The Castle Church Door

For anybody who's interested, there's an ongoing discussion in another thread concerning John 6 and the eucharist.

In another thread, Anne posted a passage from Ignatius of Antioch that Roman Catholics often cite in support of their view of the eucharist. I thought I'd repeat and expand upon my response to Anne here, since some people might find it helpful. In my experience, this passage from Ignatius is one of the most commonly cited patristic passages among Roman Catholics. Here's the passage: "They abstain from the Eucharist ...

For my fellow "Prots" . . . We are repeatedly lambasted about how twisted to and fro in the wind we must be if we hold to sola Scripture and the right of private judgment. "Come on across the tracks," they tell us, " and hold on to Tradition and achieve cognitive rest about which doctrines are true."But is this the case? Let's look at one concrete example. ...

LVKA said:"And the problem with interpretation is not whether it's literal or figurative, but whether it's condoned by Tradition or not."Like the Tradition of the ante-Nicene fathers who interpreted scripture in opposition to the veneration of images? Or the Tradition of the early Christians who prayed only to God, not to the deceased or angels? Do you agree with the Marian beliefs of the earliest Christians, such as ...

I recently got drawn into hand-to-hand combat with a couple of orcs who invaded the shire of a Presbyterian hobbit:http://greenbaggins.wordpress.com/2008/06/04/some-questions-for-pete-enns/Here is my side of the exchange:steve hays said,June 16, 2008 at 6:29 pmKen Hendrickson said,“In the first place, Sola Scriptura is directly contradicted by 2 Thess 2:15, which commands that we hold fast to the TRADITIONS which were taught by the Apostles, even those which were only taught ...

1. The right of private judgment involves two distinct issues which are often bundled into one:i) The subjective source of private judgmentii) The objective standard of private judgment.Regarding (i), every professing believer, whether he’s a low churchman or high churchman, has to exercise his individual judgment. That’s inescapable. The high churchman is no exception to this necessity. It’s not as if the low churchman is an autonomous individual ...

One of the prooftexts for Catholicism is 1 Tim 3:15. Unfortunately for Catholics, this verse isn’t referring to the church of Rome. In context, it’s referring to the church of Ephesus (cf. 1:3).It’s a reference to the local church, not the universal church—much less the church of Rome. If, therefore, we’re going to use this verse as a prooftext for a high church ecclesiology, then the church of ...

I finally got around to watching Ridley Scott’s “Kingdom of Heaven.” It succeeds at certain levels, and had the potential to be a modern masterpiece. But because he used it as a vehicle to score political points, it fell short of greatness.It succeeds at a visual level, which is obviously important in a film, where visuals are a dominant element of the medium. Scott has a wonderful eye. ...

Dave Armstrong recently posted an article on prayers to the deceased and angels. I've written on the subject before (see here, for example), and I won't repeat everything I've said in the past, but I want to comment on some of the issues addressed in Dave's article.Dave doesn't cite any Biblical equivalent of the Roman Catholic prayers Evangelicals object to, because there is no Biblical equivalent. Rather, he ...

The Biblical record gives us a lot of information about how the people of God in past ages lived in a large variety of circumstances, and prayer to God is mentioned often, whereas prayer to the deceased isn't mentioned at all. There are hundreds of passages on prayer in the Bible, covering thousands of years of history. In all of that context, we're never encouraged to pray to ...