Confessions of a Catholic Blogger
Over at Seton Magazone, John Clark posted an article entitled “7 Confessions of a Catholic Blogger”. They’re all spot on…
Category: Catholicism
Protestantism: Agreeing on essentials?
When Catholics critique the contradictory beliefs held in different parts of the Protestant world, we are often told that “Protestants agree on all the essentials”. A statement like this, of course, this begs two questions:
1. Which doctrines should be considered “essential” and which “non-essential”?
2. Who gets to make that categorization?
The second question is particularly important. Who gets the final say as to what is “essential” and what is “non-essential”? After all, what happens when two Protestants disagree on what is “essential”?
To pick an example from the dawn of the Reformation, Luther and Zwingli came into conflict concerning their respective understandings of the Eucharist, so much so that this ruptured their relationship. Could we still say that these two fathers of the Reformation agreed on “essentials”?
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Enemy of the Bible?
A while back I did a post where I gave a “Quick Apology” concerning the charges that the Catholic Church chained Bibles. I came across this article from Dave Armstrong this week where he gives a fuller response:
Explaining the mess up…
A little while ago, I was discussing with a Protestant the issue of baptism in the Early Church. The exchange was quite typical in that he rejected the beliefs of the Early Church, choosing instead to trump the witness of history with his own personal interpretation of the Scriptures.
Why did the Early Church “get it all so wrong”?
In response to this, I did something unusual, departing from my usual strategy. Rather than trying to demonstrate to him that the Early Church was correct, I asked him, in his opinion, why did the Early Church get it all so wrong? After all, the question of whether baptism washes away sin isn’t some trivial doctrine, but one which relates to the question of our very salvation!
Guide for altar servers
I’ve written before about why you should encourage your son to become an altar boy, but today I wanted to share a great video I found describing how he can live out this ministry to the best of his ability:
Great Apostasy Questions
A while back, I produced a post in which I listed some Canon Questions, some specific questions I ask when talking to non-Catholics about the Table of Contents found in their Bible. Following my post concerning my recent encounter with a Jehovah’s Witness, I’ve decided to do another post similar to my Canon Questions, but this time concerning the “Great Apostasy”, the belief that that the Church effectively disappeared from the earth some time after Christ’s death.
Groups like the Mormons hold to the Great Apostasy and use this as an explanation for the significant differences between their doctrine and the doctrine of historic Christianity. Muslims hold to this narrative too, to justify the teachings of Muhammad which stand in stark contradiction to the New Testament. Additionally, most Protestant groups, while typically not holding such a radical version of this doctrine, usually hold to some variation of it, saying that somewhere along the line the Church went off-track in a rather major way.
Introduction to the psalms
Psalms is a book which I find more intriguing the more I study it. Here’s an article I recently came across which provides a great introduction to some of the structural aspects of this Old Testament hymnbook:
