Above is a great lecture by Sam Shamoun on baptism. Sam Shamoun is one of my favourite Youtubers and he’s a great. I also admire the fact that he doesn’t tolerate people going off-topic or being sectarian in the chat. I’d recommending watching at least two of his videos every week.
In my attempts to read the Church fathers and hunt for the mysterious Islamic Christians who don’t seem to exist, I’ve been reading the works of St. Cyprian of Carthage; a third century Church father who was martyred in 258 AD. He had to deal with the issue of the Novatian Schism.
I recently read The Triads by Gregory Palamas. Gregory Palamas is a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church who helped end a theological civil war in 14th century Byzantium. I sat down on Saturday and read the whole thing in the evening. It’s not that long but I was told by a fellow Catholic apologist that my version of the Triads was abridged.
When people talk about the reformation in the 16th century they’re eager to find photo-Protestants who lived in centuries prior who had similar ideas. The names that usually come up are Huss, Wycliffe, and Gottschalk. There have been attempts to make St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas into proto-Protestants but anyone familiar with their theology can debunk these claims in a second. So who was the true proto-Protestant?
On Saturday I made an appearance on the show Reason and Theology. They invited me on to talk about the early Roman episcopate. As some of you may know, there is a revisionist theory that there was no early monarchial bishop at the Church of Rome. I have written several articles in the last six weeks in support of this position. This was in preparation for the interview.
When we look back at Church history we see that the 16th century often brought beliefs back that had been discarded. James White would be proud of this. However, who held these beliefs? Was it the early Catholic Church or was it the heretical sects? Let’s look at three examples using the early Church historian Socrates of Constantinople.
We have good news ladies and gentlemen. Protestant apologist Ken Temple has admitted that there was a good Pope. A couple posts ago he said the following in the comments section:
The only good bishop of Rome was Leo 1, because of his Tome on the 2 natures of Christ.
I often have debates on Twitter with a reformed Baptist named Ken Temple. He often comments on this blog as well. It’s all in good fun. One thing that he has pointed out is that the Catholic Church went apostate during the Council of Trent. This is because the doctrine of Sola Fide was officially condemned at this ecumenical council.
With Cameron Bertuzzi saying on social media that he’s closer to becoming Catholic than he ever was before, James White has gone into ultra-reformation mode and is throwing out all of his bad anti-Catholic arguments. I want to deal with one of them. He often throws this out but no one challenges him on it. It’s the ridiculous pseudo-argument cooked up my 19th century Protestants that the Church of Rome didn’t have a monarchial bishop until the mid-second century. Until then they had a plurality of elders. Let’s shred this argument, shall we?
I recently watched the dialogue between Adnan Rashid and Anthony Buzzard. I have to say that Anthony Buzzard really disappoints me. I don’t think that he has a lot of substance. He claims that he’s shunned by Christians for saying the Shema. That’s obviously a dishonest statement. He’s shunned for giving an interpretation for the Shema that’s consistent with medieval Rabbinic Judaism.