Introduction This brief post will show that St. Ambrose of Milan did not believe in salvation “by faith alone” as professed by the Reformers, condemned by the Council of Trent, and generally held by most Protestants today. There are two reasons I am focusing on St. Ambrose: 1. He is one of the few Church […]
On March 24 of this year we posted a guest article by Brandon Addison titled “The Quest for the Historical Church: A Protestant Assessment.” We had invited Brandon some months earlier to write an essay for Called To Communion on the topic of his choice, and we are very grateful for his generosity, trust, and […]
This is a guest post by Michael Rennier. Michael received a BA in New Testament Literature from Oral Roberts University in 2002 and a Master of Divinity from Yale Divinity School in 2006. He served the Anglican Church in North America as the Rector of two parishes on Cape Cod, Massachusetts for five years. After […]
Robert Louis Wilken’s The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity (Yale University Press, 2012) is an ambitious survey of Christian history, from one of America’s most accomplished religious historians. Wilken is William R. Kenan Professor of History of Christianity Emeritus at the University of Virginia, an associate at the St. Paul Center for […]
Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday. It is the beginning of Lent in the western Church, a 40-day season of penance. During this time, Christians traditionally show our sorrow for our sins by making a voluntary sacrifice, and possibly by taking up additional forms of self-discipline. These are, contra pop culture, to be done discretely, privately, without […]
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, […]
The great Anglican liturgical historian, Gregory Dix, published this fantastic study of the history of the Christian liturgy (though he humbly refers to it as an introduction) in January 1945 while World War 2 was still raging. At over 750 pages in small print it’s not one of those books you finish over the weekend […]
In honor of the great Marian feast tomorrow, the Immaculate Conception, I would like to repost some material from my personal blog: a book review on one of the best popular level historical surveys of Mary available. “Mary Through the Centuries,” published in 1998, was written by one of the preeminent Church historians of the […]
Within the Reformed blogosphere there has lately been put forth some pretty bold claims regarding the structure of the church in the first century, particularly the structure of the Roman Church. Basically the argument is that in the first century the church did not have a monarchical bishop and was instead ruled by a group […]
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 […]
