The following is an excerpt of an article I wrote for the Italian newspaper, Ilsussidiario. These categories of person flow out of an Incarnational ecclesiology. We see this duality in the life of our Lord. He is both the manifestation of God’s faithfulness to humanity and humanity’s faithfulness to God. Jesus Christ is God’s answer […]
The Catholic Church teaches that nature is ordered by God. The heavens are superior to the earth, and angels are superior to men.1 Even within the angelic order, not all are equal; for there are angels and arch-angels, cherubim and seraphim.2 Men naturally arrange (order) themselves into hierarchies as the ancients knew well and accepted […]
The following essay is a guest contribution by Barrett Turner. Barrett completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Virginia. This Spring he graduated from Covenant Theological Seminary with an M.Div. This Fall he will be pursuing his doctorate in moral theology at the Catholic University of America. He lives with his wife and son […]
N. T. Wright’s Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision (Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009) is a somewhat polemical response to his Reformed critics, in which Wright summarizes and defends his understanding of St. Paul’s doctrine of justification. For me, the book has proven to be both illuminating and frustrating. This post began as a chronicle […]
Yesterday two Reformed Christians announced that they had decided to convert to the Catholic Church. It reminded me of my own conversion. Becoming Catholic or in my case coming back home to the Church is so hard to explain to those who find such horror when they look in the face of the Church. They […]
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 […]
Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall” was first published in 1914, near the beginning of the Great War. This coincidence suggests a double analogy which I want to draw by deploying the poem as a proxy for my conception of the complex nature of the relationship between Catholicism and Protestantism.
Dr. Kenneth Howell earned an M.Div. from Westminster Theological Seminary, an M.A. in Linguistics and Philosophy from the University of South Florida, a Ph.D. from Indiana University in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Science, and a second Ph.D. from Lancaster University (U.K.) in the History of Christianity and Science. He was a Presbyterian minister for […]
Just kidding, the Catholics don’t have anything wrong about justification; I was just getting your attention. :-) Now to be serious. The primary way we both [Catholics and Protestants] talk about justification and about any of God’s operations is based on the way that the Scriptures speak of God. Let me say at the outset […]
According to the Reformed Protestant doctrine, on the cross Christ paid the penalty for all the sins of all and only the elect. And when those persons first believe in Christ, that redemption is applied to them such that all their past, present and future sins are forgiven, and Christ’s perfect righteousness is permanently imputed […]
