I grew up with a very normal American view of Halloween. It was a day where I dressed up like cartoon characters or cartoonish or campy monsters in order to have a few laughs and get some candy. There really was no weighty “significance” behind it. It was just good clean fun.

As I got...

In response to yesterday’s post on Benjamin Rush, a colleague in History, Matt Gaetano, points to more on this issue among early Americans as recorded in Ellis Sandoz’s book Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America. Today we’ll look at one brief episode in the...

The folks over at Sententiae Antiquae recently posted a passage worth reading from a letter of Benjamin Rush to Ashbel Green from 1807. Therein Rush says:

No more Latin should be learned in these schools than is necessary to translate that language into English, and no more Greek than is...

Christians have not agreed on the proper mode of baptism. Many believe that the only proper way to baptize someone is by the full submersion of the body under water. They typically argue that baptizo means immerse and they also appeal to Romans 6 as a watertight (pardon the pun) argument proving...

It’s time to bring our series on the identity and government of the church to a conclusion. You can find the previous installments here:

Part 1: The Crisis of Rome and Its Claims of Ultimate Authority

Part 2: Church Origins and Officers in the New Testament 

Part 3: Bishop-Elders and...

As we move into the third century, the relevant body of Christian literature grows considerably. The episcopalian structure of government has become more universal, and all of the writers of this period reference a singular bishop as holding a place of authority. They also largely repeat...

God changes us over time. That change begins with the lesson–which may take a lifetime to learn in the way that it really needs to be learned–that the first thing we must do is to give up trying to justify, or vindicate, ourselves. Abandoning the desire for self-justification is the...

We are continuing our look at the way the early church organized itself. You can see the earlier posts here: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. This post will highlight some of the more important development that would eventually lead to the Roman Catholic claims about the relationship between Peter and...

Augustine talks a lot about moms in the Confessions: particularly his own mother and the church as the mother of the faithful–though not Mary. This is unsurprising, because Augustine knows nothing of Marian devotion.

But it is not only the church who is the mother of believers; Scripture...

In response to the question, “What was God doing before he created the universe?,” one frequently encounters the claim that Augustine said, “He was preparing hell for those who ask such questions.” In other words, Augustine was owning the confused.

But Augustine had more...

We are continuing our series on the identity and government of the Christian Church and how it relates to the claims of the Roman Catholic Church. My first post explained why this question is freshly relevant and urgent for Roman Catholics, and it laid out the Roman Catholic claims about how...

In a previous post, we discussed what the Roman Catholic Church claims about the founding of the church and the implications of that founding upon the identity and leadership of the church. It is important to pay attention to the details of the claim. Rome does not merely state that churches must...

In the wake of the latest round of sexual abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church, I would like to invite all Christians and serious moral thinkers to leave that ecclesiastical institution. Many sincere members of that church have confessed that they no longer trust their pastors and their...

In this installment, Contarini continues on the theme of justification before God by imputation, that is, by the merit of Christ apart from any works of our own. The justice or righteousness by which we are justified–by which we are wholly pleasing to God–is that which is gratuitously...

We’ve now referred to “twofold justice” a few times, viz. the justice and charity inherent in us by grace, and the justice of Christ’s perfect merit imputed to us through union with Christ by faith. But, having dealt with the potential ambiguity of the term...

Herewith the next installment. (Read that first and then circle back up here.)

A couple of important points: Contarini denies that we are justified because of inherent faith, as though “faith” in the proposition were treated as a good work that is equivalent to...

Cleaning out some paperwork in my office reminded me that, after three years, I should get back to this series and finish it at some point. Lo these many months ago I started a new translation of Cardinal Gasparo Contarini’s treatise De iustificatione, “On Justification.” I...

Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart has written an essay on the Pauline terms “spirit,” (πνευμα) “soul,” (ψυχη), and “flesh” (σαρξ), maintaining that modern readers are greatly (or...

“Literalism” frequently gets a bad rap nowadays when it comes to the Bible. The word “literal” is fraught with ambiguities, especially in its modern usages, which I have no intention of getting into here. But the practice of reading the Bible ad litteram–“acc...

“Natura abhorret a vacuo”

Nature abhors a vacuum, and so every people constituted as a political body is going to have a schedule of sacred observances, of holy days–days marked out as special in some way, whether because of their perceived relation to a polity’s foundation...

It is well known that C.S. Lewis borrowed the phrase “mere Christianity” from the seventeenth-century Puritan Richard Baxter; Lewis says as much in his book called–wait for it–Mere Christianity. Lewis also uses the phrase with some regularity in other writings, as indicated h...

Christians struggle with two kinds of assurance – assurance that God loves them and assurance that God likes them. We might immediately cringe at such language as overly anthropomorphic and sentimental. I want to forestall this reaction, however, by admitting that such language can and has...

As we’ve alreadyseen, the first two poets W.H. Auden mentions in his literary catalog in New Year Letter, Dante and William Blake, are both included in the syllabus for the course he taught at the University of Michigan in 1941. The same is true of the third, Arthur Rimbaud, whose prose...

So let’s talk about effeminacy. This came up as final point of criticism in my Mere Orthodoxy critique of the gay Christianity of Revoice and Spiritual Friendship. Now, I knew that “going there” would upset a lot of people. It’s basically touching the third rail to even say...

As we continue our thoughts on gay Christianity and “spiritual friendship,” we need to take an important detour. My original plan to was to move from concupiscence to the topic of effeminacy, but as I worked through Augustine’s writings on concupiscence, I was confronted with his...