Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60065. The practice of praying to Mary and to the saints is one of the sharpest points of difference between Rome and the churches of the Reformation, and it is one where I find the Catholic explanation and the Catholic practice do not always match each other. I want to state the case for…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60064. Reports of Catholic miracles put an evangelical in an awkward spot, and I think we should admit that rather than reaching for a stock answer. Healings at Lourdes, weeping statues, incorrupt bodies, the medical dossiers assembled for canonisations. Are they real, and if some of them are, what follows? I want to avoid…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 60062. Asking whether Roman Catholicism is Christian is a question that needs unpicking before it can be answered, because it is really two questions wearing one coat. Are individual Roman Catholics Christians? And does the Roman Catholic system, as officially defined, teach the gospel of the New Testament? Those questions have different answers, and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60009. Whether Peter in Rome is a historical fact or a later legend has been argued for five hundred years, and the heat in the argument comes from what is thought to hang on it, since the claim of the papacy is usually traced back to Peter as first bishop of that city. I…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11043. Praying for the dead is a practice most evangelicals have never considered and many bereaved believers have quietly done anyway, usually in the first raw weeks after a funeral when the instinct to keep speaking to God about someone is overwhelming. So this deserves a gentle answer as well as a clear one….
Reading Time: 10 minutesQuestion 09065. Transubstantiation is the Roman Catholic teaching that in the Mass the bread and wine are changed in their substance into the actual body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus, while the appearances of bread and wine, what the medieval theologians called the accidents, remain unchanged. It is not a metaphor about spiritual benefit….
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 09071 The word ecumenism, and the ecumenical movement that carries it, has become one of those terms that generates more heat than light. To some it means everything good about Christians laying down their weapons. To others it means everything bad about churches abandoning the truth in order to be liked. Both reactions contain…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09018. The doctrine of apostolic succession holds that the authority Jesus gave His apostles has been handed down in an unbroken chain of ordinations, bishop to bishop, from the first century to the present day. Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and some Anglican bodies rest a good deal of weight on it. On this account,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09017. Ask most people what divides the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches and you will hear about statues, the Pope and whether priests can marry. Those are real differences, but they sit on the surface. The things that actually separate the two are older and deeper, and they come down to two questions that…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 07069 The Catholic and Protestant accounts of salvation differ at the point where it matters most: whether a sinner is declared righteous once and for all on the basis of what Jesus has done, or is gradually made righteous through a process the church administers. Everything else in the debate follows from that. I…