%20The%20Canon%20Question.mp3[/podcast] Download the MP3 here.

Reformed theologians use the term “perspicuity” to refer to a quality they believe Scripture to possess. By this they mean that Scripture’s meanings are plain and evident for even the ordinary reader, and that the Church is not a necessary interpretive intermediary. If Scripture were not perspicuous, then either the Church would be a necessary […]

Is the Bible a source of unity between Catholics and Reformed Christians? As I shall explain, the answer is ‘yes and no.’ The Bible is a source of unity, albeit an imperfect source of unity, if by ‘unity’ we mean ‘of one mind.’ To those of us who have spent time staring across the divide […]

As Christians, how is it that we know we are saved by the death and resurrection of the incarnate Son of God? For those raised as Christians, the Sunday School sing-song answer “for the Bible