Catholic

The Trinitarian formulations of the early Church often seem to our postmodern culture as the inevitable brainchild of monastic orders, burlap habits, deserts, and Neoplatonic philosophy. Austere, abstract, and unconnected from everyday life - just like the stereotypical image of a monk. Even worse...

Books, they say, are a preacher's whiskey. Like many students of theology and Church History, my study walls are encrusted with volume after volume beckoning me to, as C.S. Lewis once said in his essay, On the Reading of Old Books , "work my way through a bit of tough theology with a pipe in my...

Along with The Epistle of Barnabas , 1 & 2 Clement , The Shepherd of Hermas , The Epistles of Ignatius and Polycarp , Te Epistle of Diognetus , and The Martyrdom of Clement, Ignatius and Polycarp , The Didache comprises one of the documents of the "Apostolic Fathers" - documents written in the...

American President Theodore Roosevelt once said that "it is not the critic that counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and...

It should not escape the attention of the Christian disciple that some of the most profound spiritual mysteries are very often closely tied to time and history. Take the incarnation for example. Arguably the most weighty of spiritual realities, and yet Luke's accounting of this inscrutable...

A simple, isolated statement about belief in scriptural authority is not enough on its own to distinguish Protestants from Catholics. Some months ago, Wheaton College was thrust into the limelight in circumstances which caused what can only be described as a nightmare for those in charge of the...

Having recently taught a course in contemporary Roman Catholic theology at both my former school, Western Seminary (Portland, OR), and my current institution, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (Louisville, KY), my interest was piqued when Is The Reformation Over? An Evangelical Assessment...

It is common to think that the history of the Church between the apostles and the Reformation is irrelevant or at best good late night reading. Some have even gone so far as to distort Church history altogether in works of outrageous fiction. And so how do we combat complacency on the one hand and...

Is the Reformation over? That is the question asked and to some extent answered in a recent book by Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom [Mark A. Noll and Carolyn Nystrom, Is the Reformation Over? An Evangelical Assessment of Contemporary Roman Catholicism (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2005)]. The authors...

Mark Noll is well-known both within and without evangelicalism as an outstanding scholar, a gracious and thoughtful commentator on religion and America, and one of the most significant public religious intellectuals of the last decade. Indeed, disagreeing with him is not something that one does...