Proto-Protestantism

28 June 1914...written on 28 June 2010 Ninety six years ago today the Habsburg heir Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot. It always ama...

I was posting a comment on a great website which is actually interested in discussion. It's called The Confessional Outhouse. The au...

This guy gets it....The Kingdom, I mean. Why do some groups understand the nature of the kingdom but then bury it with legalism? Legalism in...

During the Carolingian Period, about the middle of the ninth century 'a mysterious book,' as Schaff says, turned up in Christend...

updated July 2012 A rebuke in the form of a rant I am consistently amazed by what I call The Reformed Gatekeepers... I don...

updated July 2012 Post number three of four dealing with issues related to Nominalism Schaff's Hegelian Historiography: The ...

updated July 2012 Fourth post concerning Nominalism Nominalism and the modern Presbyter…pastoring the sheep to submit to the Pastor. ...

updated July 2012  I remember: -Defending Calvin's role in the execution of Servetus When in reality it was Sacralist murder -De...

A Case of Romanticising History Anyone who has traveled Europe is awestruck and stirred to see the wonderful castles and cathedrals that d...

updated July 2012 This is part one of four posts related to Nominalism. Nominalism and Scepticism…Sacralism Wounded Due to the his...

updated 6 July 2012(originally appeared in June 2010) Separatism…Tactic, strategy, or a misunderstanding of our relationship to cultur...

updated 29 June 2012 The other day I stumbled across a blog post related to music, 'pagan beats' and its dangers. I tried to p...

  Last night as we watched Greek dancers perform some of the circle dances from Macedonia, Crete, and the Peloponnese, I thought about the...

Two Kingdom theology is not retreatist. It defines the nature of the Kingdom differently and in fact maintaining a proper antithesis makes u...

These issues of recognizing the two-fold nature of Theology...straddling as it were the Already and Not-yet, are core to understanding what ...

One unfortunate aspect in Verduin's work is the manner in which he deals with the visible church. Often those critical of the doctrine...

Augustine understood this to some extent. Maybe he wasn't conscious of a specific principle at work. Maybe he didn't map it out, but...

Now apply this dynamic/dialectical thinking to the Sacraments. On the one hand Baptism brings one into Covenant, they're dead and alive,...

Now, Rome is very theologically Nominalistic……..all is VISIBLE. They do not acknowledge the two tier structure I presented in the last post....

Augustine of Hippo completely baffled Louis Berkhof. If you read his 'The History of Christian Doctrines' you can sense his frustrat...

Interestingly the quasi-denomination called The Church of Christ which came out of the Restorationist movement in the 19th century has what ...

Most Protestants seem to accept the Lutheran argument that Justification by Faith Alone is the article by which the church stands or falls. ...

For those who have read the Wikipedia article it includes a brief section on Vladimir Lossky and his work "The Mystical Theology of the...

Time does not permit me to write a scholarly work on these topics and I realized long ago no one would be willing to publish such a book. I ...

Schaff's colleague John Nevin wrote a fascinating essay entitled "Early Christianity." It is available in his book "Catho...

Historically this refers to legalization/legitimization of Christianity by the Roman Emperor Constantine I in the early 4th century. The per...

All historians acknowledge there were dissident groups that existed for centuries prior to the Reformation. They are often referred to as Pr...

Politicizing the Gospel This phrase denotes the tendency among those who have tied and/or equated the Kingdom of God with power and suc...