Purify Your Bride

RC Sproul debated Greg Bahnsen on apologetics. They seem to have very different views of how to do apologetics. Sproul is an evidentialist. That is he tries to prove the God of the bible through historical evidence. He tries to show that certain events like the resurrection can be well documented and therefore a person [...]

I noticed that some guy called Catholic Champion has written a response to TurretinFan’s post. He does an OK job. A bit to much of matching insult for insult but he makes good points. Most of the quotes are just ECF’s saying nice things about scripture. It is a classic straw man. Mark was not [...]

This reply became long so I made it a post.
I am enjoying your blog, I assume that I am welcome as a protestant, and a reformed one at that! ;)
Of course you are welcome. I am glad when anyone enjoys what I write.
First- the authority would not be the ‘rookie’, but the Bible to [...]

Found an interesting article linked in the comments of this thread. It talks about the nature of knowledge and specifically the ideas of a guy named Polanyi.
One of the central elements of the early modern attempt to reformulate knowledge and thereby extricate it from the tyranny of tradition was the attempt to reduce all [...]

I made a long reply to Ken on David Waltz’ blog. It didn’t seem to post so I copied it here. Ken’s words are purple. Mine are in black:
We have sufficient knowledge without claiming infallible knowledge or living under the burden that RCC apologetic Newman style seeks to create, “how do you know you have [...]

One think I have finally go working is some basic reporting on which posts are being read. One of the most popular was on a debate between Tim Staples and Steve Gregg from Sep 2007. Not sure why. Maybe people google those names. There was a lively debate in the comments but the debate missed [...]

James White has observed that Catholic apologists have been less willing to engage him in debate over Marian dogmas then they have over other issues. That seems like it is probably true. In general Catholic apologetics has focused on 2 main issues. Those would be authority and the Eucharist. Authority because it is at the [...]

Heaven and earth will pass away but my words will never pass away.
Mt 24:35 Mk 13:31 Lk 21:33
And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. Mt 16:18
Progress requires us to build on what previous [...]

I had a discussion at Dave’s blog about Mithra. It turns out he is one of many pagan parallels to Jesus. More of them are listed here. Atheists try to show how the Jesus story is not really unique and it is quite reasonable to suppose that it might have been made up. Protestants try [...]

Matthew Kelly came to our parish last year. The line in the title was the reason I didn’t take my family out to hear him. I have to make judgments about how Catholic these Catholic speakers are. This line made me think he is probably pretty liberal. He even went further and talked about how [...]

Catholics insist we need both faith and reason. The problem with reason alone is it is error prone. That is pretty clear. But we think we can get around that. I have proved many times how few lines of code I can write without making an error. But that does not mean I can’t produce [...]

Tim Enloe posts a critique of Catholic conversion stories. All of them. He starts by insisting that these stories are somehow suspect. Almost begging protestants not to accept Catholic converts to be what they seem to be. He, on the other hand, is to be assumed to be totally honest and have completely pure motives. [...]

I had a discussion with a protestant going by Grubb over on Dave Armstrong’s forum. It was quite interesting. I was trying to get across to him that we cannot avoid having tradition influence our thinking on a deep level. That we could not use scripture to judge a tradition because we were incapable of [...]

I have long believed that one of the driving forces behind the protestant reformation was the invention of the printing press. Before that it was very hard for a charismatic leader to get his ideas out to a large number of people. Everything had to be done by word of mouth or copied by hand. [...]

As a protestant, it seemed that Catholics had a lot of doctrines about Mary. For me, it was not so much that they were wrong. I could accept that they were true. There was nothing in scripture or logic that made me think they were not. It was just that they seemed unnessecary. As a [...]